The Olmec

In 1987, villagers digging a fish pond at the foot of a small hill called El Manatí, in the swampy lowlands of southern Veracruz, found strange things in the mud. When archaeologists from Mexico's national institute excavated the spring there over the following years, they found that people had been throwing offerings into its water for centuries, beginning about 1700 BCE: polished stone axes set in careful clusters, jade beads, and the oldest rubber balls known anywhere in the world, some of them dated to about 1600 BCE. Later came wooden busts of people with shaven, elongated heads, wrapped in reed mats and laid in the mud with care, bones of newborn children, and more axes. Thanks to the waterlogged earth, wood and rubber survived three and a half thousand years. El Manatí is a window onto the religion of the people archaeologists call the Olmec, the makers of the earliest great art style of Mesoamerica.

Who the Olmec were

"Olmec" is a name borrowed from the Aztec word for the "rubber people" of the Gulf Coast; we do not know what the ancient people called themselves. Between about 1600 and 400 BCE, in the tropical lowlands of what are now Veracruz and Tabasco, they built the first large ceremonial centres in Mesoamerica:

• San Lorenzo (flourishing c. 1400–1000 BCE), on a vast artificial plateau above the Coatzacoalcos River;
• La Venta (c. 900–400 BCE), on an island in a coastal swamp, with a great earthen pyramid more than 30 metres high;
• Tres Zapotes, which outlived the others into the last centuries BCE.

Olmec-style objects and images, jade figurines, pottery with carved motifs, rock carvings, also appear far outside the heartland, in the highlands of central Mexico, Guerrero, Oaxaca and as far as Central America. Whether this means that the Olmec were the "mother culture" from which later Mesoamerican civilizations derived, or one of several interacting "sister cultures" that shared and exchanged a common symbolism, has been one of the longest-running debates in Mesoamerican archaeology.

Colossal heads and thrones

The most famous Olmec monuments are the colossal heads: seventeen of them are known, ten from San Lorenzo, four from La Venta and three from the Tres Zapotes area. Carved from basalt boulders dragged from the Tuxtla mountains, some weigh more than twenty tons. Each has a distinct face and a distinct helmet-like headdress, and most archaeologists think they are portraits of individual rulers. Several were carved from older monuments, and some appear to have been deliberately damaged and buried.

Alongside them stand great rectangular stone "altars", now usually identified as thrones. The most famous, La Venta Altar 4, shows a man seated in a niche carved as the open mouth of a creature, the entrance to a cave or the underworld, holding a rope that binds figures on the sides. The ruler emerges from the earth, the place of ancestors and of water. The imagery joins kingship to the sacred landscape.

Offerings buried out of sight

La Venta's ceremonial centre, Complex A, north of the great pyramid, was built and rebuilt over centuries, and some of its most important religious acts left things meant never to be seen again:

• The Massive Offerings: three great mosaic "pavements", each made of about 485 blocks of imported serpentine laid out as a highly stylized mask, and two other deposits of serpentine blocks. Each was placed at the bottom of a deep pit and immediately covered with metres of clay. Nothing comparable is known elsewhere in Mesoamerica.
• Offering 4: sixteen small human figurines of jade, serpentine and granite, standing in a group before six upright jade celts (polished axe-blades), as if at a gathering or rite, buried around 600 BCE. At some later point someone dug a hole down exactly to the heads of the figurines, looked, and filled it in again.
• Caches of jade celts and mirrors of polished iron ore, laid out in cruciform patterns.

Burial of the finest objects, rather than display, seems to have been central to Olmec ritual: offerings given to the earth.

The sacred water and the mountain

Olmec religion was tied to places in the landscape: springs, caves and mountains. At El Manatí offerings went into a spring. Olmec rulers had stone drains built at San Lorenzo, and some water-channel stones are carved with the face of the were-jaguar, linking the creature to water and rain. At Chalcatzingo in the highlands of Morelos, a relief carved on a mountainside, Monument 1 or "El Rey", shows a figure seated inside a cave shaped as the profile of a creature's mouth, from which scrolls emerge, beneath clouds from which drops fall. It is generally read as a scene of rain-making, or of a ruler or deity in the sacred mountain from which the water comes; its identification is debated.

The were-jaguar and the Olmec pantheon

Olmec art is full of composite beings, above all a figure with a human body and a feline face: a snarling mouth with down-turned corners, often toothless gums or fangs, a cleft in the head. It has been called the were-jaguar. Many figures are infant-like, and some are carried in the arms of adults, as on the greenstone Las Limas figure, a seated youth holding a limp were-jaguar baby, its knees and shoulders incised with the faces of four other supernatural beings.

The art historian Peter David Joralemon proposed in the 1970s that Olmec imagery shows a set of distinct gods, which he numbered: an Olmec Dragon (God I), a crocodilian creature combining features of cayman, eagle, jaguar and serpent, associated with earth, water and fertility; a Maize God with corn sprouting from its cleft head; a Bird Monster; a Fish or Shark Monster; a Rain God (the were-jaguar infant); a Banded-eye God and others. Later scholars, notably Karl Taube, developed the Maize God and rain themes and traced connections to later Maya and Aztec deities. Others question whether the images should be read as separate gods at all, or as aspects of a few great powers, or as the insignia of rulers and shamans.

Transformation figures, small stone sculptures showing a kneeling or standing human in the process of becoming a jaguar, with feline features appearing on the face and body, have been read as shamans changing into their animal spirit companions, a practice well documented among much later Mesoamerican peoples. This is an attractive reading, and contested: it projects later ethnography back over two or three thousand years.

Children, rubber and cacao

Three further strands of Olmec religion leave clear traces.

• Children. The bones of newborns among the offerings at El Manatí have led to suggestions of child sacrifice, perhaps to rain powers, as practised much later by the Aztecs for Tlaloc. The evidence is ambiguous: the remains could be of children who died naturally and were given a special burial.
• The ballgame. The rubber balls of El Manatí show that the ball, made from latex of the Castilla elastica tree, had been invented by about 1600 BCE, and figurines of players with protective belts appear in the Olmec world. The oldest known ballcourt, at Paso de la Amada on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, dates to about 1650 BCE, and a highland court at Etlatongo in Oaxaca to about 1374 BCE. The game would become one of the great rituals of Mesoamerica.
• Cacao. Chemical traces of theobromine in pottery from San Lorenzo show that cacao was being prepared and drunk there between about 1800 and 1000 BCE: the earliest steps toward the chocolate that later Maya and Aztecs offered to gods and drank at feasts.

Writing and the Cascajal block

Olmec imagery includes symbols that recur and combine, and later Olmec-related sites have some of the earliest glyphs and calendrical signs in Mesoamerica. In 2006 a team published a serpentine block from Cascajal, near San Lorenzo, carved with 62 signs in rows, and argued that it was the oldest writing in the Americas, from about 900 BCE. Many scholars accept it as writing, but it was found by road builders in a pile of rubble, without a secure archaeological context, and its date and status are disputed.

The believer's lens

No community practises Olmec religion, and its people left no readable texts. What their art suggests they valued is still visible: rulers who drew their power from the earth and the mountain, emerging from caves and bringing rain; offerings of the finest things given to springs and buried in the ground; powerful beings that combined the traits of the jaguar, the cayman, the serpent and the eagle; and maize, the plant on which life depended, with its own god. For many Mexicans today, especially in Veracruz and Tabasco, the Olmec are honoured ancestors of the nation, and La Venta's sculptures, moved to a park museum in Villahermosa in the 1950s, are cultural treasures. The archive reports this as heritage and belief, not as reconstruction.

The skeptical lens

The historian's first point is that Olmec religion is known almost entirely from images and deposits, without texts, and that most interpretations borrow meanings from much later peoples (Maya, Aztec, modern Indigenous groups). That method, the "direct historical approach", is useful but risky across such a gap in time.

The second is that many famous "Olmec" objects in museums have no known find spot, looted or bought on the market, and some may be fakes. Interpretations built on them are weaker than those built on excavated offerings like El Manatí and La Venta.

The third concerns popular claims. Since the 1970s writers such as Ivan Van Sertima have argued that the colossal heads show Africans, and that Africans founded Olmec civilization. Specialists reject this: the heads are consistent with local Indigenous populations, stylized in Olmec fashion; there are no African artefacts, plants, languages or genetic traces in the Olmec world; and the claim denies Indigenous Americans credit for their own achievements. Other writers have proposed Chinese, Atlantean or extraterrestrial origins, equally without evidence.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• Jade and greenstone. The Olmec prized jadeite and blue-green stone above all materials, importing it from far away (probably the Motagua valley in Guatemala), and used it for figurines, celts, masks and ear ornaments. Green signified water, maize and life, and polished celts may have stood for maize ears or seeds; this symbolic reading is widely held, and inferred.
• The cleft head. The V-shaped cleft in the heads of were-jaguars and the Maize God has been read as a sprouting seed, the earth opening, or a mark of the supernatural. It is one of the most distinctive signs of Olmec art.
• The four directions and the centre. Some jade and relief compositions arrange four celts or signs around a central figure. This has been read as the earliest expression of the Mesoamerican cosmogram, the world as a quincunx of four quarters and a centre, later central to Maya and Aztec thought; the reading is interpretive.
• The cave mouth. The niche of La Venta Altar 4 and the cave of Chalcatzingo's El Rey are drawn as the open jaws of an earth creature: entering or leaving the cave is entering or leaving the underworld, the source of water and ancestors.
• The mirror. Concave mirrors of polished iron ore, worn on the chest by figures in Olmec art and found in offerings, may have been used for divination or to focus the sun's light; their purpose is uncertain.
• Buried art. The Massive Offerings encode a religious idea in the act of concealment: the most laborious works were made for the earth and the gods, not for human eyes.

Connections

The Olmec stand at the beginning of the long history of Mesoamerican religion traced in The Maya (ch29) and The Aztec (ch43), which inherited the ballgame, the reverence for jade and maize, the cave-mountain and many sacred motifs. Their rulers who bring rain from the earth belong with Sacred Kingship (ch49), their buried offerings and possible child sacrifices with Sacrifice & the Scapegoat (ch51), and their Maize God with Creation & the First Order (ch46). As a Bronze Age civilization they are contemporary with Egypt's New Kingdom, the Minoans and the Shang dynasty (ch02, ch67, ch09), and like them created monumental art at the service of kings and gods, though entirely independently. The transformation figures invite comparison with the shamanic traditions of ch75.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch76.html · a comparative library of the sacred.