hamlets emerged (Figure 2.6). Over the 600 years of the Middle Formative period the urban landscape of La Venta was expanded and elaborated with four architectural complexes formed by low mounds arranged around two plazas constituting the civic–ceremonial core, all oriented 8° west of north and centered conceptually, on Mound C-1 (Figure 2.9). As described in detail already, the elites of La Venta forged social memories through construction programs, monument settings, and the burial of offerings large and small that reinforced their claims to power and authority at the center of their realm. They also appear to have placed sculptures at significant places in the broader landscape, marking them as sacred places as well, perhaps, as making claims for the extension of their political authority and their control over resources at considerable distance. To the west 76 km, a sculpture in the round whose head is nearly identical in form and style to broken Monument 44 of La Venta was set at the cleft peak of the San Martín Pajapan volcano (Figure 2.10). The more complete Pajapan monument depicts a kneeling human wearing a headdress with a backward-curved cleft element and a feline visage from the cleft forehead of which sprouts vegetation. In his hands he grasps a bar with both hands, one underneath as if poised to set it upright – a position that has been interpreted as representing the raising of a pole – the axis mundi – at the center of creation (Reilly 1987; Schele 1995: 107–108). The discovery of a nearly identical monument beyond the Tuxtlas on the outskirts of the town of Lerdo de Tejada (Figure 2.10) and of the torso of a seated monument from Angel R. Cabada that closely resembles La Venta Monument 77 suggest that La Venta may have had substantial control over an area extending some 165 km to the west along the coast in the Middle Formative period (Pool et al. 2010a).
Figure 2.10 Clockwise from left: San Martín Pajapan Monument, La Venta Monument 44, Lerdo Monument.
San Martin Pajapan image by Frida27Ponce, retouched by Peter Hanula for Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode). La Venta Monument 44 photo by Linda Schele © David Schele, Schele Collection No. 128028, Courtesy Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org). Lerdo photo by author.
As the rulers of La Venta created their bejeweled capital in the midst of the eastern swamps, Tres Zapotes emerged as a regional capital at the edge of the alluvial plain at the opposite end of Olman. The Olmec rulers there appear to have pursued similar strategies at a more modest scale than at La Venta. Of the 50 sculptures thus far recovered from Tres Zapotes, 11 can be assigned to the Olmec culture on stylistic grounds, including 2 colossal heads, 2 stelae, 4 full-round sculptures, 2 tenoned busts, and a carved greenstone column (Pool et al. 2010b). Early rulers portrayed themselves with colossal heads, which came to be set at the eastern and western limits of the site in similar fashion to the colossal heads and sandstone dwarves at the northern and southern limits of La Venta’s central ceremonial zone. Later Olmec rulers commissioned stelae, one of which shows the ruler as axis mundi standing between earth and sky, flanked by attendants; on one side dwarf-like figures wield celts and on the other a serpent (associated with the earth and underworld) vies against a jaguar (associated with the night sky) descending from above (Pool et al. 2010b) (Figure 2.11). At the center of the site a low platform surrounded by natural basalt columns and covering an offering of celts, pottery, and monkey bones. Within the enclosure lay a basalt slab through which was inserted a greenstone column that bore an incised mat representing ruling authority and a cleft associated with were-jaguar personifications of the earth and maize – in effect an axis mundi marking the center of the Tres Zapotes realm.
Figure 2.11 Tres Zapotes Stela A.Drawing by Ayax Moreno. Courtesy of the New World Archaeological Foundation.
Other sculptures were deployed in outlying settlements. Most impressive is the colossal head of Cobata, set in a pass across the mountain ridge that extends northward from the extinct volcano Cerro el Vigía, 10 km to the east. Larger (at an estimated 50 tons), and more rustically carved than other colossal heads, the Cobata head is the only colossal head not recovered from an Olmec center. Similar in execution to nearby petroglyphs and boulder sculptures, the elites of Tres Zapotes may have commissioned it from rural carvers to mark an eastern boundary of the polity and to claim control over the sacred and material resources the mountain (Pool and Loughlin 2017; Pool et al. 2010b).
With a total extent of 150 ha including adjoining pockets of occupation, Tres Zapotes was not as large as La Venta’s estimated 200 ha (González Lauck 1996),3 and its known Middle Formative sculptural corpus is only about a tenth that of La Venta. Nonetheless, it was the largest settlement in Western Olman, it certainly dominated much of the area between the eastern slope of the Tuxtlas and the Papaloapan delta and the presence of ruler images in the form of colossal heads and stelae identified it then and now as the capital of an Olmec polity. Moreover, the distinctive style and regalia of the Tres Zapotes heads and the greater orientation of the site’s obsidian assemblage toward particular central Mexican sources argue for its autonomy from La Venta (Pool et al. 2010b, 2014). Thus, politically and economically, the Middle Formative landscape of Olman continued to be a heterogeneous one, with regional capitals at either end and less expansive communities in between.
LATE FORMATIVE LANDSCAPES (400–1 BCE )
Another major shift in the social and political landscapes of Olman occurred around 400 BCE, as La Venta and its sustaining settlements collapsed and population continued to decline in the middle Coatzacoalcos and upper San Juan valleys (Borstein 2001; Rust 2008; Symonds et al. 2002 Figure 4.4). In contrast, surveys in the rest of western Olman document modest population increases in the central valleys and southern piedmont of the Tuxtla Mountains (Killion and Urcid 2001; Santley and Arnold 1996) and substantial growth in the Tepango valley of the western Tuxtlas and in the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin, especially at the centers of Tres Zapotes and El Mesón (Loughlin 2012; Pool and Loughlin 2018; Pool and Ohnersorgen 2003; Stoner 2011). Given the timing of these population trends and the sculptural evidence for a prior relationship with La Venta in the easter lower Papaloapan basin, it seems likely that population increases in western Olman were at least partly a result of migration from collapsing polities in the east.
Changes in the social landscape likely brought challenges of integration as well as opportunities for expansion to the Tres Zapotes polity. Additional challenges came with increased volcanic activity, documented by ashfalls in the sediments of Lago Verde (Lozano-García et al. 2010) and shifts in trade routes that had previously provided Olmec rulers with the prestige goods of greenstone and iron ore that helped underwrite their authority (Pool and Loughlin 2016). Tres Zapotes appears to have met these challenges in part through a reorganization of its government from one in which a single ruler monopolized power, following the well-established Olmec pattern to one in which power was shared among leaders of up to four factions within the capital, which now sprawled over 500 ha (Pool et al. 2008, 2010).
This shift in governance at Tres Zapotes is evidenced in its urban form, the themes and placements of stone monuments, and artifact assemblages that indicate a political economy that offered broad access to local and imported goods for elites and nonelites alike (Figure 2.9) (Pool and Ortiz Ceballos 2008; Pool and Loughlin 2016; Pool et al. 2010). Civic–ceremonial architecture was widely dispersed in four Tres Zapotes Plaza Group complexes, located between 945 and 985 m from one another (Figure 2.9). Each was built on the basic plan of a plaza oriented more or less east–west with a long elite residential–administrative mound bounding the north side, a conical or pyramidal temple mound on the west, and a low adoratorio platform on the plaza’s centerline; subsequent modifications in three groups added conical
