Shamanistic Resonances of Ancient Cultural Interactions in the Circumpacific Region (original) (raw)

Review of "Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica" by Christopher A. Pool

farmsteads surrounding a more densely populated core area. The rich alluvial floodplain would have made agriculture less of a challenge than elsewhere in the Maya area, and there is significant discussion of cacao having been an important economic crop, though evidence for this is largely anecdotal. Chapter 6 summarizes evidence for social and economic hierarchies and integration, concluding that Quirigua' was less stratified than Copan and distinct in its economic and political relationships. In Chapters 7 and 8 Ashmore interprets architectural data and concludes that Quirigua's rulers mimicked the use of space at Copan to elevate the Gulf Coast as well as its several "sister" manifestations throughout ancient Mesoamerica are the subject of this volume. Pool deftly contextualizes the rise and subsequent blending of all things Olmec, beginning with sedentism and continuing with the origins of writing, calendrics, and truly complex socioeconomic and sociopolitical organization. His is a fine example of reflective, synthetic, and thorough scholarship of the first order.

The Olmec and Their Contemporaries

Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2008

The Olmec and their contemporaries were the first to crystallize the Mesoamerican cultural framework of rulership, gift economics, trade, gaming, religiosity, and literacy. Urban centers, multi-tiered settlement systems, monumental constructions, craft production, and elaborate exchange systems mark significant social changes that occurred during the period 1500-400 BC. Olmec ritual focused on a sacred landscape of mountains, water sources, and the sun, all believed to be essential to human life. Caves, mountains, and springs were ceremonial pilgrimage destinations. At the same time a huge output of labor brought substantial stone resources such as obsidian, greenstone, and volcanic rock from distant regions to Olmec ceremonial centers of Gulf Coast Mexico to be shaped into monuments, offerings, and gifts that underwrote the power of rulership. Olmec elites participated in the development of writing in connection with their elaboration of kingly power. Writing included recording the Mesoamerican calendar, which centered on divination and prophecy. Olmec settlement concentrated around the enormously productive river systems of the Gulf Coast. Olmec subsistence focused increasingly on maize with the addition of beans, manioc, corozo palm nuts, chile, and sunflower. Domesticated dog and later white-tailed deer, as well as aquatic resources such as fish and turtles, were the primary sources of meat. The Olmec social developments of the Mesoamerican Formative period paralleled those of contemporaneous cultures in central Mexico, across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and down the Pacific watershed as far south as El Salvador. Scholars have debated the extent to which the Olmec were the prime movers in Formative period developments or were equal participants in a larger pattern of social change. The widespread distribution of artifacts in Olmec style attests to shared belief and value systems throughout Mesoamerica in the Formative period. Later Mesoamerican rulers, from the Maya to the Aztec, modeled themselves after Olmec elites, copying their architectural plans and adopting their writing systems. culture' model giving the Olmec preeminence in the formation of Mesoamerican cultural patterns. Another group of scholars has favored a more decentralized vision of interregional cultural hybridization whereby emerging polities across the central core of Mesoamerica mutually contributed to, and participated in, the discourse of creation of statecraft and its attendant systems of rituality and symbol. The most important of the Olmec contemporaries are the sites of Coapexco, Tlapacoya, and Tlatilco in the in the

1Asking New Questions about the Mesoamerican Pre-Classic

2015

university of illinois, urbana-champaign Between the initial recognition that the elaborate art style knownfrom Gulf Coast sites such as La Venta, Tres Zapotes, and San Lorenzowas early in the sequence of Mesoamerican cultures, and the Dumbarton Oaks symposium for which these papers were prepared, research on the Pre-Classic period was in many ways preoccupied with the problem of defining “Olmec. ” To some extent, this situation reflected the real distinctiveness of features that have come loosely to be labeled Olmec in the development of Mesoamerican societies. More than for any later period, Mesoamerica’s Pre-Classic sites were characterized by unprecedented developments, including the development of monumental architecture and public art, whose creation was credited to Olmec people or Olmec influence. Also initially fueling concern with defining Olmec was the patchy nature of the archaeological record of the Pre-Classic. Few sites had been investigated in any detail, and those st...

Olmec archaeology: A half century of research and its accomplishments

Journal of World Prehistory, 1997

The Olmec of Mexico's southern Gulf coast (3100-2450 B.P.) are the most famed of Formative period Mesoamerica's early complex cultures, and are particularly noted for their elaborate stone monuments. After five decades of research, scholars remain in sharp disagreement on what the archaeological record means with regard to the impact the Olmec had on social and political evolution in Mesoamerica. A discussion of interpretive problems and a review of 50 years of Olmec archaeology illustrates reasons for the disagreements, as well as the type, quantity, and quality of data that have been recovered from excavations. Those show that, until recently, knowledge of the Olmec has been based primarily on two limited pre-1970 data sets. New research is discussed, and topical issues in Olmec archaeology are treated in detail.