Universidade de Brasília – UnB Depto. de Línguas Estrangeiras – LET No. de Identificação da Disciplina: 146064

Instituto de Letras – IL Professor: Dr. João Sedycias Civilização Hispano-Americana

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Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Olmecs –

Olmec colossal basalt head in the Museo de la Venta, an outdoor museum near Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico. Several of these gigantic human portraits come from San Lorenzo, the largest of which is nine feet high. The visages are flat-faced, with thickened lips and staring eyes. Each has a headgear resembling a football helmet, and it is entirely possible that these "helmets" were in fact protective coverings in a rubber-ball game that is known from Olmec figurines to have been played at San Lorenzo.

The Olmecs were the first elaborate pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica, and one that is thought to have set many of the fundamental patterns evinced by later Indian cultures of Mexico and Central America.

The Olmec people lived in hot, humid lowlands along the Gulf Coast in what is now southern Veracruz and Tabasco states in southern Mexico. The first evidences of their remarkable art style appear at about 1150 BC in their oldest known building site, San Lorenzo. This site is remarkable for its many stone monuments, prominent among which are colossal carved heads that have characteristic flat faces, thickened lips, and helmetlike headgear. A later Olmec ceremonial centre, La Venta, is marked by great mounds, a narrow plaza, and several other ceremonial enclosures. The Olmecs developed a wide trading network, and between 1100 and 800 BC their cultural influence spread northwestward to the Valley of Mexico and southeastward to parts of Central America. It is clear that later Mesoamerican native religions and iconography, from all parts of the area, can be traced back to Olmec beginnings. Besides monumental architecture and sculpture, Olmec art is expressed in small jade carvings, pottery, and other media. Its dominant motif is the stylized figure of a god that is a hybrid between a jaguar and a human infant.

From the Olmecs constructions and monuments, as well as from the sophistication and power of their art style, it is evident that their society was complex and nonegalitarian. Olmec stylistic influence disappeared after about 800 BC. Not all of the Olmec sites were abandoned, but Olmec culture gradually changed, and the region ceased to be the cultural leader of Mesoamerica.

Related Topics

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Mesoamerican Civilization -

Principal Sites of Meso-American Civilization

The complex of aboriginal cultures that developed in parts of Mexico and Central America prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. In the organization of its kingdoms and empires, the sophistication of its monuments and cities, and the extent and refinement of its intellectual accomplishments, this civilization, along with the comparable Andean civilization farther south, constitutes a New World counterpart to those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China.

Archaeologists have dated human presence in Mesoamerica to as early as 21,000 BC. By 11,000 BC, hunting-and-gathering peoples occupied most of the New World south of the glacial ice cap covering northern North America. The cooler climate of this period as compared with that of today supported a grassland vegetation, especially in the highland valleys, that was ideal for large herds of grazing animals. The shift toward sedentary agriculture apparently began after about 7000 BC, when a dramatic global warming caused the glaciers to retreat and tropical forests to overtake the Mesoamerican grasslands.

The gradual domestication of successful food plants – most notably a mutant corn (maize) with husks – over succeeding millennia gave rise to more or less permanent village farming life by about 1500 BC. In addition to corn, crops included beans, squashes, chili peppers, and cotton. As agricultural productivity improved, the rudiments of civilization emerged during the period designated by archaeologists as the Early Formative (1500-900 BC). Pottery, which had appeared in some areas of the region as early as 2300 BC, perhaps introduced from Andean cultures to the south, took on varied and sophisticated forms. The idea of the temple-pyramid seems to have taken root during this period.

Corn cultivation in one area – the humid and fertile lowlands of southern Veracruz and Tabasco, in Mexico – was sufficiently productive to permit a major diversion of human energy into other activities, such as the arts and commerce. Struggles for control of this rich but limited farmland resulted in a dominant landowning class that shaped the first great Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmec.

San Lorenzo, the oldest known Olmec centre, dates to around 1150 BC, a time when the rest of Mesoamerica was at best on a Neolithic level. The site is most noted for its extraordinary stone monuments, especially the "colossal heads" measuring up to 9 feet (nearly 3 m) in height and possibly representing players in a sacred rubber-ball game.

The period known as the Middle Formative (900-300 BC), during which the La Venta urban complex rose and flourished, was one of increased cultural regionalism. The Zapotec people, for example, attained a high level of development at Monte Albán, producing the first writing and written calendar in Meso-America. However, at this site, as well as in the Valley of Mexico, the Olmec presence can be widely detected.

In the subsequent Late Formative and Classic periods, lasting until about AD 700-900, the well-known Maya, Zapotec, Totonac, and Teotihuacán civilizations developed distinctive variations on their shared Olmec heritage. The Maya, for example, brought astronomy, mathematics, calendar making, and hieroglyphic writing, as well as monumental architecture, to their highest expression in the New World. At the same time, Teotihuacán, in the Valley of Mexico, became the capital of a political and commercial empire encompassing much of Mesoamerica.

Teotihuacán power diminished after about 600, and for the next several centuries numerous states vied for supremacy. The Toltecs of Tula, in central Mexico, prevailed from about 900 to 1200 (the Early Postclassic Period). Following Toltec decline, a further period of unrest in the Late Postclassic Period lasted until 1428, when the Aztec defeated the rival city of Azcapotzalco and became the dominant force in central Mexico. This last native Mesoamerican empire fell to the Spaniards, led by Hernán Cortés (or Cortéz), in 1521.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Pre-Columbian Civilizations:

The Rise of Olmec Civilization –

It was once assumed that the Formative stage [i.e., approximately from 2500 b.c. to the beginning of the Christian era] was characterized only by simple farming villages. It is now realized, however, that coexisting with these peasantlike cultures was a great civilization, the Olmec, that had arisen in the humid lowlands of southern Veracruz and Tabasco, in Mexico.

The Olmec were perhaps the greatest sculptors of ancient Meso-America. Whether carving tiny jade figures or gigantic basalt monuments, they worked with a great artistry that led a number of archaeologists to doubt their considerable antiquity, although radiocarbon dates from the type site of La Venta showed that Olmec civilization was indeed Formative, its beginning dating to at least 1,000 years before the advent of Maya civilization.

San Lorenzo is now established as the oldest known Olmec centre. In fact, excavation has shown it to have taken on the appearance of an Olmec site by 1150 BC and to have been destroyed, perhaps by invaders, around 900 BC. Thus, the Olmec achieved considerable cultural heights within the Early Formative, at a time when the rest of Meso-America was at best on a Neolithic level. The reasons for its precocious rise must have had something to do with its abundant rainfall and the rich alluvial soil deposited along the broad, natural levees that flank the waterways of the southern Gulf coast. Thus, the ecological potential for corn farmers in this counterpart of Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent was exceptionally high. The levee lands, however, were not limitless, and increasingly dense populations must inevitably have led to competition for their control. Out of such conflicts would have crystallized a dominant landowning class, perhaps a group of well-armed lineages. It was this elite that created the Olmec civilization of San Lorenzo.

In appearance, the San Lorenzo site is a compact plateau rising about 160 feet above the surrounding plains. Cutting into it are deep ravines that were once thought to be natural but that are now known to be man-made, formed by the construction of long ridges that jut out from the plateau on the northwest, west, and south sides. Excavations have proved that at least the top 25 to 35 feet of the site was built by human labour. There are about 200 small mounds on the surface of the site, each of which once supported a dwelling house of pole and thatch, which indicates that it was both a ceremonial centre, with political and religious functions, and a minuscule town.

San Lorenzo is most noted for its extraordinary stone monuments. Many of these, perhaps most, were deliberately smashed or otherwise mutilated about 900 BC and buried in long lines within the ridges and elsewhere at the site. The monuments weighed as much as 44 tons and were carved from basalt from the Cerro Cintepec, a volcanic flow in the Tuxtla Mountains about 50 air miles to the northwest. It is believed that the stones were somehow dragged down to the nearest navigable stream and from there transported on rafts up the Coatzacoalcos River to the San Lorenzo area. The amount of labour involved must have been enormous and so would have the social controls necessary to see the job through to its completion.

The central theme of the Olmec religion was a pantheon of deities each of which usually was a hybrid between jaguar and human infant, often crying or snarling with open mouth. This "were-jaguar" is the hallmark of Olmec art, and it was the unity of objects in this style that first suggested to scholars that they were dealing with a new and previously unknown civilization. There is actually a whole spectrum of such were-jaguar forms in Olmec art, ranging from the almost purely feline to the human in which only a trace of jaguar can be seen.

These Olmec monuments were generally carved in the round with great technical prowess, even though the only methods available were pounding and pecking with stone tools. Considerable artistry can also be seen in the pottery figurines of San Lorenzo, which depict nude and sexless individuals with were-jaguar traits.

Exotic raw materials brought into San Lorenzo from distant regions suggest that the early Olmec controlled a large trading network over much of Meso-America. Obsidian, used for blades, flakes, and dart points, was imported from highland Mexico and Guatemala. Most items were obviously for the luxury trade, such as iron ore for mirrors and various fine stones like serpentine employed in the lapidary industry. One material that is conspicuously absent, however, is jade, which does not appear in Olmec sites until after 900 BC and the fall of San Lorenzo.

There is evidence that the Olmec sent groups from their Gulf coast "heartland" into the Meso-American highlands toward the end of the Early Formative, in all likelihood to guarantee that goods bound for San Lorenzo would reach their destination. San Lorenzo-type Olmec ceramics and figurines have been found in burials at several sites in the Valley of Mexico, such as Tlapacoya, and in the state of Morelos. The Olmec involvement with the rest of Meso-America continued into the Middle Formative and probably reached its peak at that time.

San Lorenzo is not the only Olmec centre known for the Early Formative. Laguna de los Cerros, just south of the Cerro Cintepec in Veracruz, appears to have been a large Olmec site with outstanding sculptures. La Venta, just east of the Tabasco border, was another contemporary site, but it reached its height after San Lorenzo had gone into decline.

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