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Christopher A. Pool
Between 1400 and 1000 BCE,1 Olmecs living in the tropical lowlands of southern Veracruz created an urban center and a stratified polity unprecedented in scale and elaboration in Mesoamerica. As the town of San Lorenzo grew, its inhabitants and those of smaller surrounding settlements surrendered much of their autonomy to a line of rulers who displayed their authority in the first truly monumental stone sculpture on the North American continent. These and later Olmec rulers deployed their symbols in key places, creating landscapes in which polity and ideology were intertwined, yet their control was tenuous and disputed beyond the river valleys where their capitals lay. In this essay I examine the changing physical, economic, political, and symbolic landscapes of the Olmecs and their Epi-Olmec successors.
Theoretical and Interpretive Issues
The fundamental questions in Olmec archaeology mirror those in other parts of the world where stratified societies arose independently from other regions. How did some individuals acquire greater authority and power than others, and how did they pass those qualities on to their successors? What mix of material, social, and ideological sources of power did they employ? How did leaders and society more generally foster cooperation toward mutually beneficial ends and enforce social norms? To what degree were followers complicit in the surrender of their autonomy, and to what degree was their compliance coerced?
In the Olmec case, however, efforts to address fundamental questions are beset with a number of interpretive issues, the first of which is to define what one means by Olmec. The term Olmec, derived from an Aztec name for inhabitants of the Gulf Coast and adjacent areas in the fifteenth century CE has been applied to an archaeological culture of the Early (1450–1000 BCE) and Middle Formative (1000–400 BCE) periods in southern Veracruz and western Tabasco as well as to an art style shared to varying degrees by societies across much of Mesoamerica in the same time frame. In this essay I use Olmec in the former sense to refer to the archaeological culture and the societies that produced it in the southern Gulf lowlands (Pool 2007: 12–15; for extended discussion of this dual usage and the interpretive issues it presents, see also Grove 1989; Lesure 2004). Although monumental stone sculpture and large constructions constitute its most impressive products, Olmec material culture is more consistently expressed across settlement types in the technological style and iconography of more humble black and differentially fired ceramic vessels with carved and incised designs and particular figurine forms (Arnold 2012; Blomster et al. 2017; Pool and Insoll 2017). By convention, archaeologists refer to the preceding Initial Formative (2000–1450 BCE) culture in this region
