The Olmecs of southern Mexico are known as the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica because they made the first stone monuments, were the first to use a calendar, and produced early hieroglyphic writing. They are generally thought to be the precursors of the Maya and other advanced Mesoamerican cultures. They flourished for more than 700 years, from about 1150 to 400 B.C.
Author David Grove is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois who has carried out archaeological research in Mexico for 50 years and is best known for his work at the Olmec site of Chalcatzingo near Mexico City. In this small volume, he has produced a lively history of the intrepid archaeologists and their research in the Olmec heartland along the Gulf coast of Veracruz and Tabasco beginning in the 1920s. This region was the—and still remains—a wild and remote part of southern Mexico dominated by coastal wetlands (swamps), heat and humidity, and mosquitoes, ticks, and snakes. The diminutive Tuxtla Mountains provide some relief from the tropical lowlands.
The first explorers were Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge of Tulane University in New Orleans, who traversed the region on horseback and by boat in 1925-26. They dodged rebel bands left over from the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910-20) and succeeded in finding important Olmec stone monuments and sites, including the site of La Venta, one of the major Olmec centers, although they identified it as Maya.
Thirteen years later, Matt Sterling of the Smithsonian Institution conducted the first scientific excavations in the Olmec heartland at La Venta and Tres Zapotes. Sterling was the first to recognize the antiquity of the sites and to identify them as a newly discovered Olmec culture, and he excavated the first Olmec monumental stone heads and alters.
Grove continues to track the archaeologists who investigate Olmec sites. Discovering the Olmecs is a fascinating history of archaeological discovery that carries on to this day. The difficulties and dangers of research in such a remote place make this book an exciting saga of science and adventure.
