Formative Olmec
Pixlel
Tepanecatecuhtli
- Location
- Essen, Germany
- Pronouns
- Him
Wrote up some more focused on the Preclassic (1600 BC-200 BC), gonna cross-post it here. Boutta drop the single most comprehensive forum post on the Olmecs ever made. Sources at the end of course.
The Gulf Coast Part 1/x: The Preclassic Period
This part of Mesoamerica is a bit of an oddball, physically, culturally, and historiographically. Most of the other big culture regions of Mesoamerica are predominantly highlands, with the obvious exception of the Lowland Maya in the Yucatan. Where the Pacific Coast is rocky and steep, the Atlantic-facing side is generally lush and gentle, and best-suited for a completely different range of lifeways and its own inventory of agricultural products. Technically, this rule applies to the Yucatan area as well, but the region we call the Gulf Coast is culturally distinct from the Maya area ever since they diverged from each other thousands of years ago.
For most of the 20th century Mesoamericanists had a different conception of the Gulf Coast. Its climate did little to preserve its ruins and thick forest that rebounded during the colonial period (hmm
) hid away most of what little we could see. Lowlands were also hit harder by colonial epidemics, as the wetter environment welcomed newly-introduced malaria and the dismantling of indigenous sanitation and social systems accelerated the spread of salmonella. Based on what we could see, scholars long considered the Gulf Coast to be a cultural backwater of Ancient Mesoamerica. Supposedly it'd have its heyday with the "Olmec" civilization and then spend the rest of history as a peripheral and thinly-settled region of little importance whose contributions to the kaleidoscope of Greater Mesoamerica were marginal. This'll be a recurring theme throughout this post - old-time Mesoamericanists showing how little they know.
Late Postclassic Mesoamericans would have laughed at us, oh how wrong we got it. The Gulf Coast figured prominently in Aztec myth and imperial aspirations as, to put it in Pool's (2006) words, a "land of cultural refinement and material plenty, founded on its rich cultural heritage, natural abundance, and its strategic location along numerous overland and maritime trade routes." When the Spanish landed here, they would encounter a diverse population including speakers of Huastec, Pame, Totonac, Tepehua, Mixe, Zoque, Nahua, and others, who together with their predecessors had over a course of 3,000 years produced some of Mesoamerica's most sophisticated and widely imitated accomplishments in art, ritual, and symbolic expression. Teotihuacan and the later Aztec Empire both managed to exert political power and influence in this region (the latter Aztecs' being the more intensive) but neither empire went untouched by Gulf influence, one example being Teotihuacan's adoption of specific interlace scroll styles mainly associated with the north-central Coast.
Modern academia and ancient knowledge were at odds with each other until the advent of LiDAR technology was applied to flyovers of the Tabasco plain, Yucatan peninsula and other areas. The results of these studies forced re-assessments of the Gulf Coast's ancient heritage (like Arnold & Pool, 2006 and Braswell, 2003). LiDAR peeled away the forest canopy and penetrated to the man-made formations underneath. Overnight dozens of new sites were identified while the scope of those we were already aware of multiplied. Tumult ensued as we argued over ever-increasing pre-Columbian population estimates. But when the dust settled, ancient scribe and modern archaeologist were in agreement: the Gulf Coast was no peripheral backwater but a powerful cultural influence on the rest of Mesoamerica for millennia.
Here's a small taste of the reality of the Gulf Coast we have unearthed. To be clear, not all of these would have been inhabited at the same time., and this is also not an exhaustive map of every single ruin we know about. Still, you'll see some of the names pop up here and there throughout this post. It's roughly divided into the sub-regions of the Gulf Coast; the northernmost being the Huasteca, then Totonacapan, the Lower Papaloapan, and Coatzacoalcos basin. Note that these divisions are a bit overly broad when applied to periods prior to immediately before contact.
The "Olmec" World
Perhaps the great esteem Postclassic Mesoamericans held for the Gulf Coast is but an echo of earlier periods. For much of the Preclassic period (also known as the Formative, which it henceforth will be referred to), the Coast was likely the most densely-populated region of Mesoamerica by a significant margin, even outside the Olmec world. Going by the numbers, the region today known as "La Huasteca" including parts of northern Veracruz and southern Tamaulipas, especially the Panuco-Tamesi basin, achieved a population density of 78-157 people/sq km during the Late Formative (Gutierrez Mendoza 2003). A similar estimate of 81-102 people/sq km has been offered, reluctantly, for the lower Papaloapan region in the Early Classic (Stark 2003), during the height of Cerro de las Mesas' power. The first of the largest Olmec cities, San Lorenzo, itself a cluster of three sites, was the largest city in Mesoamerica during the height of its influence (roughly 1200 to 900 BC) at some 13,000-18,000 inhabitants, itself at the head of a settlement hierarchy of three or even four tiers of settlement sizes (Cyphers, 1997a; Symonds et al 2002).
Nonetheless, it wasn't always an especially urbanized population at this early stage, but archaeology supports a rather large, continuously dispersed, population from the Huasteca to the Olmec heartland. Especially the latter, which was certainly urbanized - indeed the Olmecs are regarded as Mesoamerica's earliest urban society and features of their culture went on to influence subsequent developments to a significant degree. First unearthed in the 1860s, scientific excavations lead by Matthew Stirling would follow in the 1930s and 1940s, which revealed the Olmec to be an important and very ancient culture, as well as one wholly undiscovered until then. ...So they went on nonetheless to name it after a 16th century Nahuatl term. Yeah we'll get to the problems with Olmec later.
Their antiquity, if not their importance, was at first contested by haughty Mayanists. Sylvanus Morley and J Eric Thompson insisted it had to be contemporary with or "even later" than their precious Classic Maya. The then-new technique of radiocarbon dating then proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Olmec were far older than any previously studied culture, confirming earlier suspicions. This inspired Michael Coe, a colossus of a Mesoamericanist who made innumerable contributions to our field despite being a weirdo with hot takes, to hail the Olmecs as the "First Civilization" of the Americas. Another Mexican scholar, Alfonso Caso, caught up in mid-20th century enthusiasts' overreager attribution of far-flung jade artifacts to Olmec manufacture or inspiration, credited them as Mesoamerica's "Mother Culture". This itself is a hot take that has inspired contentious and heated debate among modern Mesoamericanists. We'll get to that later.
A long-standing process of increasing population density in the humid, low-lying river valleys of what are today the Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz culminated about 3500 years ago (ca. 1600 BC) in the emergence of urban centers. This seems to have happened rather 'suddenly' but we would do well to bear in mind that earlier record of cultural production in this environment remains rather obscure. Such Olmec centers which bear the modern archaeological names of San Lorenzo, La Venta, Laguna de los Cerros, and Tres Zapotes, among many others, arose out of thousands of years of more or less undifferentiated farming villages that had existed, dispersed across all Mesoamerica, since well before 1600 BC. Although the Olmecs have been regarded as Mesoamerica's first "complex" culture, the reality of course is they were not without antecedents. Nonetheless, their perceived seminal importance has ensured a lot of attention and study out of proportion to their contemporaries.
This is similar to the example in the Ancient Middle East; sedentary farmers were around thousands of years before cities like Uruk came to be. To evoke a possibly familiar comparison, the Olmec fluorescence would predate the Bronze Age Collapse; thus, to use a technical term they are "very fucking old". Something else that I think may help put the Olmec chronology into perspective is that ~1600 BCE is also roughly the starting point for state formation in Chinese civilization, right at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty, which is the first one to be historically verified to exist as a state (the "Xia Dynasty" was said to precede it by ~300 years, but could potentially be either an invention of Zhou Dynasty propagandists or, if it existed, a distant memory of sites like Erlitou or Erligang which don't immediately resemble a unified state). It's also contemporaneous with the Mycaeneans, the first instances of statebuilding in mainland Europe, and they had help. After the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization, the ones that would be established by the Indo-Aryan migration had only just entered their embryonic forms. Civilizations elsewhere (i.e. outside of the Fertile Crescent) had still yet to appear at this time. So in that vein Mesoamerica was developing urbanized states at essentially around the same time as the rest of the world and weren't necessarily "lacking" anything that would have produced it "faster". I also feel it worth mentioning that San Lorenzo was in its time not much different in size compared to most prominent contemporary Mesopotamian cities.
One crucial development that accelerated the course toward city life was nixtamalization. Although urbanism was the peak of a process that began millennia before, it is no coincidence that within centuries of the invention of nixtamalization did cities follow suit. This is a process whereby harvested maize is then soaked in water mixed with lime, as in limestone, though there are other ways to get lime such as the ashes of burnt plants and boiled mollusc shells. Reaction with the nitrates and calcium in the mineral produces maize with a better taste and texture, but also increases nutritional value of corn; overreliance on which otherwise can lead to a disease called pellagra, caused by a deficiency in the vitamin niacin. Although some strains of maize were at this time already capable of modern yield, nixtamalization is ultimately what made the difference between part-time (if active) horticulture and full-time intensive agriculture.
Indeed the Olmec centers went on to mobilize labor on a large-scale to build farming terraces, irrigations, and dams. To acquire material for these construction projects, labor also had to be amassed and organized to quarry and transport stone - the better part of which came from the Tuxtla mountains dozens of kilometers away from some prominent masonry sites. Large quantities of quality tools also had to be produced, and in the meantime symbols of ceremonial power and ideology were also fashioned as the regalia of the elite, particularly from jade. A powerful religion took hold that one way or another influenced neighboring regions in ways both subtle and obvious, lead by a priesthood held to be capable of "shapeshifting" in the well-understood later Mesoamerican sense.
Although agricultural and urban, most who study the Olmec do not categorize them as states (at least not their earliest iteration), being more along the lines of "complex chiefdom" though as anyone in the field knows the line between a complex chiefdom and a state is rather blurry; indeed some prefer to call them "emergent states". Early Formative-period San Lorenzo has specifically been described as an "incipient state" (Symonds et al 2002) which was met with some controversy.
Although the Olmec legacy has a lot more to it I will get into, the thing most everyone thinks about when they see "Olmec" are the famous colossal stone heads. So I'll spend a moment discussing them. The first of these was found in the 1860s, and the first real analysis of one was Frans Blom & Oliver LaFarge in 1926, but we have found 17 in total since: 10 from San Lorenzo, 4 from La Venta, 2 from Tres Zapotes, and a truly massive one from La Carbata standing 11 feet tall and weighing in at 50 tons. The majority date to a range from 1150 to 900 BC. These heads have inspired awe in their discoverers, not just for their size, but the precise workmanship of their carvings. Enormous labor and organization would have been required to quarry and transport stone of such bulk, but extreme skill and delicateness was needed to shape the stone to recreate the soft curves of a human face, the puffiness of the lips, the dimple of the chin, the swelling of the bags under the eyes, the curvatures between the cheeks and the nose.
They have likewise fascinated among the general public, which has mistakenly compared them to Moai statues or Ethiopian noses. They're a symbol of regional pride, impressions of them scattered liberally about the cities and towns of modern Tabasco in logos, signs, and municipal websites. And yet, oddly enough, they seem to have been a chiefly or exclusively Olmec art - nothing like them has ever been found buried in ruins elsewhere, neither of their contemporaries or those of later cultures. Equally strange is that they appear very suddenly in the archaeological record - there is no known precedent for this extreme skill in masonry and peculiar (and apparently quite standardized) iconography. This is likely just because whatever antecedent there may have been was done in perishable materials.
The faces and expressions of each head are distinct, as are the finer details of the headgear, earrings, and other piercings, and some bear sparse iconography vaguely reminiscent of glyphic proto-writing, which the Olmecs would be responsible for refining into a true writing system by about 500 BC if not a bit earlier. Despite this we are missing some important context for how and where these heads would have been displayed and we aren't too sure what they were really for. Nonetheless, based on the headgear (which all 17 heads have, albeit with slight variations) some have interpreted the heads to be representing ballplayers, as they are a bit reminiscent of ballplayer "helmets" of leather and cloth in later depictions. Based on their uniqueness from each other, some have intuited that they must be portraits. The logic goes then that they may be portraits of ballplayers - or perhaps more likely, of rulers acting in the role of (victorious) ballplayers. Another notable feature is their large, flat noses, which may be a deliberate artistic choice to add a sort of feline (specifically jaguar) aspect to the portrait's faces, alluding to the "shapeshifting" abilities of priests, rulers, and gods.
Unfortunately while this is a reasonably coherent explanation, it is all based on anachronisms and unproven assumptions, so we can't say this is what the heads were for sure beyond any reasonable doubt. Most people's knowledge of the Olmec starts and stops with the big stone heads, but they had other long-lasting achievements. A more recent plausible explanation has also surfaced however, where the heads from La Venta and San Lorenzo (and presumably colossal heads in general) were actually re-carved "altars", which were actually probably thrones, that were then argued to have carved into the shape of a ruler's face upon their death. David Anderson has a thread talking about this here:
View: https://twitter.com/dsaarchaeology/status/1181255267620737024
So where most discussions of the Olmec are keen to stop at the heads, I'd like to elaborate on some other aspects of their society too, some of which have obvious descendants in later Mesoamerican cultures.
We also have examples of Olmec glyphs incised in jade axes and the like. One is this one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated from the 10th to 14th century BC:
Some interpretation of what the iconography means:
Many incised Olmec greenstone celts show this kind of glyph-like iconography, ranging from naturalistic to highly stylized elements. An incised celt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, shows a disembodied hand (including a carefully delineated thumbnail) and above it a bracket-mouthed profile face wearing a cross-banded headpiece surmounted by a deep cleft, out of which emerges a maize cob shape, itself sprouting three smaller plant forms. Here again, we encounter associations of the "Olmec Dragon," as an earth lord from whose body the crops grow, and of the maize god, signified by the cruciform sprouts emerging from the maize ear. Or, to be more precise, the image is more likely intended to represent not the deity itself but, as Joralemon says in his catalogue entry, a ruler/priest "wearing the divinity's distinctive costume" (268).
The name "Olmec" and its alternatives
You should know - they didn't call themselves Olmecs. Actually we don't know what they called themselves. 'Olmeca' is from Nahuatl, while these days the most likely candidate for the Olmecs would be the Mixe-Zoquean languages. Among their probable descendants are the Ayuujkjä'äy people and their O'depüt or Angpøn cousins, who the Aztecs called Mixes and Zoques respectively, hence the name Mixe-Zoquean, one of the major language families of Mesoamerica (together with Oto-Manguean, Maya, and Yuto-Nawan). Indeed some linguists and epigraphers would suggest many other languages in the Mesoamerican "Sprachbund" ultimately calqued or otherwise borrowed from Mixe-Zoquean languages for certain vocabulary.
Today these are prominent in the isthmus region, but in distant antiquity they seem to have been much more widespread, extending into the Guatemala highlands and perhaps beyond the mouth of the Papaloapan river. Some linguists propose the Totozoquean family instead, adding Totonac - otherwise a language isolate - to the Mixe-Zoquean family... uh along with the extinct Chitimacha language of Louisiana. I'm very skeptical about Totozoquean and so are my friends that know anything at all about Mesoamerican linguistics. Regardless, it's likely that Mixe-Zoquean speakers covered a lot more ground in Preclassic times.
Olmec is meant to mean "rubber people" and is an anachronism chosen by archaeologists in the 30s and 40s based on what the Aztecs called the inhabitants of the region the Olmecs once inhabited in the 16th century. This poses obvious problems; we are calling a group by an outsider's term for a largely different group of people. This isn't the only problem, however, as it leads to confusion. The problem is that there is a later civilization of Late Classic Central Mexico (and the Gulf) known from native chroniclers called the Olmeca-Xicalanca, separated by thousands of years from what archaeologists call the Olmecs. They're very cool in their own right, we'll get to them in another post I guess.
So Mesoamericanists have dabbled in trying to figure out a better name. To avoid confusion with the later Olmeca-Xicalanca, one alternative suggested is ... La Venta culture, named after the village in Tabasco where we first discovered and excavated the Olmec city-state center also called La Venta. People also don't like this name, mainly because it's boring and indistinct for a culture as seminal as the Olmecs were and it doesn't actually really solve the exonym problem. Another one is Tenocelome, which was first suggested in 1967 but it feels like only recently I see it occasionally being used, mostly in Spanish sources. To be honest, it has all the same disadvantages as Olmec: it's a Nahuatl-inspired term for a Mixe-Zoquean people who wouldn't have called themselves that. It's also a bit obscure outside of academia, so we're forced to specify that we mean the Olmecs in any case because that term became mainstream. The only real advantage is that it cannot be confused with any other Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture. Alas, it seems we are stuck with Olmec, at least for now.
The "Olmec Problem"
The "Olmec Problem" refers to the debate between Olmecs as Mesoamerica's "mother culture", wherein Olmecs politically and culturally dominated all their contemporaries, thus singlehandedly forming the precedent for all archetypal Mesoamerican traits, versus the "first among equals" or "sister culture" hypothesis, where their sociopolitical dominance is exaggerated and neighboring distinct cultural regions were at a similar level of social complexity at a similar time. In the latter case, they all together contributed pieces to the Mesoamerican whole. The former theory is a little older, coming from a time when there was a lot of scholarly enthusiasm about Olmec research which coincided with neglect for other Preclassic societies.
Although the Olmecs have long been touted as something like Mesoamericas "first" complex culture, they were not without antecedents. Rather than a sudden overnight development, the archaeological record firmly establishes the Olmecs evolving and developing gradually over time from previous traditions. Probably the most important one is the Mokaya culture, who were sedentary agriculturalists with signs of stratification contemporaneously or even a couple centuries before the more famous Olmecs. The name Mokaya is trying to be "corn people" in Proto-Mixe-Zoquean, and their centers (technically divided into multiple archaeological traditions) were situated on the opposite side of the isthmus from the Olmec heartland, including up into the Guatemala heartlands where they and the Preclassic Maya had a few altercations.
For those paying attention, you already know my stance on the Olmec Problem - my Oaxaca post goes into detail with the early Zapotec city-states of the Preclassic, who evidently developed in-turn with Olmec ones, and I could do similarly for Preclassic Maya ones. The "big sister culture" viewpoint is more or less academic consensus today, as investigation and in turn respect for their Preclassic contemporaries, trade partners, and rivals, has grown. In the end, however, Pool (2006) had this to say, urging us to be wary of the ever-looming need for nuance:
The problem is further complicated by some stirrings of what were possibly Olmec colonies founded by Olmec settlers in distant regions in order to secure trade routes that were so important to the Olmec elite. The big candidate for this is at a site Canton Corralito in Chiapas. But I'll have to cut this post short here, for now.
Sources:
- Current Research on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, Christopher Pool
- The Olmec World, or the "Formative Era Ceremonial Complex", George L Scheper
- Iconography of the Nahual: Human-Animal Transformations in Preclassic Guerrero and Morelos, Gerardo Gutierrez and Mary Pye
- Lightning Celts and Corn Fetishes: The Formative Olmec and the Development of Maize Symbolism in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, Karl Taube
- Metropolitan Museum of Art's website
- Writing in Early Mesoamerica, Stephen Houston
- War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica, Ross Hassig
The Gulf Coast Part 1/x: The Preclassic Period
This part of Mesoamerica is a bit of an oddball, physically, culturally, and historiographically. Most of the other big culture regions of Mesoamerica are predominantly highlands, with the obvious exception of the Lowland Maya in the Yucatan. Where the Pacific Coast is rocky and steep, the Atlantic-facing side is generally lush and gentle, and best-suited for a completely different range of lifeways and its own inventory of agricultural products. Technically, this rule applies to the Yucatan area as well, but the region we call the Gulf Coast is culturally distinct from the Maya area ever since they diverged from each other thousands of years ago.
For most of the 20th century Mesoamericanists had a different conception of the Gulf Coast. Its climate did little to preserve its ruins and thick forest that rebounded during the colonial period (hmm
) hid away most of what little we could see. Lowlands were also hit harder by colonial epidemics, as the wetter environment welcomed newly-introduced malaria and the dismantling of indigenous sanitation and social systems accelerated the spread of salmonella. Based on what we could see, scholars long considered the Gulf Coast to be a cultural backwater of Ancient Mesoamerica. Supposedly it'd have its heyday with the "Olmec" civilization and then spend the rest of history as a peripheral and thinly-settled region of little importance whose contributions to the kaleidoscope of Greater Mesoamerica were marginal. This'll be a recurring theme throughout this post - old-time Mesoamericanists showing how little they know.Late Postclassic Mesoamericans would have laughed at us, oh how wrong we got it. The Gulf Coast figured prominently in Aztec myth and imperial aspirations as, to put it in Pool's (2006) words, a "land of cultural refinement and material plenty, founded on its rich cultural heritage, natural abundance, and its strategic location along numerous overland and maritime trade routes." When the Spanish landed here, they would encounter a diverse population including speakers of Huastec, Pame, Totonac, Tepehua, Mixe, Zoque, Nahua, and others, who together with their predecessors had over a course of 3,000 years produced some of Mesoamerica's most sophisticated and widely imitated accomplishments in art, ritual, and symbolic expression. Teotihuacan and the later Aztec Empire both managed to exert political power and influence in this region (the latter Aztecs' being the more intensive) but neither empire went untouched by Gulf influence, one example being Teotihuacan's adoption of specific interlace scroll styles mainly associated with the north-central Coast.
Modern academia and ancient knowledge were at odds with each other until the advent of LiDAR technology was applied to flyovers of the Tabasco plain, Yucatan peninsula and other areas. The results of these studies forced re-assessments of the Gulf Coast's ancient heritage (like Arnold & Pool, 2006 and Braswell, 2003). LiDAR peeled away the forest canopy and penetrated to the man-made formations underneath. Overnight dozens of new sites were identified while the scope of those we were already aware of multiplied. Tumult ensued as we argued over ever-increasing pre-Columbian population estimates. But when the dust settled, ancient scribe and modern archaeologist were in agreement: the Gulf Coast was no peripheral backwater but a powerful cultural influence on the rest of Mesoamerica for millennia.
The "Olmec" World
Perhaps the great esteem Postclassic Mesoamericans held for the Gulf Coast is but an echo of earlier periods. For much of the Preclassic period (also known as the Formative, which it henceforth will be referred to), the Coast was likely the most densely-populated region of Mesoamerica by a significant margin, even outside the Olmec world. Going by the numbers, the region today known as "La Huasteca" including parts of northern Veracruz and southern Tamaulipas, especially the Panuco-Tamesi basin, achieved a population density of 78-157 people/sq km during the Late Formative (Gutierrez Mendoza 2003). A similar estimate of 81-102 people/sq km has been offered, reluctantly, for the lower Papaloapan region in the Early Classic (Stark 2003), during the height of Cerro de las Mesas' power. The first of the largest Olmec cities, San Lorenzo, itself a cluster of three sites, was the largest city in Mesoamerica during the height of its influence (roughly 1200 to 900 BC) at some 13,000-18,000 inhabitants, itself at the head of a settlement hierarchy of three or even four tiers of settlement sizes (Cyphers, 1997a; Symonds et al 2002).
Nonetheless, it wasn't always an especially urbanized population at this early stage, but archaeology supports a rather large, continuously dispersed, population from the Huasteca to the Olmec heartland. Especially the latter, which was certainly urbanized - indeed the Olmecs are regarded as Mesoamerica's earliest urban society and features of their culture went on to influence subsequent developments to a significant degree. First unearthed in the 1860s, scientific excavations lead by Matthew Stirling would follow in the 1930s and 1940s, which revealed the Olmec to be an important and very ancient culture, as well as one wholly undiscovered until then. ...So they went on nonetheless to name it after a 16th century Nahuatl term. Yeah we'll get to the problems with Olmec later.
Their antiquity, if not their importance, was at first contested by haughty Mayanists. Sylvanus Morley and J Eric Thompson insisted it had to be contemporary with or "even later" than their precious Classic Maya. The then-new technique of radiocarbon dating then proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Olmec were far older than any previously studied culture, confirming earlier suspicions. This inspired Michael Coe, a colossus of a Mesoamericanist who made innumerable contributions to our field despite being a weirdo with hot takes, to hail the Olmecs as the "First Civilization" of the Americas. Another Mexican scholar, Alfonso Caso, caught up in mid-20th century enthusiasts' overreager attribution of far-flung jade artifacts to Olmec manufacture or inspiration, credited them as Mesoamerica's "Mother Culture". This itself is a hot take that has inspired contentious and heated debate among modern Mesoamericanists. We'll get to that later.
A long-standing process of increasing population density in the humid, low-lying river valleys of what are today the Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz culminated about 3500 years ago (ca. 1600 BC) in the emergence of urban centers. This seems to have happened rather 'suddenly' but we would do well to bear in mind that earlier record of cultural production in this environment remains rather obscure. Such Olmec centers which bear the modern archaeological names of San Lorenzo, La Venta, Laguna de los Cerros, and Tres Zapotes, among many others, arose out of thousands of years of more or less undifferentiated farming villages that had existed, dispersed across all Mesoamerica, since well before 1600 BC. Although the Olmecs have been regarded as Mesoamerica's first "complex" culture, the reality of course is they were not without antecedents. Nonetheless, their perceived seminal importance has ensured a lot of attention and study out of proportion to their contemporaries.
This is similar to the example in the Ancient Middle East; sedentary farmers were around thousands of years before cities like Uruk came to be. To evoke a possibly familiar comparison, the Olmec fluorescence would predate the Bronze Age Collapse; thus, to use a technical term they are "very fucking old". Something else that I think may help put the Olmec chronology into perspective is that ~1600 BCE is also roughly the starting point for state formation in Chinese civilization, right at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty, which is the first one to be historically verified to exist as a state (the "Xia Dynasty" was said to precede it by ~300 years, but could potentially be either an invention of Zhou Dynasty propagandists or, if it existed, a distant memory of sites like Erlitou or Erligang which don't immediately resemble a unified state). It's also contemporaneous with the Mycaeneans, the first instances of statebuilding in mainland Europe, and they had help. After the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization, the ones that would be established by the Indo-Aryan migration had only just entered their embryonic forms. Civilizations elsewhere (i.e. outside of the Fertile Crescent) had still yet to appear at this time. So in that vein Mesoamerica was developing urbanized states at essentially around the same time as the rest of the world and weren't necessarily "lacking" anything that would have produced it "faster". I also feel it worth mentioning that San Lorenzo was in its time not much different in size compared to most prominent contemporary Mesopotamian cities.
One crucial development that accelerated the course toward city life was nixtamalization. Although urbanism was the peak of a process that began millennia before, it is no coincidence that within centuries of the invention of nixtamalization did cities follow suit. This is a process whereby harvested maize is then soaked in water mixed with lime, as in limestone, though there are other ways to get lime such as the ashes of burnt plants and boiled mollusc shells. Reaction with the nitrates and calcium in the mineral produces maize with a better taste and texture, but also increases nutritional value of corn; overreliance on which otherwise can lead to a disease called pellagra, caused by a deficiency in the vitamin niacin. Although some strains of maize were at this time already capable of modern yield, nixtamalization is ultimately what made the difference between part-time (if active) horticulture and full-time intensive agriculture.
Indeed the Olmec centers went on to mobilize labor on a large-scale to build farming terraces, irrigations, and dams. To acquire material for these construction projects, labor also had to be amassed and organized to quarry and transport stone - the better part of which came from the Tuxtla mountains dozens of kilometers away from some prominent masonry sites. Large quantities of quality tools also had to be produced, and in the meantime symbols of ceremonial power and ideology were also fashioned as the regalia of the elite, particularly from jade. A powerful religion took hold that one way or another influenced neighboring regions in ways both subtle and obvious, lead by a priesthood held to be capable of "shapeshifting" in the well-understood later Mesoamerican sense.
Although agricultural and urban, most who study the Olmec do not categorize them as states (at least not their earliest iteration), being more along the lines of "complex chiefdom" though as anyone in the field knows the line between a complex chiefdom and a state is rather blurry; indeed some prefer to call them "emergent states". Early Formative-period San Lorenzo has specifically been described as an "incipient state" (Symonds et al 2002) which was met with some controversy.
Although the Olmec legacy has a lot more to it I will get into, the thing most everyone thinks about when they see "Olmec" are the famous colossal stone heads. So I'll spend a moment discussing them. The first of these was found in the 1860s, and the first real analysis of one was Frans Blom & Oliver LaFarge in 1926, but we have found 17 in total since: 10 from San Lorenzo, 4 from La Venta, 2 from Tres Zapotes, and a truly massive one from La Carbata standing 11 feet tall and weighing in at 50 tons. The majority date to a range from 1150 to 900 BC. These heads have inspired awe in their discoverers, not just for their size, but the precise workmanship of their carvings. Enormous labor and organization would have been required to quarry and transport stone of such bulk, but extreme skill and delicateness was needed to shape the stone to recreate the soft curves of a human face, the puffiness of the lips, the dimple of the chin, the swelling of the bags under the eyes, the curvatures between the cheeks and the nose.
They have likewise fascinated among the general public, which has mistakenly compared them to Moai statues or Ethiopian noses. They're a symbol of regional pride, impressions of them scattered liberally about the cities and towns of modern Tabasco in logos, signs, and municipal websites. And yet, oddly enough, they seem to have been a chiefly or exclusively Olmec art - nothing like them has ever been found buried in ruins elsewhere, neither of their contemporaries or those of later cultures. Equally strange is that they appear very suddenly in the archaeological record - there is no known precedent for this extreme skill in masonry and peculiar (and apparently quite standardized) iconography. This is likely just because whatever antecedent there may have been was done in perishable materials.
The faces and expressions of each head are distinct, as are the finer details of the headgear, earrings, and other piercings, and some bear sparse iconography vaguely reminiscent of glyphic proto-writing, which the Olmecs would be responsible for refining into a true writing system by about 500 BC if not a bit earlier. Despite this we are missing some important context for how and where these heads would have been displayed and we aren't too sure what they were really for. Nonetheless, based on the headgear (which all 17 heads have, albeit with slight variations) some have interpreted the heads to be representing ballplayers, as they are a bit reminiscent of ballplayer "helmets" of leather and cloth in later depictions. Based on their uniqueness from each other, some have intuited that they must be portraits. The logic goes then that they may be portraits of ballplayers - or perhaps more likely, of rulers acting in the role of (victorious) ballplayers. Another notable feature is their large, flat noses, which may be a deliberate artistic choice to add a sort of feline (specifically jaguar) aspect to the portrait's faces, alluding to the "shapeshifting" abilities of priests, rulers, and gods.
Unfortunately while this is a reasonably coherent explanation, it is all based on anachronisms and unproven assumptions, so we can't say this is what the heads were for sure beyond any reasonable doubt. Most people's knowledge of the Olmec starts and stops with the big stone heads, but they had other long-lasting achievements. A more recent plausible explanation has also surfaced however, where the heads from La Venta and San Lorenzo (and presumably colossal heads in general) were actually re-carved "altars", which were actually probably thrones, that were then argued to have carved into the shape of a ruler's face upon their death. David Anderson has a thread talking about this here:
View: https://twitter.com/dsaarchaeology/status/1181255267620737024
So where most discussions of the Olmec are keen to stop at the heads, I'd like to elaborate on some other aspects of their society too, some of which have obvious descendants in later Mesoamerican cultures.
- Step Pyramids: At La Venta, a major Olmec city-state center that flourished from 900 to 400 BC (the "Middle Formative" or also "La Venta period" as it kinda dominated the region politically for some time), in - and please forgive the archaeological names - Complex A, is a monument called ... Mound C (sigh) which stands as Mesoamerica's first-ever step pyramid, the beginnings of thousands more to be built in its likeness for the next 2500 years.
- The Ballgame and rubber vulcanization: Excavations at El Manati in the mid-2000s found some intact rubber balls preserved in a nearby bog, dated to the Early Formative period. This obviously also demonstrates that the Olmecs were already vulcanizing rubber thousands of years ago (though evidence of this was already found elsewhere, just not necessarily in ball form). It remains an unproven, if somewhat likely, assumption that Olmec ballgames resembled those of later periods in their mode of play and ceremonial significance.
- Tortillas and comales: People in the American Southwest and Central America know just how big a deal this is. Truly god's gift to mankind. For everyone else, a tortilla is a flattened piece of bread made from corn flour, and the comal is the specific type of flat gridle used to cook them. They can be folded up around whatever you want to make dishes we call tacos, burritos, and so on today. The comal survives archaeologically and where found it's generally taken to imply that the people who used it prepared and ate tortillas. To be clear, however, these pans and therefore likely tortillas predate the Olmec themselves, so it was not exactly an Olmec invention any more than the sling was. The significance here is the large scale production and consumption of tortillas (evidenced by the enormous quantity of comal pans found) may have contributed to their lasting popularity, spread around Mesoamerica (and beyond) in part thanks to the Olmecs' long trade routes. Oh, speaking of.
- Long-range commerce: Earlier I alluded to how the Olmec heartland was situated far away from many important natural resources, particularly raw materials for construction. Jade, timber, obsidian, and stone for construction all had to be sourced from other people abroad, among other prestige goods. Jadeite was primarily sourced from the Motagua river valley in Guatemala, hundreds of kilometers away; we know this thanks to techniques like measuring isotopes. Yet the Olmecs are well-known and well-regarded for their craftsmanship in jade, making ceremonial masks, pectorals, and axes (which symbolized power over lightning). This perceived need to import prestige goods in such quantities despite great effort may have accelerated as much as been enabled by the increased social complexity of the Olmec world, as this is often a factor in the coalescence of a distinct elite culture and stratification.
Far-reaching Olmec trade, rather than direct conquest or any hot takes about mother cultures, is presumed to be the means by which the Olmec influence worked its way through eastern Mesoamerica, creating networks of local elites who all have a similar "language" of high status, understanding similar customs (like the ballgame) and finding value in similar gestures of power, monumental architecture, and prestige goods. This trade was so important that changes in its course and abundance of materials in source regions seem to have aggravated political upheaval in the Olmec heartland, contributing to the decline of San Lorenzo at the end of the Early Formative and paving the way for La Venta's rise to power - though environmental factors like a volcanic eruption which diverted the course of a river didn't help. It was also no doubt an arena of competition among these elite to ensure access to these increasingly important trade routes. Which leads into... - Warfare and (probably) human sacrifice: That political competition between the various Olmec centers often manifested as warfare is made abundantly clear in art from the Middle Formative which depicts combat between warriors equipped with spears and large rectangular shields (we're unsure of the material). Some of the most informative such artworks are at Stela D (sigh) in Tres Zapotes, dated to the Late Formative (~400 BC). It depicts a political scene within the gaping maw of an animal, in which two figures stand, one with a spear, over a third who kneels to them. Stela A has another scene where one figure has a knife and the other a trophy skull. But Monument C (...) is the most unambiguous here: a number of men are shown wearing helmets, some in the form of animal heads, carrying large rectangular shields and all wielding spears or maces. One has been stabbed through the knee. (Skyrim joke here)
In the Formative period warfare is generally regarded to have been very small-scale, fought mostly as raids for plunder, captives, or razing buildings to drive people away or subdue them as tributary dependencies. I talked about this a little in my Oaxaca effortpost too. Apart from war between the different Olmec city-states, it's also likely they fought against people in neighboring regions which were at a similar level of development. This may have favored relatively small parties of "noble" warriors trained and equipped for melee combat - which is probably why this is what mostly shows up in the aforementioned art. Archaeologically however what shows up most is evidence for slings, not melee weapons. Slings were usually made from maguey fiber and therefore perishable, but what survived the onslaught of time was their ammunition. Numerous Olmec and Olmec-influenced sites throughout the La Venta period, including Tehuacan, Chalcatzingo, Zacatenco, Ticoman, Gualupita, El Arbolillo, and Chalchuapa, have warehouses used to store quantities of mass-produced clay sling bullets. Despite their obvious importance and prominence, they are never depicted in Olmec art (that I'm aware of, anyway). - The Olmec religion: Lots of motifs common through Mesoamerica are even known as far back as the Middle Formative Olmec World; including the division between an avian-serpent god and a rain god who were responsible for weather phenomena. It seems as though the avian-serpent was encharged with transporting the rain, while the rain god was responsible for the precipitation itself, which came in 4 different forms, a familiar trend known across many cultures in later periods. Jade and other greenstones (also called "social jades") represented the beneficial kind of rain and were associated with lightning, a motif that lived on in later periods. The importance of a concept better known as a nahual, involving the shapeshifting to channel the powers of supernatural beings and well-known in later Mesoamerica, is probably also known in this time as first argued by Furst in 1968, based on the way some Olmec ceramic figurines are possibly depicting transformation.
- Writing and calendrics: The Olmec are attributed the lofty title as the original inventors of a system of writing, the system on which all later derivations would evolve from, and more than anything else this may be their claim to fame. Unfortunately, this script remains more or less undeciphered today, even if we can be relatively sure what some groups of glyphs are trying to be (IE names of people or places) and some extent of how it operated, based on the scripts that evolved from it. While some attribute the Cascajal Block and its 62 symbols as the earliest evidence of writing among the Olmecs (and by extension the Americas) this has also been met with a lot of skepticism among experts as the symbols are unlike anything seen in any other Mesoamerican writing system before, including the inventory of glyphs we do know from later Olmec inscriptions. Even Stephen Houston, who originally was the one to praise it as a kind of "Rosetta Stone" for early Mesoamerican writing, seems to have recanted this and agrees with the earliest unambiguous example of writing on La Venta Monument 13, contemporary with the San Jose Mogote Monument 3 inscription (I covered this in a recent effortpost about the Preclassic Zapotec). To be honest I don't know enough about the specifics of this debate or even Preclassic Mesoamerican writing to feel comfortable giving my opinion on what exactly the Cascajal block is supposed to be, but I'll echo the consensus of the selection of papers I have on hand in ignoring it for this purpose.
In that case some of the oldest known writing in the Americas accompany these depictions of what are probably rulers, between approximately 700 and 500 BC.
Another bit, from San Andres ca. ~650 BC, depicts this bird with what may be a speech scroll, thus saying the name "(King) 3 Ahau (a calendar date)" likely in reference to an Olmec ruler. This is especially significant because it indicates that these signs were definitely not just iconography, they were written words that could be spoken, they were signs encoding language. Other speech scrolls are found in Late Formative artwork at Monte Alban and Kaminaljuyu.
Other signs are also apparent. Some examples:
We also have examples of Olmec glyphs incised in jade axes and the like. One is this one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated from the 10th to 14th century BC:
Many incised Olmec greenstone celts show this kind of glyph-like iconography, ranging from naturalistic to highly stylized elements. An incised celt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, shows a disembodied hand (including a carefully delineated thumbnail) and above it a bracket-mouthed profile face wearing a cross-banded headpiece surmounted by a deep cleft, out of which emerges a maize cob shape, itself sprouting three smaller plant forms. Here again, we encounter associations of the "Olmec Dragon," as an earth lord from whose body the crops grow, and of the maize god, signified by the cruciform sprouts emerging from the maize ear. Or, to be more precise, the image is more likely intended to represent not the deity itself but, as Joralemon says in his catalogue entry, a ruler/priest "wearing the divinity's distinctive costume" (268).
The name "Olmec" and its alternatives
You should know - they didn't call themselves Olmecs. Actually we don't know what they called themselves. 'Olmeca' is from Nahuatl, while these days the most likely candidate for the Olmecs would be the Mixe-Zoquean languages. Among their probable descendants are the Ayuujkjä'äy people and their O'depüt or Angpøn cousins, who the Aztecs called Mixes and Zoques respectively, hence the name Mixe-Zoquean, one of the major language families of Mesoamerica (together with Oto-Manguean, Maya, and Yuto-Nawan). Indeed some linguists and epigraphers would suggest many other languages in the Mesoamerican "Sprachbund" ultimately calqued or otherwise borrowed from Mixe-Zoquean languages for certain vocabulary.
Today these are prominent in the isthmus region, but in distant antiquity they seem to have been much more widespread, extending into the Guatemala highlands and perhaps beyond the mouth of the Papaloapan river. Some linguists propose the Totozoquean family instead, adding Totonac - otherwise a language isolate - to the Mixe-Zoquean family... uh along with the extinct Chitimacha language of Louisiana. I'm very skeptical about Totozoquean and so are my friends that know anything at all about Mesoamerican linguistics. Regardless, it's likely that Mixe-Zoquean speakers covered a lot more ground in Preclassic times.
Olmec is meant to mean "rubber people" and is an anachronism chosen by archaeologists in the 30s and 40s based on what the Aztecs called the inhabitants of the region the Olmecs once inhabited in the 16th century. This poses obvious problems; we are calling a group by an outsider's term for a largely different group of people. This isn't the only problem, however, as it leads to confusion. The problem is that there is a later civilization of Late Classic Central Mexico (and the Gulf) known from native chroniclers called the Olmeca-Xicalanca, separated by thousands of years from what archaeologists call the Olmecs. They're very cool in their own right, we'll get to them in another post I guess.
So Mesoamericanists have dabbled in trying to figure out a better name. To avoid confusion with the later Olmeca-Xicalanca, one alternative suggested is ... La Venta culture, named after the village in Tabasco where we first discovered and excavated the Olmec city-state center also called La Venta. People also don't like this name, mainly because it's boring and indistinct for a culture as seminal as the Olmecs were and it doesn't actually really solve the exonym problem. Another one is Tenocelome, which was first suggested in 1967 but it feels like only recently I see it occasionally being used, mostly in Spanish sources. To be honest, it has all the same disadvantages as Olmec: it's a Nahuatl-inspired term for a Mixe-Zoquean people who wouldn't have called themselves that. It's also a bit obscure outside of academia, so we're forced to specify that we mean the Olmecs in any case because that term became mainstream. The only real advantage is that it cannot be confused with any other Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture. Alas, it seems we are stuck with Olmec, at least for now.
The "Olmec Problem"
The "Olmec Problem" refers to the debate between Olmecs as Mesoamerica's "mother culture", wherein Olmecs politically and culturally dominated all their contemporaries, thus singlehandedly forming the precedent for all archetypal Mesoamerican traits, versus the "first among equals" or "sister culture" hypothesis, where their sociopolitical dominance is exaggerated and neighboring distinct cultural regions were at a similar level of social complexity at a similar time. In the latter case, they all together contributed pieces to the Mesoamerican whole. The former theory is a little older, coming from a time when there was a lot of scholarly enthusiasm about Olmec research which coincided with neglect for other Preclassic societies.
Although the Olmecs have long been touted as something like Mesoamericas "first" complex culture, they were not without antecedents. Rather than a sudden overnight development, the archaeological record firmly establishes the Olmecs evolving and developing gradually over time from previous traditions. Probably the most important one is the Mokaya culture, who were sedentary agriculturalists with signs of stratification contemporaneously or even a couple centuries before the more famous Olmecs. The name Mokaya is trying to be "corn people" in Proto-Mixe-Zoquean, and their centers (technically divided into multiple archaeological traditions) were situated on the opposite side of the isthmus from the Olmec heartland, including up into the Guatemala heartlands where they and the Preclassic Maya had a few altercations.
For those paying attention, you already know my stance on the Olmec Problem - my Oaxaca post goes into detail with the early Zapotec city-states of the Preclassic, who evidently developed in-turn with Olmec ones, and I could do similarly for Preclassic Maya ones. The "big sister culture" viewpoint is more or less academic consensus today, as investigation and in turn respect for their Preclassic contemporaries, trade partners, and rivals, has grown. In the end, however, Pool (2006) had this to say, urging us to be wary of the ever-looming need for nuance:
The problem is further complicated by some stirrings of what were possibly Olmec colonies founded by Olmec settlers in distant regions in order to secure trade routes that were so important to the Olmec elite. The big candidate for this is at a site Canton Corralito in Chiapas. But I'll have to cut this post short here, for now.
Sources:
- Current Research on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, Christopher Pool
- The Olmec World, or the "Formative Era Ceremonial Complex", George L Scheper
- Iconography of the Nahual: Human-Animal Transformations in Preclassic Guerrero and Morelos, Gerardo Gutierrez and Mary Pye
- Lightning Celts and Corn Fetishes: The Formative Olmec and the Development of Maize Symbolism in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, Karl Taube
- Metropolitan Museum of Art's website
- Writing in Early Mesoamerica, Stephen Houston
- War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica, Ross Hassig
