[m2c] Olmecs - Mother Culture, or Only a Sister?

[usman x]

>From http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/15/science/15olme.html

Mother Culture, or Only a Sister?
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

On a coastal flood plain etched by rivers flowing through swamps and
alongside fields of maize and beans, the people archaeologists call the
Olmecs lived in a society of emergent complexity. It was more than 3,000
years ago along the Gulf of Mexico around Veracruz.

The Olmecs, mobilized by ambitious rulers and fortified by a pantheon of
gods, moved a veritable mountain of earth to create a plateau above the
plain, and there planted a city, the ruins of which are known today as San
Lorenzo. They left behind palace remnants, distinctive pottery and art with
anthropomorphic jaguar motifs. Most impressive were Olmec sculptures:
colossal stone heads with thick lips and staring eyes that are assumed to be
monuments to revered rulers.

The Olmecs are widely regarded as creators of the first civilization in
Mesoamerica, the area encompassing much of Mexico and Central America, and a
cultural wellspring of later societies, notably the Maya. Some scholars
think the Olmec civilization was the first anywhere in America, though doubt
has been cast by recent discoveries in Peru.

Archaeologists have split sharply over how much influence the Olmecs had on
contemporary and subsequent Mesoamerican cultures. Were Olmecs the "mother"
culture? Or were they one among "sister" cultures whose interactions through
the region produced shared attributes of religion, art, political structure
and hierarchical society?

Last month, the simmering pot of mother-sister controversy was stirred anew
by Dr. Jeffrey P. Blomster, an Olmec archaeologist at George Washington
University. In a report in the journal Science, he and other researchers
described evidence of the widespread export of Olmec ceramics that they said
supported "Olmec priority in the creation and spread of the first unified
style and iconographic system in Mesoamerica."

Dr. Blomster's team analyzed the chemistry of 725 pieces of pottery
decorated with symbols and designs in the Olmec style and collected
throughout the region. The researchers compared the composition of the
ceramics with local clays. They determined that most of these were not
imitations of the Olmec style made by local potters. In a significant number
of pots, the clay matched the chemistry of material found around San
Lorenzo.

"The evidence is overwhelming that San Lorenzo, the first Olmec capital, was
doing the exporting," Dr. Blomster said. "The Olmecs were disseminating
their culture and it was something of great interest to others."

The research, he added, showed that San Lorenzo did not appear to be
importing artifacts emblematic of other cultures or that regional
contemporaries were exchanging such material with one another. The city on
the artificial plateau seemed to be the hub of regional culture and central,
he said, to understanding the origin and development of complex society in
Mesoamerica.

Dr. Richard A. Diehl of the University of Alabama wrote in Science that the
findings "provide powerful support for the mother-culture school," adding,
"San Lorenzo thus dominated in the commercial relationships and attendant
spread of Olmec iconography and belief systems."

But Dr. Diehl, a proponent of the mother school and the author of "The
Olmec," published last year, said in an interview that the "connections we
are seeing may not have lasted more than a generation, perhaps the time of a
particular ruler, and at most, not more than a century or century and a
half."

The Blomster research dealt with pottery from the latter half of the early
formative period of Mesoamerican culture, which extended from 1500 to 900
B.C. The last centuries of this period were the time of San Lorenzo's
ascendance, but afterward the city was largely abandoned and the Olmec hub
gravitated to La Venta, nearby in what is now the state of Tabasco.

Dr. Blomster collaborated with Dr. Hector Neff, an archaeologist at
California State University, Long Beach, and Dr. Michael D. Glascock of the
Research Reactor Center at the University of Missouri. The Missouri center
analyzed the pottery and clay samples from San Lorenzo and six other Mexican
sites from the era of Olmec prominence.

Proponents of the sister school are not letting the interpretation of the
new research go unchallenged. They may be a minority in Mesoamerican
studies, but a vocal and formidable one, including such stalwarts as Dr.
Kent V. Flannery and Dr. Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan and Dr.
David C. Grove, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.

Dr. Grove disputed Dr. Blomster's conclusions, saying that the research
demonstrated only that Olmec pottery was traded, not that the trade
disseminated Olmec political and religious concepts around the region.
Others questioned the assertion that no pottery of other cultures had found
its way to San Lorenzo.

The mother-culture advocates, said Dr. Susan D. Gillespie, a Mesoamerican
archaeologist at the University of Florida, who is married to Dr. Grove,
were "flogging a dead horse, the idea that the Olmec invented civilization,
carried it to all of Mesoamerica and it's the basis of the Maya."

Dr. Gillespie acknowledged that the Olmecs established a vibrant culture and
that their accomplishments were extraordinary. She also agreed that they
were innovative and that their leaders presided over a political system
capable of mobilizing labor for public works. It was no easy task raising an
artificial plateau or hauling heavy blocks of basalt 40 miles to San Lorenzo
from volcanic fields and fashioning them into the stone heads that stand as
high as 10 feet.

Olmecs also contributed games with rubber balls, which became popular and
fiercely played by later regional cultures. The Aztecs, much later, used the
name in their own language for "rubber people" - Olmec - to describe the
culture that was by then long vanished but not forgotten. No one knows what
the ancient Olmecs called themselves.

"But others in the area were doing things equally complex, though
different," Dr. Gillespie said. "Other areas were also taking steps on their
own toward the development of Mesoamerican civilization."

That, and an active interchange of ideas and beliefs among various
neighboring societies, is the essence of the argument advanced by
sister-culture proponents. They further contend that the concept of the
Olmecs as a mother culture grew out of 19th-century ethnocentrism, in which
the construction of stone sculptures is a sign of civilization because that
is a hallmark of early Western civilizations.

Many of these archaeologists have concentrated their research and
excavations on non-Olmec areas with evidence of ancient complex societies,
like the Valley of Oaxaca, the central basin of Mexico and the Pacific
coastal sites of Chiapas in southwestern Mexico. Dr. Gillespie, though, has
studied Olmec workshops that were operating in the culture's heyday, mainly
producing stone artifacts thought to be altar thrones.

Dr. Blomster cited recent excavations by Dr. Ann Cyphers of the National
University of Mexico that "emphasize the higher sociopolitical level that
the Olmecs achieved relative to contemporaneous groups in Mesoamerica," a
view contrary to the sister-culture position. Dr. Cyphers said the rulers of
San Lorenzo appear to have lived in a palace with huge basalt columns and
sculptures, while leaders in the adjacent Valley of Oaxaca had places not
much better than the wattle-and-daub huts of commoners.

Dr. Michael D. Coe, an archaeologist at Yale who is an authority on the
Olmec and the Maya cultures, sides more with the mother-culture school,
saying that "much of the complex culture in Mesoamerica has an Olmec
origin."

In the new edition of his book "The Maya," Dr. Coe writes that during four
centuries of San Lorenzo's prime, ending about 900 B.C., "Olmec influence
emanating from this area was found throughout Mesoamerica, with the curious
exception of the Maya domain - perhaps because there were few Maya
populations at that time sufficiently large to have interested the expanding
Olmecs."

But early Olmec rulers were aware of the territory where the Maya eventually
established imposing cities. Three years ago, scientists reported finding a
rich lode of jadite, including huge boulders of it, in the jungles of
Guatemala. Traces of ancient mining were uncovered, and some of the
outcroppings were of blue jade, the prized gemstone Olmec artists used for
carving delicate human forms and scary masks.

Archaeologists said the discovery not only solved a mystery of the origin of
Olmec jade, but also showed that the Olmecs exerted wide influence over the
region, either directly or by trade through intermediaries.

The Olmec influence on the Maya began to show up in artifacts, starting
before 100 B.C. By then, Dr. Coe and other scholars said, Olmec art,
religion, rubber-ball games and the ceremonial dress of rulers had clearly
found its way to Maya cities.

Dr. Diehl of Alabama said there was "good evidence that Olmec sculpture is
portraying beliefs" also related in Popol Vuh, the epic of creation found in
Maya writing. This cosmology predated the Maya and was widespread in
Mesoamerica, but its origins are murky.

The classic maize god of the Maya, scholars say, appears to be a clear
descendant of a similar Olmec god. A Maya wall painting in San Bartolo,
Guatemala, shows a resurrected maize god surrounded by figures offering him
gifts of tamales and water. "The deity's head is purely Olmec," Dr. Coe
said.

The assumption is that aspects of Olmec culture reached the Maya indirectly,
probably through what is known as the Izapa civilization in the territory
extending from the Gulf Coast across to the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, in
Mexico, and of Guatemala. The city known as Izapa is the site of imposing
temple mounds in Chiapas, a place where the Olmec sculpture and Maya
painting and glyphs seemed to converge.

Dr. John E. Clark, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University, has
excavated in the area for years and is involved with current research, he
said, showing strong links between San Lorenzo and ancient sites in Chiapas.

>From there, Dr. Clark said, the influence of the Olmecs - not only their art
and gods but their kingship and all its trappings - eventually penetrated
deep into Maya country and its rising cities. It appeared to be a melding of
late Olmec culture with preclassic Maya. Some early carvings of Maya kings,
he said, were made on the backs of Olmec jade pieces. A comparison of their
art reveals that Maya and late Olmec kings dressed in similar style,
resplendent in jade and feather capes like their shared gods.

In his journal commentary, Dr. Diehl supported the Blomster team's research
as the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on the spread of
Olmec pottery.

The research appeared to show, for example, that the exchanges of pottery
and presumably other goods were arranged between Olmec rulers and specific
foreign lords "rather than the more diffuse trade networks posited by
sister-culture proponents," Dr. Diehl said. But left unexplained, he added,
was how "this was accomplished and what motivated people on both ends."

Were these truly commercial ventures? Dr. Diehl said there was so far no
archaeological evidence suggesting that the Olmecs conquered or proselytized
its neighboring societies. Neither is there a clear picture of what happened
to San Lorenzo.

Nothing in the ruins or later legends points to conquest by an invading
army. More likely, some scientists think, the city was abandoned by the
ninth century B.C. because of natural catastrophe: the rivers they depended
on probably changed course, the result of silt and tectonic shifts in the
coastal landscape.

La Venta, the new capital, came to an equally mysterious end around 400
B.C., and it was not long until the Olmecs lapsed into decline. Pockets of
the culture persisted in Tres Zapotes, near the former capitals, and
scattered communities in southern Mexico.

By the time the first major civilization of Mesoamerica was disappearing,
the Olmecs blending into other societies, it apparently had reached out far
enough in trade and influence to pass on a legacy of politics, art and
religion to the up-and-coming Maya. A few mother-culture archaeologists,
citing the new research, liken the relationship of the Olmecs to the Maya to
the Greeks and Romans of Western civilization.


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