1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [122]
La Venta, too, was destroyed, perhaps deliberately, around 350 B.C. But its eight-hundred-year existence spanned one of the most exciting times in American history. At La Venta’s height, Olmec art and technical innovations could be found throughout Mesoamerica. So widespread was Olmec iconography—jaguar babies, carved stelae, distinctively shaped ceramics—that many archaeologists believed its very ubiquity was evidence that the Olmec “not only engendered Mesoamerica but also brought forth the first Mesoamerican empire.” The description is from Ignacio Bernal, once director of Mexico’s famed National Museum of Anthropology. Bernal, who died in 1992, envisioned an imperium that spanned much of southern Mexico, proselytizing its religion and forcing other groups to send their finest works to its heartland. The Olmec, he thought, were the Romans of Mesoamerica, a magisterial society that “established the pattern which, through the centuries, was to be followed by other expansionist Mesoamerican cultures.”
Since Bernal’s death many researchers have come to view the Olmec differently. According to the University of Michigan anthropologists Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, the Olmec heartland was but one of four regional power centers: the Central Basin to the north, where settlements like Tlatilco and Tlapacoya laid the groundwork for the empires of Teotihuacan and the Toltecs; in the isthmus, the chiefdoms of Oaxaca; the Olmec, along the Gulf Coast; and, later, the Maya polities in Yucatán and northern Guatemala. Some believe that there was a fifth power: Chalcatzingo, an important chiefdom between the Central Basin and Oaxaca.
In the first millennium B.C., all four (or five) were making the transition from individual fortified villages to groups of chiefdoms to states with centralized authority. Although the Olmec preceded the others, they did not set the template for them. Instead they all influenced each other, sometimes by trade, sometimes by violence, each one developing new techniques, exporting unique goods, and swiping ideas from the others. In this world of “competitive interaction,” all parties hustled for advantage. Trade in goods was important, but it was the trade in ideas that mattered.
By making this argument, I am endorsing one side in the long-running dispute between mother- and sister-culture proponents. In other words, as one mother-culture advocate put it, I am “swallowing Marcus’s [nonsense] whole.” He may be right. But I would argue that there is a difference between inheriting a cultural tradition, as the Norte Chico culture’s successors apparently did, and copying one, as the Olmec’s proponents argue. Nobody disputes that Han Chinese society arose long before its neighbors in Asia, but Asian archaeologists don’t refer to China as Asia’s “mother culture,” because China’s neighbors used part of its intellectual legacy to build up their own distinct and different writing systems, agricultural technologies, imperial practices, and much else. Given the evidence available now, the same seems to be true for the Olmec and ancient Mesoamerica. (To me, anyway—many researchers disagree.)
MESOAMERICA, 1000 B.C.–1000 A.D.
For thousands of years Mesoamerica was a wellspring of cultural innovation and growth. This map does not depict it accurately, because these societies were not contemporaries—the Olmec vanished centuries before the Ñudzahui and Zapotec began to reach their height, for example. Nonetheless, it should give some idea of each society’s heartland.
Emblematic of this rocketing growth were the Olmec’s neighbors in Oaxaca, the Zapotec, whom Flannery and Marcus have studied for more than two decades.