1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [119]
Learning from local people that Tres Zapotes was only one of many mound sites in Veracruz, Stirling decided to return in 1940 to survey them all. The task was daunting even for a cigar-chomping, whisky-drinking, adventure addict like Stirling. Most of the mound centers were in the middle of trackless mangrove swamps or up narrow, unmapped rivers choked with water hyacinth. Ticks and mosquitoes were indefatigable and present in huge numbers; the ticks were worse than the mosquitoes, Stirling remarked, because they had to be dug out of the flesh with a knife. At one point Stirling and a colleague hitched a ride in a pepper truck to one of the smaller sites. After jolting down a road with deep ruts “designed to test the very souls of motorcars,” the two men were let off in a nondescript meadow. Stirling went to talk with the driver.
“The ticks are not bad, are they?” I asked him hopefully, viewing the tall grass and underbrush between the road and the mounds. “No,” said the driver, beaming. “When full, like grapes they fall off and no harm is done. There are millions of them here, however.”
In La Venta, a dry, raised “island” in the coastal swamp, Stirling’s team discovered four more colossal heads. Like the first, they had no necks or bodies and wore helmets that vaguely resembled athletic gear. All were at least six feet tall and fifteen feet round and made from single blocks of volcanic basalt. How, Stirling wondered, had their makers transported these ten-ton blocks from the mountains and across the swamp? Whoever these people were, he eventually concluded, they could not be Maya; their ways of life seemed too different. Instead they must have belonged to another culture altogether. La Venta was filled with mounds and terraces, which told Stirling that many people had lived there. The city, he wrote in 1940, “may well be the basic civilization out of which developed such high art centers as those of the Maya, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and Totonacs.” He called its “mysterious people” the Olmec.
Stirling’s account set the template for decades to follow. Ever since his day, the Olmec have been known by two Homeric epithets: they were “mysterious,” and they were the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica. (Tourists are told by Frommer’s 2005 Mexico guide, for example, to visit the ruins of the “enigmatic people” who created the “mother culture of Mesoamerica.”) But in recent years many archaeologists have come to believe that neither description is correct.
Curious villagers surround the great Olmec head excavated in 1939 by archaeologist Matthew Stirling in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
The Olmec’s purported mysteriousness is related to their emergence. To Stirling and many of his successors, the Olmec seemed to have no peers or ancestors; they appeared fully formed, apparently from nowhere, like Athena springing from the brow of Zeus. First there was a jungle with a few indistinguishable villages; then, suddenly, a sophisticated empire with monumental architecture, carved stelae, earthwork pyramids, hieroglyphic writing, ball courts, and fine artworks—all of it conjured into existence with the suddenness of amagician’s trick. The Olmec, wrote Smithsonian archaeologist Betty Meggers, were a “quantum change.” Their status as precursors led archaeologists to believe that the subsequent emergence of other complex societies was due to their example—or their conquest. Even the mighty Maya did little more than continue down the path set by the Olmec. “There is now little doubt,” Yale archaeologist Michael Coe wrote in 1994, “that all later civilizations in Mesoamerica, whether Mexican or Maya, ultimately