The Olmec and Their Contemporaries (original) (raw)

2008, Encyclopedia of Archaeology

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