• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Strictly speaking, Coe was mistaken. By the time he wrote, many of his colleagues strongly doubted that the Olmec either emerged alone or were the mother culture. They did emerge abruptly, these researchers say, but they were only the first of the half-dozen complex societies—“sister cultures”—that sprang up in southern Mexico after the development of maize agriculture. Focusing on the Olmec’s chronological primacy, they believe, obscures the more important fact that Mesoamerica was the home of a remarkable multisociety ferment of social, aesthetic, and technical innovation.

RUBBER PEOPLE

Nobody knows the right name for the Olmec, but “Olmec” is the wrong one. They spoke a language in the Mixe-Zoquean language family, some members of which are still used in isolated pockets of southern Mexico. “Olmec,” though, is a word in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica to the north. It means, more or less, “people of the land of rubber.” The problem with the name is not so much that the Olmec did not use it for themselves—nobody knows what that name was, and they have to be called something. Nor is the problem the rubber, which the Olmec used, and may have invented (scientists discovered in the 1990s that they made rubber by chemically treating the latex-containing sap of a tropical tree, Castilla elastica). The problem is that the Mexica did not actually use the name to refer to the putative mother culture in Veracruz, but to another, completely unrelated culture in Puebla to the west, a culture that, unlike the ancient Olmec, still existed at the time of the Spanish conquest. The confusion between the Mexica’s Olmec and Stirling’s Olmec led some archaeologists to propose that the latter should be called the “La Venta Culture,” after the site he investigated. Almost everyone agreed that the new name was a big improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately, nobody used it. Not for the first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect name prevailed.

The Olmec heartland was the coastal forests of Veracruz. Compared to the Norte Chico, the area is promising. Like the Peruvian littoral, it is bracketed by sea and mountains, but it catches, rather than misses, the prevailing winds, and the rain that comes with them. The shoreline itself is swampy, but not far from the coast the country rises into a lush, fertile plateau. Further inland are the Tuxtla Mountains, with many rivers cascading down their flanks. The rivers flood in the rainy season, enriching the land, Nile Delta style. During the rest of the year, the climate is drier, and farmers plant and tend their milpas on the alluvial soil.

The first traces of the people who would become the Olmec date back to about 1800 B.C. At that time there was little to distinguish them from groups elsewhere in Mesoamerica. But something happened in Veracruz, some spark or incitement, a cultural quickening, because within the next three centuries the Olmec had built and occupied San Lorenzo, the first large-scale settlement in North America—it covered 2.7 square miles. On a plateau commanding the Coatzacoalcos river basin, San Lorenzo proper was inhabited mainly by the elite; everyone else lived in the farm villages around it. The ceremonial center of the city—a series of courtyards and low mounds, the latter probably topped with thatch houses—sat on a raised platform 150 feet high and two-thirds of a mile to a side. The platform was built of almost three million cubic yards of rock, much of it transported from mountain quarries fifty miles away.

Scattered around the San Lorenzo platform were stone monuments: massive thrones for living kings, huge stone heads for dead ones. Rulers helped to mediate between supernatural forces in the air above and the watery place below where souls went after life. When kings died, their thrones were sometimes transformed into memorials for their occupants: the colossal heads. The features of these enormous portraits are naturalistically carved and amazingly expressive—thoughtful or fiercely proud, mirthful or dismayed.