1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [121]
Like the carvings and stained-glass windows in European cathedrals, the art in San Lorenzo and other Olmec cities consisted mainly of powerful, recurring images—the crucifixions and virgins, so to speak, of ancient Mesoamerica. Among these repeated subjects is a crouched, blobby figure with a monstrously swollen head. Puzzled researchers long described these sculptures as “dwarves” or “dancers.” In 1997 an archaeologist and a medical doctor with archaeological leanings identified them as human fetuses. Their features were portrayed accurately enough to identify their stage of development. Researchers had not recognized them because artistic renditions of fetuses are almost unheard of in European cultures (the first known drawing of one is by Leonardo). Other frequent themes included lepers, the pathologically obese, and people with thyroid deficiencies, all portrayed with a cool eye for anatomical detail. Perhaps the best-known subject is a man or boy gingerly holding a “were-jaguar”: a limp, fat, sexless baby with a flattened nose and a snarling jaguar mouth. Often the baby has a deeply cloven skull.
The denizens of San Lorenzo are unlikely to have shared Europeans’ dismay at the physical deformity portrayed in these images. Indeed, by contemporary standards high-born Olmec were deformed themselves. By binding small, flat pieces of wood to newborns’ foreheads, they pushed up the soft infant bones, making the skull longer and higher than normal. To further proclaim their status, wealthy Olmec carved deep grooves into their teeth and pierced their nasal septums with bone awls, plugging the holes with ornamental jade beads. (Because no Olmec skeletons have been found, no direct proof of these practices exists; instead archaeologists base their beliefs on the portrayal of Olmec nobles in figurines and sculptures.)
Swanning about the elite precincts, the rich and powerful wore finely woven clothing, but only below the waist—breechclouts for men, skirts and belts for women. Veracruz was too hot for anything more. On public occasions, nobles bedizened themselves with bracelets, anklets, many-stranded necklaces, bejeweled turbans, and big, hiphop-style pendants. Some of the last were concave mirrors made from beautifully polished magnetite. Precisely ground, the mirrors were able to start fires and project images onto flat surfaces, camera lucida fashion. Presumably they were used to dazzle hoi polloi. As for the poor, it is likely that they went naked, except possibly for sandals.
San Lorenzo fell in about 1200 B.C., victim of either revolution or invasion. Or perhaps it was abandoned and sacked for religious reasons—archaeologists have advanced several hypotheses for the city’s demise. What is certain is that the site was vacated and the stelae defaced and the sculptures decapitated. The colossal heads being, so to speak, pre-decapitated, they were smashed with hammers and systematically buried in long lines. Vegetation overran the red-ocher floors and the workshops that manufactured ceramic figurines and iron beads and rubber ax-head straps.
Olmec society was surprisingly unaffected by the collapse of its greatest polity. A much bigger city, La Venta, was going up on a swamp island about forty miles away.
Today La Venta is partly buried by an oil refinery, but in its heyday—roughly speaking, 1150 B.C. to 500 B.C.—it was a large community with a ring of housing that surrounded a grand ceremonial center. The city’s focus, its Eiffel Tower or Tiananmen Square, was a 103-foot-tall clay mound, a bulging, vertically fluted cone somewhat resembling a head of garlic. The mound rose at the south end of a rectangular, hundred-yard-long pavilion that was bordered by two knee-high berms. At the north end of the pavilion was a sunken rectangular courtyard fenced on three sides by a row of seven-foot basalt columns atop a low red and yellow adobe wall. The fourth, northern side opened onto a third