Museo de Antropología de Xalapa

The Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, known as the MAX, is the anthropology museum of the Universidad Veracruzana, on Avenida Xalapa in the north of the city, about 3 km from the centre. It is widely regarded as the second most important museum of its kind in Mexico after the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Its collection of about 2,500 pre-Hispanic pieces concentrates on the cultures of the Gulf Coast, above all the Olmec, Totonac and Huastec, and some objects date back to the Early Preclassic, around 1300 to 900 BC.

The museum grew out of a collection started in the 1940s under the state's education department. A building on the grounds of the old Molino de San Roque opened on 20 November 1960 to hold some 10,000 pieces, and a second, circular building for ethnographic material followed in 1966. In 1985 Governor Agustín Acosta Lagunes had the old museum torn down and replaced; the new building, by the New York office of Edward Durell Stone with Mexican architect Sergio Mejía Ontiveros, took 15 months to build and opened in 1986, with museography by Iker Larrauri and Fernando Gamboa. Its gardens won a landscape architecture prize from the Mexican society of landscape architects in 2000.

The building is a long chain of halls, galleries and covered patios stepping down a slope over more than 9,000 square metres, meant to echo the geography of Veracruz, and its square windows recall the niches of El Tajín. The route runs through Olmec, Totonac and Huastec rooms. Highlights include seven colossal heads and Monument 1 from San Lorenzo, the Señor de Las Limas, the La Mojarra stela with its long inscription, the Totonac "smiling faces", the clay Cihuateteo figures from El Zapotal, ceremonial yokes, hachas and palmas, and the Huastec Adolescent. There is also an ethnography section on Veracruz's living indigenous peoples, rooms for temporary shows, an auditorium for 329 people, a café and a shop, all set in green gardens.