Mystery of the Olmecs endures
Were they a wellspring of other civilizations?

By John Noble Wilford

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE


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 are Olmec
sculptures: colossal stone heads with thick lips and staring eyes that
are thought 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 on that theory 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 February, 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."

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," 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 Diehl, a proponent of the mother school and the author of The
Olmec, published last year, said 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 B.C. 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.

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.

Grove disputed 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.

The mother-culture advocates, said Dr. Susan D. Gillespie, a
Mesoamerican archaeologist at the University of Florida, who is married
to 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."

Gillespie said that the Olmecs established a vibrant culture and that
their accomplishments were extraordinary. She also said that they were
innovative and that their leaders presided over a political system
capable of mobilizing labor for public works.

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.

source: http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky...e/11448132.htm