In about 1400 B.C., an advanced and distinctive culture emerged in southern Mexico, probably in the lowland forests of the Gulf Coast. The Aztecs, who appeared 2,800 years later and are considered their cultural ancestors, called them the Olmecas, and we know them today as the Olmec. They are celebrated for their early achievements in art, writing, and political organization, and are often called the Mother Culture of Mesoamerica that bred the Teotihucános, Maya, Aztecs, and others.
University of Kentucky archaeologist Christopher Pool has produced the most thorough and up-to-date study of this fascinating culture, offering a fair and thoughtful evaluation of the major controversies in Olmec studies and a history of the field itself. Rejecting the Mother Culture hypothesis as too simplistic, Pool nonetheless credits the Olmecs with crafting an “ideology of rulership” that supported Maya kings 2,000 years later.
The first major question Pool poses is “What is ‘Olmec?’” First used to describe an art style that includes the familiar colossal heads as well as small, strange jade figures, it came in some circles to represent an all-inclusive cultural identity. Pool argues for a more narrow definition that restricts the Olmec people to the Gulf Coast, centered at the four main polities of San Lorenzo, Tres Zapotes, Laguna de los Cerros, and La Venta. Here the Olmecs were the first to form highly differentiated, hierarchical societies. They created Mesoamerica’s first monumental art, and mastered the difficult techniques of sculpture in the round. They built extensive trade networks to gather the exotic materials they needed for this art, and through these networks they spread the Olmec style some 600 miles.
Pool concludes that this was not the work of a unitary state, but one that featured competition and cooperation among local leaders. Poole’s book highlights the variation in Olmec art, economy, society, polity, ideology, and regional interaction.
