Who were the Olmec, and why that name?
The Olmec lived in the hot, wet lowlands of what are now the Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco, a land of rivers, swamps and rainforest at the southern end of the Gulf of Mexico. Their main centres rose one after another: San Lorenzo flourished from about 1200 to 900 BCE, then La Venta from about 900 to 400 BCE, with Tres Zapotes lasting longer still.
Nobody knows what they called themselves. “Olmec” comes from Olmecatl, a word in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, meaning “people of the rubber country”, which the Aztecs used for the inhabitants of the same region more than two thousand years later. Archaeologists borrowed it in the twentieth century. The rubber link is apt, at least: some of the oldest rubber balls in the world, used for the ballgame, come from an Olmec spring sanctuary at El Manatí.
The colossal heads: seventeen faces of stone
The first head came to light in 1862, at Tres Zapotes, where, according to the usual account, José María Melgar y Serrano heard of a buried “kettle” that turned out to be a face. Since then seventeen colossal heads have been found: ten at San Lorenzo, four at La Venta and the rest at Tres Zapotes and La Cobata. They range from about 1.5 to 3.4 metres high and, by most estimates, from 6 to 50 tonnes in weight. A person standing next to one barely reaches the chin of the largest.
Each head shows a man with a heavy face, full lips and a close-fitting helmet or headdress, and no two are the same. The features, the expressions and the designs on the headdresses differ, which is why most scholars read them as portraits of individual rulers rather than images of gods. The helmets may be the padded headgear of the ballgame, or of war, or simply a royal crown.
The stone is the most astonishing part. The basalt came from Cerro Cintepec, in the Tuxtla Mountains, tens of kilometres from San Lorenzo, and the Olmec had neither wheels used for transport nor draught animals. The most widely accepted idea is that the boulders were dragged to the rivers and floated on rafts, then hauled up to the centres with ropes, rollers and many hands. Carving them with stone tools and abrasives took the work of a society that could organise labour on a large scale, the same need for hard, prestigious stone that drove other early rulers, as the page on the statues of Gudea explains for Mesopotamia.
Thrones: a ruler at the mouth of a cave
The Olmec also carved huge rectangular blocks that archaeologists once called “altars”. Today most see them as thrones. The best known, Altar 4 at La Venta, shows a seated figure leaning out of a niche on the front, as if from the mouth of a cave, with a rope in his hand that runs round the side of the block to a captive or an ancestor. A ruler sitting on top would literally have been above the entrance to the underworld, a place of ancestors, water and fertility in Mesoamerican belief.
Some Olmec monuments were later broken, buried or recarved. Whether this was destruction by enemies, a ritual “killing” of the stone at a ruler’s death or simply recycling is still debated, and the answer may differ from one monument to the next.
Jade: the green stone of rulers
At the other end of the scale, the Olmec were masters of small, polished stone. Their favourite was jadeite, the hardest kind of jade, blue-green or deep green, which they obtained by trade from the Motagua river valley in Guatemala, hundreds of kilometres to the south. Jade cannot be carved with a knife: it has to be ground with sand and water, so a mask or a figurine could take months of work. For later Mesoamerican peoples, green stone stood for water, maize and life, and the Olmec probably saw it in a similar way.
One of the most remarkable finds is Offering 4 at La Venta: sixteen standing figurines of jade and serpentine, arranged in a group as if in a meeting, with six thin jade axes standing behind them like a wall. It was buried in a pit and, at some later time, someone dug down exactly to the heads of the figures, looked, and filled the hole again. Archaeologists still argue about what the scene shows.
Were-jaguars and the question of the “mother culture”
Olmec art often mixes human and animal features. The best-known type is the so-called were-jaguar: a baby-like figure with a cleft head, swollen eyelids and a down-turned feline mouth. What it meant is uncertain; it may represent a rain or maize spirit, or the child of a human and a jaguar, as some later myths suggest. Other motifs (flame eyebrows, crossed bands, the cleft head) spread far beyond the Gulf Coast, on pottery and carvings from central Mexico to Guatemala.
For this reason the Olmec were long called the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica, the people who invented what everyone else inherited. Many archaeologists now prefer a “sister cultures” view: several regions grew at the same time and exchanged ideas, with the Olmec as the most precocious and influential, but not the only source. The debate is still open. What is clear is that some of the habits of later civilisations, from the ballgame to great ceremonial centres such as Teotihuacan, which fell centuries later, already appear in Olmec art.
What Olmec art tells you, in short
Olmec art was made for rulers: their faces in colossal stone, their thrones carved as sacred mountains, their wealth in green stone brought from far away. It shows a society that could move tonnes of basalt without wheels and grind jade for months, about a thousand years before the classic cities of the Maya. Its place in the wider history of art, alongside the first civilisations of the Old World, is sketched in the beginner’s map of art history.
Where to see it
The Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, in Veracruz, has the largest collection of colossal heads, from San Lorenzo. In Villahermosa, Tabasco, the Parque-Museo La Venta displays the monuments of La Venta, Altar 4 included, in a park setting. The Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City has the Olmec hall with Offering 4. Outside Mexico, Olmec jades are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington and the British Museum in London.
Sources
- R. A. Diehl, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization (London, 2004).
- K. Taube, Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, 2004).
- K. Pool, Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica (Cambridge, 2007).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, “Olmec Art”.
- Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), Museo de Antropología de Xalapa and Parque-Museo La Venta.
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