The Olmec: Mother of Mesoamerican Civilisations

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Hey guys, I hope you're doing well.

Welcome to the Ancients.

On this quite rainy morning, I'm doing this intro on my way to work in London.

Today's episode is all about the Olmec, this extraordinary ancient Mesoamerican culture and the art that they left behind.

Now all the art that we're going to be talking about in this episode, we'll put links to images of them in the description.

What I found most fascinating about this chat, heads and all, was how the Olmec distinguished between portrayals of elite humans, of their rulers, and the supernatural.

It's really, really interesting.

Our guest today is the professor of art history, Dr.

Jill Mollenauer.

Jill, she's a leading expert on Olmec art, and I really hope you guys enjoy.

Let's go.

The Olmec.

They're known as the mother of Mesoamerican civilizations.

Emerging in around 1500 BC, long before the golden ages of either the Maya or the Aztec, the Olmec thrived in the tropical lowlands of southern Mexico, with great centers at places like San Lorenzo and La Venta.

But the Olmec are also very enigmatic, very mysterious.

A culture defined by their incredible art.

Their colossal namesake stone heads first and foremost, the Olmec heads, but also so much more.

Today we're we're exploring the story of the Olmec the only way you can, through the awesome art they've left behind, with our guest, Dr.

Jill Mollenhauer.

Jill, it is a pleasure to have you back on the Ancients podcast.

It has been too long.

Thank you so much for having me back.

You are more than welcome.

And to talk about this extraordinary culture, the Olmec culture,

first of all, Jill, it seems like this ancient Mesoamerican civilization, they left behind some of the most extraordinary art ever from Mesoamerica.

They really did.

And it's fascinating in part because it seems to us, I'm sure not to them, but to us, it seems to come out of nowhere.

We think that they're probably exploring sculpture in more ephemeral mediums.

So wood, for example, perhaps doing more in clay than we're even recovering.

But, you know, kind of right around roughly 1200 BCE, there's just an explosion of this monumental sculpture in a location that has very little natural stone, which is also very surprising.

And then they are creating these enormous, sometimes and sometimes smaller, but still very precious examples of what we think of as very naturalistic sculpture.

It's definitely idealized, but it has a human quality to it so often that really resonates with viewers even today.

I think it's one of the reasons that modern viewers really love Olmec art is because you can see the humanity that's resonating through the centuries and the millennia.

Absolutely.

And we're going to explore several key examples of this Olmec art in today's episode, both the monumental and the more, some smaller, more portable examples as well, but just as fascinating.

But first of all, Jill, we need to start with the background.

When we say the Olmec or the Olmec culture, who are we talking about?

Set the scene, Jill.

Who are the

This is really a more complicated question than it might appear initially, because

we started labeling this culture before we knew much about it.

And so really around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, people started to see that there were objects appearing in private collections and also being discovered that were in this very particular art style that all seemed to be related and they didn't know where it was coming from.

And then a number of sort of discoveries were made in the early 20th century that seemed to pinpoint the location of this art style in the Gulf Coast region of Mexico.

So that is today the southern part of the state of Veracruz and then sort of northwestern Tabasco.

And

so

Archaeologically, we started to explore the region and find more examples of monumental artwork that seemed to be in this style.

And we said, aha,

this is the heartland.

This is the Omek culture that's producing this art style.

And then we realized going forward and learning more about Mesoamerica's ancient past that, in fact, this is more like an international style.

And if we think of international art styles like international Gothic, right, you have international gothic variations that appear in Britain and in France and in Italy today and all over the place.

And they're variations, but on a central kind of core aesthetic and a core set of images.

So Omec very much seems to be the same way that at some point this art style starts to spread over to as far east as Guerrero into central Mexico in the state of what is today Morelos, down all the way as far south possibly as Costa Rica.

So it's got legs.

And so we now have this conundrum in which we call an archaeological culture really associated with those colossal heads in the gulf coast the olmec culture but we also have the olmec art style which is all over mesoamerica at one point in its ancient past that's so interesting it also makes it a bit more difficult as you say there so because i've always got in my notes key centers like i think la venta as well and you know the olmec culture and it feels although the majority of that the story of those ancient mesoamerican people is about the art there's also more to the Omec than just the art, and yet they're initially associated with just art.

So, I mean, is it an evolving term when we talk about the Omec culture today?

Absolutely.

And I think we don't quite understand fully the relationship between, we've got three primary, what we call the primary sites in the heartland.

Sometimes we call it Olman, this region in the Gulf Coast of Mexico.

And really, it's the colossal heads that have led us to identify identify these three sites as defining the boundaries of the Omec heartland.

And really,

but interestingly, the archaeology of the sites is quite different from one site to the next.

So, San Lorenzo, as the earliest site, looks quite different than La Venta, which is a later site.

And that also looks very, very different archaeologically from Cresapotes, which is further north.

And

so, we don't quite understand how these cultures were all related to each other.

Certainly they were.

We see clear correspondences primarily, again, in the art and to some extent in ceramics and other

practices that we can identify archaeologically, but they're also so distinct.

I sometimes wonder if we didn't have the colossal heads, would we necessarily relate these three sites to the same culture?

And I don't know, because again, there is overlap, but there's also quite a lot of variability.

So it it is really so much of what we understand about the Olmec, we really do understand primarily through these enduring works of art.

And what time period are we talking about with these key works of art, the time period that we associate now with the word Olmec in Mesoamerican history?

I think this is a great question because when people think of Mesoamerican history, they often go right to Aztec, which is really Renaissance, right?

Or maybe Maya, which the height of a lot of those classic period Maya kingdoms is equivalent to medieval, you know, in the Middle Ages.

But with the Omec, we're really looking at an overlap with Pharaonic Egypt,

as well as,

you know, the ancient Assyrians and Bronze Age China.

It's a big span of time, roughly 1400, 1500 BCE to about 350, 300 BCE.

And then we see it start to transition into something that looks a little different that sometimes is called epi-Olmec, which goes a few hundred years further into the future.

And they have a lasting legacy in Mesoamerica broadly, and in the Gulf Coast particularly, that continues on, but it changes and they start to look culturally quite different by 200, 250 CE.

It's become something else entirely.

So we are talking about a very ancient culture.

Generally speaking, in that area, which is now seen as as the heartlands of the Olmec, do we know much about how the people lived, I mean, their day-to-day lives?

Should we be imagining sedentary, complex, I guess you could use the word, sophisticated ancient people, ancient civilization or civilizations?

This is a good question.

And it really depends on how you want to identify civilization, how you want to define it.

And there's been a lot of argument about whether or not we should consider the early Olmec a state, early archaic state, or whether they're a chiefdom level society.

We're still learning so much about them through the archaeology.

But early on at the site of San Lorenzo, the earliest manifestation of Olmec, they're in an area that is incredibly rich in riverine and aquatic resources.

So they're living off of a wide variety of animals, fish, and then doing some farming, manioc.

There is some indication of maize agriculture or corn, but it's not as intensified as it will be.

Really, maize as an important aspect of Mesoamerican culture seems to really take off in what we call the middle formative, roughly 800 to 300, 350 BCE,

sort of the time.

of the real fluorescence of maize agriculture.

So before that, they are doing some farming, but they're also relying pretty heavily on gathering other resources in this really rich natural environment.

They are settled.

There is evidence of what we call site hierarchy, which means that you have San Lorenzo kind of at the top, and then all of these little sites that surround it that seem to be under the influence of San Lorenzo in some way.

And we're still trying to suss out exactly what the political structure, the social structure looks like.

So there's still a lot that we're learning constantly through new archaeological exploration of the region, just like anywhere in the world where we're learning more as we go back in time and archaeologists get farther and farther down, right?

And you get more intensive archaeology in a region.

I've got one more overarching question before we delve into certain examples of Olmec art.

And it feels like another question that I've no doubt many academics love to debate and sink their teeth into, which is I see the phrase mother of Mesoamerican civilizations or cultures when it comes to the Olmec.

I mean, Jill,

what do you think about that?

Should we, is it correct to call the Olmec the mother of Mesoamerican civilizations?

I have to say, I myself have not fully made up my mind about this one.

It was a sort of facile and very early designation, a kind of catchphrase associated with the Olmec that was conjured up in the early 20th century as people were getting really excited about what they were finding and realizing how ancient this culture was.

When they first discovered the archaeological remnants of this culture, people thought maybe it post-dated the Maya.

And then they thought maybe they were actually

equivalent in chronology to the Maya, that they were living at the same time.

And then they realized that, in fact, they were probably predating much of what we associated at that time with Maya culture.

And

so then

somebody got this great idea.

It's the mother culture, right?

So much of what we see later on in Mesoamerica has given birth in Olmec civilization.

And then we started to learn more about this ancient time period in Mesoamerican history and realizing that, in fact, there were a number of

other sites, other cultures that were participating in this network.

of exchange and interaction that were all probably feeding into this development of early Mesoamerican cultural identities and giving rise to some of these key ideas that seem to then diffuse through Mesoamerica in the next centuries and millennia.

That being said, when it's established, San Lorenzo doesn't really have any competitors on its same scale.

By the time of La Venta, there are certainly other places and there is a great deal of argument over how much primacy La Venta may have had both in the region and extensively across Mesoamerica by the middle formative.

But San Lorenzo is

sometimes people will say it's kind of the first among or this term primer interparis, right?

The kind of first among many.

But San Lorenzo doesn't really have peers.

It's much larger than any other site.

Nobody anywhere in Mesoamerica is creating the sculptural record that San Lorenzo has.

Certainly not on that scale, certainly not with the amount of labor that's going into the production of these sculptures.

And even the site,

there may have been something there in this kind of low-lying kind of floodplain area, some sort of natural feature that they identify, but that plateau is built up basket full of earth by basket full of earth.

It's effectively a man-made landscape feature.

And that really, again, is there's no comparison to anywhere else that we know of so far.

Again, we may find that it did have peers at the time, but as far as we know, San Lorenzo is really

unique during this early formative period.

And so in that sense, and we do find that there are certain things in Mesoamerica that go back to San Lorenzo.

I've looked into it in the earliest iteration of any sort of avian or feathered serpent, this

supernatural or deity form that then appears in different iterations all through Mesoamerican history.

The first image that we know of really goes back to San Lorenzo.

So much of what we think of in terms of Mesoamerican broad spectrum ideologies.

do seem to be birthed in the formative and a lot of it probably at San Lorenzo.

So I want to say, no, that this was sort of a campaign to really prop up the discoveries of the early 20th century, and that

the Omec aren't exactly the mother culture, that this was just good PR, but I don't know, to some extent, perhaps in some ways, yes.

And in some ways, they're part of a time period in which the foundations of Mesoamerican, indigenous culture, belief systems, et cetera, are all starting to rise to the surface.

It is so interesting to think of that idea of San Lorenzo as being almost like the first prominent complex state in Mesoamerica.

And I'm sure that that question and that debate will continue.

But regardless, it highlights the importance of San Lorenzo in the story of ancient Mesoamerica.

And it also feels talking about San Lorenzo, and I'm sure the other key centers as well, they're going to remain prominent in this conversation as we now explore that first key theme of Olmec art in today's chat.

And we have to start with the heads, don't we, Jill?

Because they are, although there's more art than just the heads, they are the most iconic, the most recognizable part of ancient Olmec culture today.

They are extraordinary.

Can you paint us a picture of them?

Absolutely.

I do recommend, I always hesitate to say Google, you know, if you're a listener's Google Olmec art, you're going to get a mix of things that are actual Olmec art and things that are imaginings of Olmec art.

It's one of the kind of favorite subjects of forgers and fakes and and people who like to riff and make mashups, etc.

But if you find the Olmec heads on your own in a Google search, you're going to see a range of sizes, but they all read visually as massive.

And some of them really are multi-ton

works, sometimes standing higher than the average height of a human.

And

they are

many of them very naturalistic in their representation of individual facial features.

They all tend to have these

helmet-looking headdresses with specific emblems or symbols on them that may identify them as

individuals.

It may be personal names, it may be clan or dynastic affiliation.

I think probably

personal names myself, but something that's helping you to identify this along with their idiosyncratic facial features, everyone looks like an individual person.

Sometimes they have teeth showing.

They all have a kind of slightly,

the corners of the mouth are well-defined.

Some people will define them as downturned.

I don't know that they're downturned, but they're definitely well-defined corners of the mouth that then lead to these beautifully fleshed-out lips that are often parted to show teeth.

They have quite big lips.

Also, we'll put a link to these images of the Omekes in the description, but I mean, Jill, they do have these great, these great big lips that I can see in some of these pictures.

Yeah, and they're beautifully delineated by the sculptors.

They have broad noses, kind of almond-shaped eyes.

What's really interesting is that those eyes have pupils in them, and that isn't actually very common for other sculptures of humans for

Omec art.

But

you do have figurines and other figures like the Lord of Las Limas that have reflective pupils in their eyes.

And I think there's something about sight attached to their authority.

And I have colleagues who've written about this idea of sight being linked to cognition and being linked to a sense of authority.

And I do wonder if that's why you get these really carefully delineated pupils within the eyes.

You've got fleshy cheek pads and a kind of furrow between the brows, but they are incredibly naturalistically and beautifully sculpted.

And I think what's really impressive about this Beyond Their Scale is the fact that they're not made with any sort of metal tool, metal sculpting tool.

This is all done stone on stone with hammering and abrasion.

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So these would have taken a long time to kind of carve out of the rock.

So can we imagine a whole, a very sophisticated process behind the creation of these olmec heads?

And I guess that might reveal a bit more about the whole nature of these early societies as well, how they were able to gather the manpower, all of the skill together in one place to create these beautiful bits of stone monumental artwork?

Yes.

In fact, we have workshops.

There's one workshop attached to a site called Laguna de los Ceros.

There's a kind of secondary outlayer area called Llano del Hijero, and there is evidence of a workshop there.

It's not clear how much is being sculpted on site versus how much is being kind of pre-formed to be sent off to workshops elsewhere.

And there's a lot of debate also about how the stone is getting down into these Gulf lowland territories because the locations of the volcanic stone are upwards of 60 to 100, 120 kilometers away, depending on the site.

So, and they're multi, again, they're huge, really, really heavy stones.

In some cases, sometimes they're smaller, but there is, again, a lot of debate about how you would get the stones to the ultimate destination.

And one idea is that they were floated on rafts because this is a heavily riverine area.

There are areas that flood, especially during the rainy season, and lots of waterways.

That being said, some folks recently have raised questions and proposed a kind of maritime process of, you know, taking them over to the coast and then down the coast via raft, but certainly most likely water transportation because there are no wheels, there's no beasts of burden in Mesoamerica to even pull a wheeled vehicle.

So they have to find alternative means in which to transport these huge stones.

We do have workshops also identified at San Lorenzo.

And part of them,

their job is probably to produce these large-scale stone sculptures.

And then part of their job is to recycle stone.

So we do see them recarving and reusing stone over time as well.

But

what's really remarkable to me is that San Lorenzo, if you look at all of the sculpture that's being produced stylistically, it's very consistent.

You can tell when it's San Lorenzo.

And I think that's fascinating because it really speaks to, again, a kind of cohesive workshop, probably a master apprentice system that's allowing for the creation of this kind of canon and the stylistic consistency across likely centuries of production.

Jill, I was going to ask, I mean, because first off, in total, do we have total amount of Olmec heads that we know about?

I mean, how many Olmec heads are we talking about?

Well, that's a great question.

Some people will say 17.

Now, there is a colossal head out at a site called Cobata.

It's well away from any major center of occupation.

And

recent archaeological excavation suggests it's quite late.

I think it should actually be in a totally different category because it's also stylistically very distinct from the other 16.

So 16, in my opinion, in total that are being produced by the Olmec proper.

10 of them at San Lorenzo.

That leads me on to the next question.

And you mentioned it in your answer to the question before this one.

The fact that if San Lorenzo is prominent at an earlier time period than another of those key Olmec centers that you highlighted earlier, like La Venta, and yet you find Olmec heads at both of those locations, well, you've already mentioned this.

I mean, you can see stylistic differences between the creations of these two sculptures at two different locations and potentially in two different time periods as well.

So you can also track the evolution of this iconic style of monumental artwork from the ancient Omeg.

That's fascinating.

And I do think we need to be thinking more about artistic, how things are made in artistic production, right?

That San Lorenzo does have workshops that are producing, and it leads to this incredible stylistic continuity.

There are two heads at Tresapotes, and they are stylistically quite distinct, which I think is really interesting.

There is also less stylistic consistency amongst the heads at La Venta.

There are four there.

And I think by the time we get to the middle formative, you've got more itinerant sculptors who are traveling around and

who are then, it's leading to more diversity in terms of the style by that point.

This would also explain, we do have Olmec style sculpture crapping up.

down into Chiapas and into the Pacific coast of Guatemala as far south as El Salvador in the middle formative.

And this might also explain why you've got Olmec style artwork cropping up as you go south, but it's often a one-off.

It's one work in a region or two works kind of in a region.

Few sites have more than one or two works in Olmec style proper.

So again, I imagine that there are sculptors who are traveling, who have training and knowledge of this style and who are traveling around and offering their skills, their services, etc.

We could cover a whole episode on the Olmec heads.

And in fact, we have done a whole episode on the Olmec heads in the past.

So I won't ask every question about the Olmec heads before we go on to other parts of Olmec art.

I will ask, though, quickly, one of the other big questions that I know many listening to this will be asking.

We see images of them today.

They're impressive, but they look just kind of stone-coloured.

They don't look like they have any colour on them.

Was that different back in Olmec times?

Do we think they were painted?

So I think they were painted.

And part of that is that if you look across the record of ancient sculpture all over the world, the ancients love polychromy, right?

Everywhere you go, from the terracotta warriors in China all the way through those wonderful Greco-Roman sculptures, everything has color on it.

Unfortunately, the soils of the Gulf Coast are highly acidic, and there's just no remnant of any

color on the surface today.

I will say that in one very early archaeological report, Matthew Sterling, who was one one of the early excavators of the Omec sites, says that he sees pigment on one of the Omec heads, but it's not there today, at least not to my knowledge.

And

I don't think that's ever really been verified.

But I do think that if they had the means for polychroming to paint these, they probably were, because if we go on to look at Mesoamerican sculptural traditions after this, most of them, them, if there's any remnant of the original surface, is polychromed.

So I think probably.

And who do we think these heads could represent?

Could they be gods?

Could they be kings?

But also, not just thinking of men, could they also be certain queens or goddesses or priestesses?

I mean, who do we think these heads might represent?

Excellent question.

And again, there's quite a lot of debate.

Personally, and not everybody's going to agree with me.

I do think they're leaders or or elites.

Kings, I think we have to reconsider some of our language or our assumptions around models of Indigenous rulership.

I think we tend to project European terminology and European models of rulership onto other cultures.

And if we really look at Indigenous models of governance, you know, all through the Americas into the United States and Canada, all the way down into the central Andes, we don't find a lot of models of rulership that comport with the kind of European courtly system of kings and queens, beyond perhaps the classic Maya.

But even with the classic Maya, certain sites seem to have kings at a time, and then at other times they have more shared models of governance.

Copan is a place where you see this, where you have a clear dynastic rulership, and then at some point it's not working for them anymore.

And, you know, then they have to reconfigure their expectations for rulership at some point in their history where they seem to move towards a model of shared governance late in that history.

So, even among classic Maya, where you have the clearest evidence for a courtly system of kings and queens, you still have shifts in that model of governance.

And I think maybe they're kings, but maybe they are

other

chiefs, perhaps, but it might be that our Western terms also don't configure well to, again, these indigenous seats of power, right?

But that being said, I think they are individuals.

I think early on, an art historian Beatriz Ela Fuente observed that it's very clear when you're looking at humans in Olmec art, and it's very clear when you're looking at the divine or supernaturals.

And so it's not like in the Greco-Roman world where

gods appear like humans and humans appear like gods, right?

These two things look very different in

Mesoamerican systems broadly, but among the

Particularly, you can tell when something is divine, you can tell when something is human, and these are humans.

And clearly, they have a lot of influence, they have a lot of power because they are able to commission these enormous portraits.

So, I do think they are people holding high positions, the highest positions socially that it's possible to hold.

And

are they all men?

That's very difficult to tell.

Unfortunately, the Olmec tend to really erase a lot of overt signs of gender in their art, particularly in the sculpture.

In the small-scale ceramics, there are clear women, there are pregnant women.

But when you get into the monumental sculpture, everybody kind of looks gender neutral, right?

There are very little in the way of primary, secondary sexual characteristics that allow us to identify men from women.

What we're we're left with is regalia, right?

It's costume.

Is this person wearing a skirt or are they wearing a mashlotl or a loincloth?

Do they have other signs in their costume of being male or female?

And I have colleague Billy Follinsby who's worked quite a bit on trying to identify women in Omec art.

And they're certainly there.

They're certainly there holding high level social positions.

Whether they're holding the highest positions is difficult to say.

Whether any of these figures are women is really difficult to say because we're lacking any part physically that we would typically use to identify male versus female.

I think it is interesting to ask ourselves why are the OLMEC not just downplaying, but in some senses, effectively erasing the physical signs of sex or gender distinction?

Why is that not only not important for them to show, but they almost erase it?

And this is particularly interesting to me is this kind of erasure of the sexual part of identity, at least attached to anatomy.

Again, they might show it in the costume, they might show it in regalia, but it's not as visible to us as outsiders coming from our modern perspective.

So these some of these folks could be women, and it's just impossible for us to tell.

Perhaps when they were created, people knew who these individuals were.

And that was enough to know that this was a woman or this was a man.

But at this point, I think we do have to be careful of assuming masculine identity as a default, right?

And unless there is evidence to the contrary, we assume it's a man.

I don't know that that's necessarily a good position to hold, you know, logically.

No, sadly, it's not like in ancient Egypt where you have depictions of pharaohs and in a couple of occasions, female pharaohs like Hatshepsut, who are depicted like male pharaohs, but they have in the hieroglyphs in the cartouche right next to them, you know, saying who they are.

Sadly, it doesn't seem like there's a name tag next to these Olmec heads saying who they are.

So, it's regardless, though, Jill, it's a really nice thought to leave that part of this chat on.

You also mentioned something in passing there during that answer, which I thought was a brilliant way to get on to the next part of our chat.

Was that you mentioned that in Olmec art, you can see a clear distinction between when humans are being shown and when the divine, the gods, the supernatural are being shown.

And it feels like this is epitomized in a particular work of art, an extraordinary work of art that I know you've done a lot of work around, which is the Lord of Las Limas.

Jill, can you tell us about this object?

What it is first?

So the Lord of Las Limas is a really interesting sculpture, unique in many ways, and yet I also find it to be exemplary of so much of what I consider iconic in Olmac art.

What's unique about it is that it seems to combine a subject that we know both from monumental and portable sculpture in

a format that sort of isn't one or the other.

It's roughly 55 centimeters in height, so it's not huge.

Much smaller than that.

And yet it reads as more monumental as so much Olmac art does because of the volume and because of the way they carved it.

This treatment of kind of swelling volumes and negative space.

People just say that Olmec art looks monumental, regardless of size.

So it looks big.

We know of this subject, this human figure holding

an infantile supernatural, right?

Which, so something that looks like a baby, but has the face of a supernatural creature.

And it's made of greenstone, not jade,

but another kind of greenstone, which was a very important material in Mesoamerica, beginning really back as long as the early formative, but then going into the middle formative, we see more and more jade and more and more greenstone starting to become an important luxury material.

And it has associations all the way through Mesoamerica with life,

with

maize, with water, with fertility, with vitality.

And so greenstone at this point in time is already becoming a highly charged, elite substance with a lot of symbolism behind it.

The figure is carved of greenstone.

It's got reflective pyrite pupils inset into the eyes, which I think is just

so striking.

And then again, it's carrying in its arms, but not like you would carry a human infant.

We have ceramic depictions of women holding children, and you hold them upright.

You don't hold them out as some sort of almost like an offering, right?

The little baby supernatural creature is just prone, right?

Kind of laying there.

No infant lays prone unless it's, you know, not alive, right?

No infant, you know.

they squirm and they move around.

This is just kind of lying inert in the arms of this figure.

The face of the figure, its

its legs, it's inscribed with these esoteric symbols that people have tried to interpret, perhaps as the faces of other divine forces or deities, if you want to call them that.

It's got a sort of supernatural mask inscribed on its otherwise very human, naturalistic face.

And then the features of the little baby supernatural are also inscribed.

So one of the things that I love about it is it does show this omic propensity to layer kind of esoteric abstract symbolism onto more three-dimensionally modeled work so that you see one thing, but you have to really look closely and you see something else entirely.

It's clearly a religious image.

That being said, how it was used, we're not really sure.

It's small enough, it could have been paraded around, it could be moved, but again, it has correspondence to other large-scale monumental works that are not movable.

And it's really unique.

It was found outside of a major center.

It wasn't found at San Lorenzo.

It wasn't found at La Venta.

It's found at a secondary center that has shown evidence of occupation at the time of San Lorenzo's dominance, but it was probably subordinate to San Lorenzo.

And it's kind of a charming story about how it was actually discovered.

You had two kids who were using this stone to crack nuts and

they realize as they start to kind of dig around to the base of the stone that, oh, this stone has the face.

And they realize that, in fact, what they've been using is the top of this whole figure.

So the people locally remove it and actually put it in a shrine and start worshiping it as an image of the Virgin and Child before

officials from the state come in and remove it as an archaeological treasure, basically.

But it has a sort of fascinating modern history as well.

And it's such a wonderful story of discovering treasure, you know, when you're a child, right?

If you can imagine being a kid playing around your neighborhood and finding something like that.

Exactly.

Digging for treasure with treasure.

It's an extraordinary story.

If we think the human being portrayed in that artwork is a lord or is a member of the elite and the person that the figure is holding is a supernatural figure.

Does it give us any insight then, if we believe it's a religious object and could have been carried from place to place as part of ceremonies, maybe.

Could it give us an insight into how these people, the Olmec, saw the relationship between their rulers on earth and the supernatural?

Were they almost the glue between them all?

Absolutely.

I do think that this is a really important facet of elite status during this time is your ability to produce, to control, to manifest the divine, right?

What I think is really interesting about the Olmec is that we have this art style and artifacts that travel outside of the Gulf Coast, and people have tried to read those as evidence of some form of cultural conquest.

But there are no overt images of warriors.

that we know of.

There's a couple of indications.

There's a kind of splayed figure in petroglyphic relief on a boulder at San Lorenzo that some people have suggested perhaps as a conquered warrior.

There is a kind of ambiguous image from central Mexico at a site called Chacot Cingo in the Olmec style that shows some aspects of violence, but probably ritualized violence because the figures aren't all human.

But there's no overt images of warfare, of conquest, right?

Instead, it looks like their major export is to some extent ideology and the art that carries those messages, right?

And it's one of the things that seems to be developing at this period in time is the idea that people hold status in part because of their ability to mediate between the human world and the unseen world of the divine and to have some influence or control over that, which is kind of par for the course throughout human history, right?

So often we give status to people who are believed to hold more sway with the divine to control things that are beyond the ken of mortal man, right?

And I think these folks were certainly using that idea of the being able to put a face on the divine and then show how they have influence over it.

And I think the Lord of Las Lamas is a great example of that.

And the idea that you have this esoteric symbolism that is layered over, it's also a kind of encoding of this image with really specialized knowledge that not everybody had access to, right?

So there's also a kind of hierarchy that's being developed in terms of who has access to what kind of specialized knowledge when it comes to the divine or the supernatural.

It sounds very much like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

It's so interesting how you see those similarities between different cultures across thousands of years and in different parts of the world.

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Do you see that artistic design, images of an elite figure carrying or next to a supernatural figure?

Do we therefore see it repeated in many different types of Olmec art from across the ancient Mesoamerican world?

Not a ton, actually.

It's pretty particular to mostly the Gulf Coast area, and it appears primarily outside of Lord of Las Limas on these what we sometimes call tabletop altars, but we really think they're thrones.

Which I think also speaks to the idea that this is an image that has to do with power and authority, right?

That this is primarily an image that we recognize from these thrones.

And we don't really see it in Olmec art outside of this region, which to me also says this isn't an idea that necessarily translates to everybody in Mesoamerica at this time.

And if you look at Olmec art from different regions, thematically, it actually varies quite a bit.

There's overlap, but there's divergence.

So you can see that the people at Chalcatzingo in central Mexico, the people in Guerrero, the people in Chiapas, even though though they're adapting this art style and some of the symbols, they're not just taking it wholesale.

They're making it their own and they're making it meaningful to their own cultural context.

So it's really not a kind of boilerplate or cookie cutter, you know, these images appear exactly the same here and here and here.

It's adaptation and translation and

looking at this art style and thinking about the way in which it's made meaningful to local people, even though it's also associated with something that must have been at least initially foreign.

And I guess exactly for the everyday people, because we've been talking about the people at the top, haven't we, Jill?

But I'm guessing the majority of people living in the world at that time, they would have been, well, in the Mesoamerican world, in that part of Mesoamerica, they would have just been in their farming settlements, tending their agriculture.

You know, they wouldn't have been interacting with with the elites day in, day out.

So I guess it was trying to make the art more recognizable and more important to everyday people too.

And I guess that's another part of Olmec art that I've overlooked so far is trying to understand the importance of art to everyday people in these societies.

And most people really probably,

you know, weren't that concerned.

I'm imagining most people weren't that concerned, you know, with what the elites were doing.

in their daily lives.

I imagine that people gathered at certain centers for a ceremony, and that's where they saw things that were meant to impress, to stupefy, to overwhelm, right?

And things that maybe they understood a little bit, but not a lot.

Most people, art for them looks like small-scale ceramic figurines or you know, sometimes really fine examples of ceramic wares of a particular pot or some other vessel.

And that's probably the art that many people interact with on a regular basis.

That being said, what I think is really interesting is that in the Gulf Coast area, particularly,

as well as in other regions, you have these sculptures appearing along routes of travel.

You have large-scale sculptures that seem to have been positioned along waterways in the Gulf Coast, where if you were traveling, you'd maybe pass one and be able to see it from

your raft or dugout canoe.

And if you're traveling through these trade routes, you would maybe encounter certain works of art that would communicate something about the identity of the people in that region.

And that's, I think, the other place where people are encountering.

But those are the people who are moving around, who are engaged in trade, who are

passing along these routes of travel for one reason or another.

Again, the majority of people probably encounter them rarely.

And so I think they're part of the emergence of these social hierarchies is also who has access to what, what is meaningful to whom.

It's a differentiation in life ways and a differentiation in the kinds of objects that you deal with in your everyday life and how you understand their relevance to your day-to-day life.

I'm really glad we mentioned that as well, because otherwise, you know, the chat, we will largely be focusing on some of the most extraordinary examples of Olmec art, like the heads, like the Lord of Las Limas, and as we're about to get to the Ware Jaguar.

But it's also really nice to highlight those ceramics too.

And what you mentioned earlier, Jill, in passing, those thrones, or what some people have called altars, another great example of monumental Olmec art.

Jill, before we move on to the really enticing name and story and artwork of the Ware Jaguar, are there any other key examples of Olmec art that you'd like to mention that we haven't covered?

You know, classically, if you look at any book on the Olmec, unfortunately, there isn't really a book on Olmec art specifically, although you do have great catalogs for exhibitions on Olmec art.

But if you look at resources on the Olmec, they will invariably name the colossal heads, the thrones, and stele.

I think this is...

you know, so interesting that so many places around the world, humans create stele, right?

These upright stones carved usually with imagery or with text.

Although it's fascinating in this early period of Mesoamerica, you start to also see in regions to the south of the Gulf Coast, people erecting stelae that are just plain stones.

They may have been painted, but they may have just been meaningful because they are stone, right, and where they're taken from.

But the Olmec do have sculpted scenes on upright carved slabs of of stone.

Most of the time, the slabs of stone are relatively unformed, which I've always thought is really interesting.

They almost graft the relief sculpture over the natural bumps and ridges of these massive blocks of stone.

And I think that's not a coincidence, but rather thinking about really referencing the original place of those stones.

And you can see in Olmec sites like La Venta, there's references in the sculpture to caves, to mountains.

They're constructing almost this secondary topography or landscape through the sculpture.

And I think the kind of rough, unformed surfaces of some of those stile are a part of that.

Thank you for mentioning those, Stile.

They look absolutely extraordinary.

And yes.

I didn't realize that they were almost part of a triumvirate of the big art forms that you associate with the Olmec.

I mean, I'll also give a shout out to something that I just saw in passing in preparation for this chat, which I thought was amazing, was this extraordinary artwork of something called the wrestler.

Compared to other bits of 3D art from Olmec culture, it looks extraordinary.

It looks very unique once again.

This quite muscly man, almost with both of his arms out from his body.

What is this?

Yeah, the wrestler is one of my favorite works of Olmec sculpture and is also very controversial.

A number of people have claimed that the wrestler must be a fake.

And I think part of that is because it does look so different.

Although I would also say, if you take a close look at Olmec sculpture, there's a lot of really unique, idiosyncratic works.

There's almost nothing to say that this is any more unique than other works that have been encountered archaeologically.

I think it's quite in the Olmec style.

Even the dynamism is something that we do see indicated by other works.

There's sculpture of what's often called the ball player, although we don't know it's a ball player, but it's at San Lorenzo and it's got very dynamic leg posture, but no arms because the arms actually were articulated and you could move them, which I think is wild.

So that speaks to some interest in movement in other archaeologically encountered works.

But I will say my colleague Anne Seifers actually did track down the original provenance of people who dug up the wrestler.

So I think we can now unequivocally say that the wrestler is not a fake, that it does have archaeological provenance and is in fact one of the most delightful examples of Omeg sculpture that I think is out there.

Now, Jill, we will move on to the were jaguar.

I didn't even know this was such a thing, but this feels a really interesting, extraordinary part of ancient Olmec art.

What is this image of the were jaguar in ancient Olmec art?

So the were chaguar has such a fascinating history in the discussion of Olmec art, and it has to do with how people understood or thought to describe some of these early images they were encountering of this Olmec-style supernatural or divine being.

And there's probably, when I say being, really where Jaguar is a kind of category, there's probably more than one supernatural or divine entity, God, if you will, that has these features.

But

this is a kind of key way to depict the divine in Omec art.

And it is a figure with, again, kind of almond-shaped eyes, broad nose, and this snarling mouth with averted or kind of curled lips, sometimes with interesting kind of bifurcated fangs coming out, sometimes with a toothless gum exposed.

And it's very particular.

There's really nothing else that looks quite like this, I think, really anywhere in the world, but but particularly in Mesoamerica.

And it's one of the key ways that people identify Olmec art when we see supernaturals with these features that come up.

And so early on, somebody said, you know, that mouth particularly and the kind of almond-shaped eyes, the broad nose, that reminds me of a jaguar or a snarling jaguar.

And then

Some colleagues of mine have suggested, well, there was a real fashion for Hollywood werewolf movies.

And I think Miguel Covarubias is sort of brought into this conversation and having a fascination for werewolf movies and the idea that they started calling it the were Jaguar, right?

The sort of part man, part jaguar, part feline figure.

And then

there were a few discoveries of sculptures in

the Gulf Coast area, particularly at San Lorenzo and its surrounding region, that are very, very partial.

They're very fragmentary.

It's hard to say what they are.

But one of them has two pairs of feet.

It looks like a feline feet crouching over a prone figure.

And the other one has a human sort of figure seated on top of something else.

We're not really sure what because it's so fragmentary.

And the theory was These are representations of humans copulating with jaguars.

And this is the birth of the weird jaguar.

Wow.

There's also a pictograph, a painting on a cave surface at a site called Oshotilan in Quero that has a human figure kind of overlapping with a jaguar.

And there is a kind of projecting element off the human figure that they thought might be a very stylized phallus, and that this was, again, the copulator of the impregnation of the jaguar by a human to give birth to the supernatural rare jaguar.

And the story was that the Omec really based their entire mythology on this part man, part jaguar creature.

The problem with this, there are several problems with this.

Number one, if you look at how the Omec really depict felines, they show us jaguars and the jaguars don't have those features.

They don't have mouths like that.

They don't have noses like that.

So that seems problematic to me.

The sculptures around San Lorenzo, again, are so partial, but the only one that has clear feline elements, those feline feet, it's also been noted that the other feet are not human, that they look simian, and the other creature has a tail.

So somebody suggested perhaps it was an attack scene of a jaguar attacking a simian creature, a monkey or something.

But not human.

And the other one, again, so partial.

If there's two humans or two living creatures, a human and a jaguar, it's impossible to tell.

And the pictograph from Guerrero,

they've done a few more studies, and that is not a phallus, it's a belt.

So

the

weird jaguar narrative was this sort of house of cards that's built up by early misinterpretations of the imagery, but it almost is so embedded in the discussion of the Olmec and Olmec art.

After decades and decades of literature calling this thing the weird jaguar, it becomes so difficult for people to call it anything else.

And we've tried renaming it.

Anatolpo Horolenko suggested we call it the composite anthropomorph because it does seem to combine

that.

Absolutely.

That's part of the problem is, you know, some of the naming conventions that have been proposed are not sexy enough, I think, to really catch on.

So is it a weird jaguar?

You know, I think probably not, but the name has really stuck.

And I think it's naming conventions can be like that.

If you think about the treasury of Etreus or the standard of or, you know, these iconic works of ancient art that have misnomers attached to them that will never be fully, you know, decoupled.

I think that really we're looking at it's, it might forever be the word jaguar, which, you know, is problematic because it's not really, but it is a way to show that something is divine.

I like to think about it like Hindu art, where they're always going to show you, you know, the deity looks human, but there's extra arms or there's extra feet or there's something that tells you that it's not human.

And this is a way to show you that this thing is not human, that it is divine by the incorporation of these features.

Is this something that we'll see time and time again throughout Mesoamerican history?

And this is kind of bringing us into the kind of the legacy of the Omeg, is the fact with their deities, with the supernatural figures, they are not completely shown as anthropomorphic figures.

As you say, there are some human elements there, but they're either combined with some sort of other creature or have some certain things which, as you say, distinguishes it from a normal human being.

Is that something that you'll see continue beyond the time of the Olmec?

Yes, I think it's very rare to have...

It does occasionally happen, especially, I think, later in Mesoamerican history where you get more human-looking deities.

but by then you have conventions of costume and symbolism that are attached to and make those figures readily identifiable.

You've got books and

murals and other things that are really helping to spread the iconography and make these otherwise human-appearing supernaturals or deities recognizable to the general populace.

You've got a more conventionalized pantheon.

So I wouldn't say that

we never get figures that are represented human-like, but are divine.

It's just later on.

And they also often have non-human forms, right?

Or there's something about them.

If you think about, you know, some of the representations of Aztec deities, they're, you know, the monster joints or something else that marks them out in some way as supernatural.

Again, it might be an element of a costume.

It might be something on the body.

But I think a lot of times, especially early in mesoamerican history it is very common to have these other features and in fact has been proposed and gone in and out of fashion the idea that this olmec were jaguar visage basically disseminates and becomes a sort of foundation for later deity representations that are you know not exactly the same, but that are riffs on that vary the features, but can be traced back back to this more ancient way of representing the divine.

And no, there might be something to that.

I don't think it's a straight line, but

just as in everywhere else, people don't forget about these ancient cultures.

We have heirlooms that persist.

There are Omec objects discovered in the Templo Mayor, right, of the Aztec.

There's an Omec mask that was in one of the offering caches.

People preserve these memories of these ancient cultures and these legacies.

And so I do think there's something, you know, if we want to call the Olmec the mother culture, it's more like the Olmec period of Mesoamerican history that's giving rise to this legacy of the ancient past that will continue to be remembered, you know, throughout the centuries and even the millennia by later peoples.

Because I see it sometimes said, isn't it, Jill, how with the Olmec, you see what people attribute that time period to when writing emerges, the calendar.

What else is there?

I think you mentioned earlier, the feathered serpent, the famous feathered serpent as well, and writing.

But are those things that you can see the origin, all of those things you can see the origins of with the Olmec that do seem to, as you say, the Olmec just don't, they're not completely forgotten.

I mean, the legacy of their culture over hundreds of years must still be there by the time of the Maya and the Aztec later.

So you can actually see, that was it, the ball court, the ball court, the famous ball games.

That could all originate with the Olmec.

And so therefore, even though we don't call them Olmec any longer, and they are different cultures, the Olmec almost lives on.

In some ways, yeah.

I think that the Olmec are one powerhouse in the formative period that goes on to influence and interact with these cultures, particularly in places like the Maya region that then go on to develop their own,

their cultural legacy, right?

And there's the Zapotec at places like Montalban and its surrounding vicinity, where again,

they're in contact with the Gulf Coast.

And the Gulf Coast itself continues to impact these later cultures because it is this kind of highway,

this node.

within the trade networks.

Everything passes.

A lot of stuff passes through the Gulf Coast.

And so it continues to have this impact.

And people in the Gulf Coast certainly remember the Olmec.

You can see them making reference back to the Olmec in some of their later works in the classic period.

So certainly by the late formative, you know, kind of as we transition into the classic, right?

So roughly, you know, 200 CE,

we see that people are already referencing.

these more ancient cultures, the Olmec, but also the people who were in contact with the Olmec, right?

That were in that region earlier.

And you can see this then resonating.

I think it's really important to think about the fact that these folks are prehistoric to us, but

they're not ahistorical.

They have a historic memory.

All of these sculptures that the Olmec create are around.

People see them and are aware of them in the region.

They have new lives.

They continue to be, in some cases, places of pilgrimage.

There's a sculpture up at a place called San Martín Pajapan.

It's up at the top of a volcano and it has people constantly making pilgrimage to it for centuries up until possibly the modern era.

And, you know,

there is a continuity that is allowed in part because of the persistence of the materials, that stone, right, that continues to provide a kind of material touchstone to that ancient past and to preserve that legacy and to continue its relevance for later peoples.

I must also ask then, do we know why or how or in what form the Olmec fall, if they fall at all?

There's definitely declines and it doesn't happen all at once.

It's not that the whole heartland is thriving and then gets wiped out.

San Lorenzo goes first before La Venta really gets going.

And we're not entirely sure why.

There have been various theories, everything from a kind of peasant revolt to

volcanic eruption in the region, etc.

It's not clear, unfortunately, at this point why San Lorenzo goes into decline.

Then Levente has its heyday, and then it goes into somewhat of a decline.

Terese Potes has been around since the time of San Lorenzo as a smaller settlement and then larger, certainly by the middle formative, but it really has its heyday after the decline of La Venta and it starts to attract.

And one of the things that we see in the archaeology, particularly at Teresa Potes, which has had some of the most sustained large-scale archaeological investigation that really can speak to this, is the way in which these sites adapt and reconfigure the population declines and then it re-rebounds.

And you can see them kind of reconfiguring the socio-political structure of the site.

You can see them adapting and changing, coming into contact with new peoples.

So I think, you know, there are all sorts of forces that lead to sites going into decline, but rarely are they permanently abandoned.

All of these sites have some later occupation, usually on a very small scale.

And

really,

it's just about kind of the evolving ebb and flow of humanity in the region.

There may be more specific specific forces at work, but unfortunately, archaeology has yet to turn those up, but there's still a lot to do, so maybe one day we'll know more.

That's a great way to end it because I was going to say, with the arts work that we've already covered, it's shone an extraordinary light on the Olmec culture.

And if we had more time, we could explore even more topics such as warfare or writing, the calendar, and so on.

But you've given us a wonderful introduction to this incredibly important ancient prehistoric Mesoamerican culture, Jill.

It's exciting to know what might be found in the years ahead, that there is more Olmec archaeology waiting to be discovered in future years.

So this is a developing story.

Absolutely.

And it's important to remember that very little of San Lorenzo has actually been excavated.

That's still

more is unknown about that site than is known.

La Venta, there's still so much work to be done at that site.

We have vast depths that have been left unplumbed.

And I I think it's really going to be exciting as we go forward.

We have new discoveries all the time.

Just in 2020, a new site east of Leventa in the Tabasco border was announced.

It's actually a Maya site called Aguara Phoenix, dating to around the same time as Leventham.

We're trying to now understand the relationship between these two contemporaneous sites that are large scale, that seem to have some sort of relationship with each other.

So more is coming to light, light, I want to say every day.

And it is really exciting.

It's also challenging sometimes to try to wrap our heads around and rethink what we assumed we knew and change based on new information.

But that is one of the exciting things about the field as well.

And one of the reasons that I really love it.

Jill, this has been great and such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

It just goes to me to say thank you for returning to the ancients today.

Thank you, Treston.

Well there you go.

There was Dr.

Jill Mollenhauer coming back on the podcast to talk through the story of the Olmec and their art.

I hope you enjoyed our latest episode on ancient Mesoamerica.

Let us know what other topics from Mesoamerica you'd love us to cover in the future.

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