colossal head in Complex B emphasized the status and roles of rulers, and paired thrones at the southern base of Mound C-1 and Complex D at the southern end of the site bore the images of rulers or ancestors sitting in a niche, one of each pair cradling an infant in its lap and the other flanked by human figures who may represent ancestors or captives (González 2010: 138–145; Grove 1999). Many of these monuments remained visible in their settings for centuries after they were emplaced, as early twentieth-century visitors recounted (e.g., Blom and La Farge. 1926). Later, the Epi-Olmec governors of Tres Zapotes selectively employed that site’s colossal heads and a basalt-enclosed platform as ancient symbols of Olmec rulership in the formal complexes they constructed to reinforce their own claims to authority within a more collective alliance (Pool et al. 2010b).
Discussion: The Shifting Political Landscapes of Olman
At 1500 BCE the landscape of the southern Gulf lowlands of Mesoamerica stood on the cusp of a transformation. For over three millennia its human inhabitants had supplemented the natural boundary of its rivers, marshes, swamps, lakes, savannas, and forests by planting maize in small plots cleared in part by burning the natural vegetation during the dry season (Pope et al. 2001). In dwelling on the land, making gardens, walking the trails, marking fishing holes, disposing of their dead, and recounting stories of it all, the Olmecs’ ancestors had already constituted a landscape in concert with the natural environment and the forces they perceived to inhabit it.
Though their settlements were relatively small and overall population density was low, the inhabitants of Olman were not isolated from one another or from the world around them but shared raw materials, technologies, and artifact styles. Throughout the region, even among the relatively mobile inhabitants of the Tuxtla Mountains, people made similar neckless jars (tecomates) and other vessel forms, which they decorated with a common variety of plastic techniques, including rocking stamping, with a shell moved backward and forward in the damp clay. Obsidian, though not abundant, was acquired even in small sites, probably through down-the-line trade from Central Mexico and Guatemala, as was serpentine and other greenstones used in ritual. At El Manatí, people continued their two-century-old practice of offering greenstone axes, rubber balls, and healing plants to the forces that controlled water in both its benevolent and destructive aspects. Thus, by the end of the Initial Formative period at 1450 BCE, some of the basic elements of Olmec subsistence, technology, and ritual were in place, and they had already begun to shape the landscape physically and conceptually in ways that would remain little changed in parts of Olman for a thousand years, while other parts would see impressive settlement growth, social differentiation, and landscape transformation.
EARLY FORMATIVE LANDSCAPES (1450–1000 BCE )
The social, economic, ritual, and political landscapes of Early Formative Olman were heterogeneous and disjoint. The greatest changes transpired in eastern Olman, particularly in the middle Coatzacoalcos valley, where the San Lorenzo Olmecs constructed what was arguably Mesoamerica’s first urban landscape. By the end of the Bajío phase around 1450 BCE, the inhabitants of the village at San Lorenzo were already conducting substantial cutting and filling operations to level the top of the plateau (Arieta Baizabal and Cyphers 2017). Over the four centuries of the San Lorenzo phase (1400–1000 BCE), they would raise the plateau and extend it with terraces to as much as 700 ha (Arieta Baizabal and Cyphers 2017: 62).2 Arieta Baizabal and Cyphers (2017: 62) estimate the total amount of earth moved by the end of the San Lorenzo phase at 6–8 million cubic meters of fill, which would make it the largest construction in Early Formative Mesoamerica, although how much of the terracing was centrally directed is uncertain. Nevertheless, the surpluses of food produced in the northern alluvial plain and brought into San Lorenzo from the surrounding countryside along the rivers that encircled it gave the elites of San Lorenzo the means to support work crews and artisans who turned the hill encircled by the waters of the Coatzacoalcos, Tatagapa, and Chiquito rivers into a regional capital resplendent with red-hued elite residences, water features, and stone images of rulers and supernatural beings that told the stories of the origins, their lineages, and their relationships to the natural and supernatural realms of the cosmos. Urbanization not only is a process of emerging centers but also entails a transformation of the sustaining countryside (Jennings 2016: 82). Around San Lorenzo new hamlets appeared, old hamlets grew into villages, and villages at Loma del Zapote and Tenochtitlan expanded but lost their autonomy to become secondary centers, their status proclaimed with small thrones and full-round statues expressing human and cosmic themes (Cyphers 2012).
Thus, in the middle Coatzacoalcos valley powerful rulers of the most urbanized settlement in Mesoamerica used the advantage of a large labor force, abundant wild food sources, cultivable uplands and efficient riverine travel to manage the risks and opportunities presented by interannual variation in rainfall and flood intensities. Their power lay not only in their economic advantage but also in their cooptation of preexisting ritual and beliefs about the relationship of humans to the natural and supernatural forces of the cosmos expressed in a novel technology of meaning and social memory – the carving and setting of monumental stone sculptures in juxtaposition with other sculptures and civil–religious architecture in the capital and its subordinate centers.
Elsewhere in Olman, populations shared common ceramic technologies and styles but contrasted greatly in terms of their settlement patterns, political organization, economies, and construction of more sparsely occupied landscapes. At the height of San Lorenzo in the late Early Formative these ranged from mobile egalitarian groups in the Tuxtla Mountains to a possible three-tiered settlement and sociopolitical system centered on Laguna de los Cerros in the San Juan Basin, with Tres Zapotes, La Venta, Zaragoza and other sites beginning to grow to prominence in their local settings (von Nagy 1997: 267). Sites in the upper San Juan Basin interacted most closely with their neighbors in the middle Coatzacoalcos, and that interaction, whether cooperative or coercive (and perhaps both at different times), undoubtedly shaped the history of the growing center at Laguna de los Cerros and the nearby Llano del Jícaro basalt source. It is notable that with the exception of San Lorenzo, the upper San Juan basin has produced the largest number of Early Formative stone monuments (at Laguna de los Cerros, Cruz del Milagro, and Cuatotolalpan); that can be due not only to the availability of the resource but also the vertical differentiation of its settlement and sociopolitical hierarchies and its interaction with San Lorenzo. More distant settlements were also more autonomous in their economic and social interactions with other regions. At Tres Zapotes, for example, ceramic decoration and figurine styles suggest social ties to Oaxaca and central Veracruz, while trade networks brought in obsidian from the nearest sources in Puebla and Veracruz.
MIDDLE FORMATIVE LANDSCAPES (1000–400 BCE )
In terms of the human landscape, the most profound trends of the Middle Formative period were the depopulation of the middle Coatzacoalcos and upper San Juan valleys and the growth of populations in the Tonalá and Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basins around La Venta and Tres Zapotes, a pattern that suggests migration out of the center of Olman toward its margins. Population in the middle Coatzacoalcos fell by over 90% (Symonds et al. 2002: 88–90), and the settlement pattern returned to one resembling that of the Bajío phase some 500 years before, with a midsized village at the summit of the San Lorenzo plateau, where the remaining inhabitants continued to erect some mounds while living among the images of long-dead rulers and their monumental works (Figure 2.3). In the upper San Juan Basin, population fell by about 63% (Borstein 2001: 191), as people moved away from the riverine lowlands toward more upland areas. Increased reliance on maize overall means that larger parts of Olman would have been cleared for swidden fields, especially in those regions experiencing population growth, though there is little reason to suspect that population pressure resulted in extensive deforestation.
San Lorenzo’s loss appears to have been La Venta’s gain, as population increased on the island and along the Barí and Blasillo rivers, where old villages grew into
