Lecture 05 Formative Pre-Classic: The Olmec

All right and welcome back. So today we're going to start in on Mesoamerica and we're going to talk about the formative pre-classic period and specifically the Olmec. Before we get started we really ought to orient you to Mesoamerican geography. While there are many many cultures and many different little civilizations within the Mesoamerican zone, we're basically talking about three areas. We're talking about the Mexican basin and highlands. The basin of Mexico City is an endorheic basin which means that there are no rivers that run out of it. So it's a kind of high altitude place with lakes. It's semi-arid. Frankly it's pretty darn similar to Utah in the summer except it runs a little bit hotter. It's surrounded by mountains. There's a number of these high basin plateaus and valleys and that's where we're going to find the civilizations of the Toltecs, of Teotihuacan, and also of the Aztec, Tenochtitlan. The next region that we have is going to be the Mexican Gulf Coast. So this is Tabasco, Veracruz. These are the places where we're going to have very dense rainforest, coastal wet rainforests. This is the land of rubber trees and this is where we're going to find the Olmec. On the other side we have Monte Alban and Monte Alban is where we're going to find the Zapotec. And that's a Oaxaca kind of region and it's a lot more semi-arid but it's kind of halfway in between what we see in the Veracruz coast and what we see in the Mexican basins and highlands. And then we have the Yucatan. And the Yucatan and the southern highlands is the Mayan Sphere. So in the south towards what is modern-day Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, these are going to be kind of hilly territory. Not terribly mountainous but hilly territory. And all of this is going to be rainforest. And then as we move north we get into the Yucatan. And the Yucatan is actually a very interesting climate because it is very lush and very green but it doesn't really get as much rainfall as you might think. It's a much more Caribbean climate and it's very very flat. And the water comes not from rivers or rain as much as it comes from cenotes, these sinkholes that pop up. Generally when we talk about the Mayan Sphere it is the early Maya and classic Maya are going to be in this section here. And then the late or terminal classic Maya are going to be up here. And all of this is kind of either side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. It's the kind of dividing line between these two areas. The Olmec are right on that dividing line. And they are probably going to be the Ur culture of both these Mexican basin civilizations and also these Mayan civilizations. So a word or two about Mesoamerican chronology. Mesoamerican chronology is again broken down into different periods than South America. In South America the guys who got there first called it early, middle, and late horizon. We call this the pre-classic or sometimes formative period. That's the time period of the Olmec, the Zapotec. A little bit of Teotihuacan is in that period. Then we cross over into the classic period. This is Teotihuacan but also Maya. This is the high point of the Maya. And then we have the post-classic period which is going to be late terminal classic Maya up to about the year 1300. And then the Toltecs and the Aztecs and Mixtec and some of these late civilizations there. You may ask yourself why classic? Well when Mesoamerican archaeology got started the archaeologists gravitated to the Maya and the monuments of the Maya, particularly the classic period of the Maya around the year 600 to 900. That's usually the high points of Mayan civilization. And so since they thought that was the high point of civilization they called that the classic period. And so everything before that got named either pre-classic or formative or everything after that got called post-classic. That's kind of funny because the truth is that the post-classic civilizations or the terminal classic civilizations are in many ways every bit as big, every bit as grandiose, and have more art than perhaps the classic period. But it's the classic period that I think really appealed to, let's admit, largely European and American archaeologists. So that's why it's the classic period. Here you can see how this breaks down. It's more or less kind of equivalent to what we in South America but where we use horizon or etc. We're going to start talking about the Olmec. Now the Olmec were once regarded as the oldest civilization in the New World. We now know that's false. But when I was going to undergraduate school the Olmec were the oldest thing by far. There wasn't anything near close to that. Chauvin was easily a thousand, two thousand years later. Now we have, of course, the Chico Norte, the Carl Sube kind of structure, and that means that we have a much older civilization down in Peru. But let's forget that. It seems like the Olmec are a completely independent development. There seems to be some trade early on in the archaic period with things like maize, corn, agricultural products. But then these two cultures part and the Ur culture of South America is going to be the Chico Norte culture and the Olmec are going to be the Ur culture of Mesoamerica. And they have very, very different belief systems. They have completely different gods, completely different belief systems in many ways, North and South. And so the Olmec we recognize, of course, from their signature monument, these Olmec heads. But there's lots of things that we can talk about. First off, we're going to talk about the major sites in Veracruz and Nevasco, La Venta, San Lorenzo. We're going to talk about the major themes and iconography of the Olmec and then we're going to talk about the beginnings of writings and calendars and, you know, some of the first evidence of pyramids and mounds. It should be stated that the Olmec are a relatively recent discovery. People knew that there were civilizations out there and knew that there had been a culture out there since about the time of the conquest. And people had poked around some of these mounds and they knew they were artificial. But no one had any real idea how old they were or that this was a unique specific culture until Matthew Sterling came along. And so Matthew Sterling is probably more responsible than any other archaeologist in history for the uncovering of this civilization. He is the one that uncovered the vast majority of the heads and the sites. And most of this has been since the 1930s. His first major expedition was the 1930s. I think the first heads were discovered then as well. So we really owe it to him for, you know, formulating this idea of who they are. The Olmec then seem to be this Ur culture that there on the Veracruz coast we have this creation of the Olmec. It's important to know that we don't actually know what the Olmec called themselves. They do have some writing but we can't read it. We still can't translate it to this day. Olmec just is the Nahuatl word for people from the land of the rubber trees, which is accurate because there's rubber trees here. But other than that, we don't know what they called themselves. We don't know the names of their gods or their deities, but we can see iconography that is similar to other cultures. And so they are located in and around this region and we can see influences of their culture throughout all of these other regions from the Oaxacan area up to the Mexican basin and of course down to the Mayan area. It is the Mayan area where we see the closest similarities with the Olmec. The Maya really do seem to venerate the Olmec to the degree that many people suspect that the Mayan are the Olmec. They're the descendants of the Olmec. But whether that's true or not, we're not entirely certain. So there's a number of major sites. We're going to take a look at La Venta and San Lorenzo and all of these are located in these coastal regions that are very lush, very dense, very green. And it's here that we see the construction of what we now know are not the first pyramids, but the first pyramids in the Mesoamerican zone. And they're pretty simple. They're large earthen pyramids. So these are not faced with stone. They are ceremonial centers and the La Venta pyramid more or less looks like this today. And there's still a debate about exactly how this should be reconstructed. So here's one reconstruction. In this case, they reconstructed it as a kind of amorphous mound on a raised platform. Then there are raised platforms and a kind of group of shrines over here and then another kind of raised mound. This reconstruction gives a bit more formal shape to the pyramid. But whether that's the case or not, we don't know. We presume that there must have been a structure on top, a temple, but it's long since gone. It's mostly these mounds, this kind of plaza here framed in by these mounds that we identify as the earliest kind of architecture. This kind of architecture we see a lot of place also in the Mayan sphere. We often call it an e-group, that it'll have a mound on one long side and then sometimes a mound or something in between and then mounds along the edges. So you can see that that kind of makes something that looks like the letter E. Therefore, that's why it's called an e-group. Oh my gosh. It's this scintillating imagination of archaeologists. Let's be honest, you know, if you're digging things with a, you know, a tiny little trowel and a toothbrush, you really have to have a great capacity for boredom to be an archaeologist. So that's the kind of people who go into it. I can make a joke about it because I have lots of friends who are archaeologists. I did my time on a dig, so. When we look at these mounds, they are, again, mostly rammed earth, but there are a number of monuments that are built into them, including, of course, the heads, as well as other substructures, thrones. So we really shouldn't think of these as kind of finished temples, but kind of works in progress. The things that you see here are really not that much more developed than we see elsewhere. Tres de Potes has a little bit more exciting stuff to look at, but that's because it was reoccupied at a later time period. So the beautiful pyramids and platforms that you're seeing here are, in fact, from a later time period. They are not from the Olmec time period. The Olmec time period would have had much less defined mounds. When we look at Laguna de los Cerros, for example, you can see the same thing. We have what appears to be a pyramid, and then we have low mounds, and there are a variety of other mounds that exist around it. So in architecture terms, there's really not much to talk about. We can see, particularly in these e-groups, architecture that will be paralleled elsewhere in the Mexican basin and in places like the Mayan sphere. So let's talk about the Olmec heads, because everybody wants to talk about them. Again, the Olmec heads were something that no one really knew about until we started excavating them in 1939. Matthew Sterling started uncovering them, and once they uncovered them, they started finding them around a lot of these locations. There are 17 of them, and they are truly massive. You can see the breakdowns. Most of them were found at San Lorenzo, but they've been found at every site so far. And they are 1 to 2 meters tall and weigh about 2 to 6 tons. They're made out of basalt, which is just incredible, because basalt is an incredibly hard and glassy volcanic rock. It's a very hard stone to work. And so the ability to get such wonderful naturalistic details in them, this puckering around the edge of the nose, this edge on the seam of the lip, how deeply cut the mouths are, really, really wonderful in that regard. But the most puzzling thing about them is where they were located. There were rumors flying around about these things. Some of them were partially buried. You can see how the top of this guy's head here was up under a ground and covered in vegetation, and they had to excavate it down. But most of them were completely buried and totally concealed and unknown. Some were buried sitting up. Some were buried on their back. All of them have this characteristic broad face, thick and heavy set lips, broad nose, and all of them are wearing helmets or headgear or headdresses of some kind. This might be ball gear. We'll talk a little bit more about the ball game. The ball game is very important in Mesoamerican civilization, and the ball game has you, you know, playing ball with a solid rubber ball. This isn't like the air-filled dodgeballs. These were solid rubber, and they would definitely hurt you. And so you can imagine they would have had to have protective gear, and people have suggested that maybe this is ball gear equipment. If so, that's the only evidence we have of this kind of equipment at this time. We cannot date the ball game, which is such a critical feature of Mesoamerican civilization, to Olmec civilization quite, you know. Maybe, but it's always... the evidence is all circumstantial. There's no ball courts or anything that we can tell. Whereas by the time you get to the Zapotec or the Monte Albans, yeah, definitely they have ball games. Or they might just be headdresses. They might be crowns or some kind of turban. It's evidence of rulers. As far as what they're for, nobody has a gosh darn clue. They seem to be important. They definitely spent a lot of time making them. They're certainly gorgeous and beautiful, but who or exactly what they are remains a mystery. One would assume that these represent either deities or rulers, so perhaps the dynastic kings. But if that's the case, why were they buried? And they're not just buried. They are actually intentionally buried, and all of them are mutilated to some degree. So several of them have very pronounced pockmarks meant to damage the face. So when you make these things, you're making these things with hammer stones, and you're hammering away at it with a rock that's harder than the basalt, or is a piece of basalt. And it appears that after they had carved these so carefully and lovingly, they then sat there and repeatedly hammered away at it with hammer stones to create these indents. Now, this is, again, not easy. So they went to enormous effort to make them, and then they went to enormous effort to mutilate them. All of them are mutilated or damaged like this in some way. Some are far more mutilated than others. You can see colossal head number two is very mutilated. And then they're buried! And there's no rhyme or reason as to where they're buried. If they were buried all on a platform, one might argue, okay, these are votive deposits. People make some beautiful art for the purposes of votive deposits. You bury it beneath the ground because that's how you give it to the gods. Or maybe it's a funerary object buried to commemorate a king, and so therefore it's buried. You send it off to Xibalba, the outer world, that way. But if that's the case, there's no rhyme or reason to it, because some are found on the platforms, some are found off the platforms, some are found off paths, some of them are found outside the main area. So what does that even mean? Why are they where they are located? Everything in the world has been postulated. I don't know any of them are particularly satisfying. So a couple of theories. One, they represent a series of dynastic kings, and one would assume that these kings then fell out of power, and so therefore they were destroyed. They were disempowered by being mutilated, and then buried deliberately so that they wouldn't ever be seen again. That's a possibility. The other possibility is that some kind of ritual action, that these enormous heads represent something beloved or feared that then had to be ritually killed. Human sacrifice does seem to be a feature even in Olmec civilization, so perhaps you made these enormous heads only to sacrifice them. That doesn't mean that they hated them or feared them, because many sacrificial victims were willing in the Mesoamerican world, and so they might have been highly honored objects that then were ritually sacrificed or mutilated and then buried. It's a completed total mystery, and we really don't know what to make of it today. There's also a lot of other crackpot theories that I won't entertain, that these represent people of other ethnicities who came across the Atlantic Ocean. There's absolutely no evidence that that's the case. People of the region are genetically identical to the people that were there before, and if you know these cultures, they do have low, broad nose ridges, and that makes perfect sense. So there's no evidence that this is anything other than the creation of Native peoples. One of the things that's so compelling about them is their intense level of naturalism. They have this natural beauty to them. Again, sensitivity to the human form, and that's something that we see in all Olmec art. In fact, I would go to the extent saying that of all the Mesoamerican cultures, and probably of all the Latin American cultures, with the possible exception of the Moche, who are very, very good at those beautiful portrait stirrup faces, that this represents the most naturalistic tradition in all of the New World. They really do care to get anatomical details, features. I love this guy and his dad bod. It's just perfect. The folds of flesh. The head looks like it's tall and distorted, but that's the product probably of head binding. So this is, again, another place where head binding comes in. We see a lot of figures in ceramic. We see a lot of figures in stone, and they really tend to capture the organic feel of a body, its natural posture, its anatomy. They're really quite lovely. Here's one that is another one that's a little bit controversial. This one's carved out of salt. This one shows an individual that seems to have very thin facial hair. Now, what's interesting is that we often think of Native Americans as having no facial hair, but that's not quite true. They do have a little facial hair, and so facial hair became a kind of indication of status, so this may be an exaggeration. There's another one of these cases where people try to suggest this is evidence of foreign settlement, but again, there's no evidence this is anything other than Native. The figure here is carved out of basalt, and it's called the wrestler because he looks like he's got somebody in a headlock. It's a luchador of some kind, but in reality, he's probably wrapping something around his middle. One of the things that we know about rulers and elites is that cloth was a very high prestigious item, and so wrapping cloth around your middle is kind of formal dress. It also may have been wrapping cloth around your middle because when you played the ball game, you wrapped a lot of cloth around your middle to protect your hips and your abdomen because the way you played the game was not with your hands and feet, but by hitting the ball with your hips, and so you wanted that protection. So presumably this guy would have had cloth there that was really wrapped around him, actual cloth, meaning that he's probably a stand-in, a votive, and would have been dressed and invested in clothing as if he were a real person. Now this one's a little controversial because it was found in 1933, and there wasn't much context given for it, and so a lot of people have claimed that it's a forgery, but I don't think so. We see these same kind of anatomical details, and roundness of form, and high-domed heads, and sitting postures everywhere else. And the person who found it, as far as we know, there's no evidence that this was tried to pass off as anything other than, you know, hey, I found this, and so I think that the evidence that it's a forgery is not accurate. But, you know, hey, you never can tell, but I think it's genuine. We see a lot of these kind of round, you might call them babies, you might call them dwarfs, it's hard to tell the difference sometimes. And they too have these elaborate headdresses, and they have these very kind of organic mouths, heavy lips, broad faces, low nose bridges, and broad noses, and features. But they also have these kind of heavier set rolls of fat that can be kind of quite attractive in their own way, very organic. And so while when we look at figures such as this, these are probably meant to represent elites and rulers, these are different. These are probably dwarfs, and dwarfs are an interesting feature of Mesoamerican iconography. And they show up everywhere. And they usually, again, are regarded as liminal figures. What I mean by that is that they could cross the boundaries between this world and the other, and the afterlife. So in later Mayan context, you will often find dwarves associated with the entrances to caves and temples, which are again associated with the afterlife. And so we suspect the same thing is going on here. We also find them carved into very hard materials. So we see these infants, or you know, perhaps dwarves, carved into jade and hematite. We'll talk a little bit more about jade and hematite because it's one of the more important materials that exists. We'll also talk about how these babies don't quite seem normal, that they have these flat faces and these kind of curling, snarling mouths. One of the finds at La Venta was this large basalt tomb. And you can see we have these massive, what we call, kelts. A kelt is just a single monolith of stone, sometimes shaped, sometimes not. These are large basalt kelts, and they were arranged to kind of make a tomb. And this use of kelts is very, very common as well. We also find an offering. This is known as Offering 4. This was also found at La Venta. And here we have a number of what we call greenstone figures, and we also have kelts. So this was located under a platform and was ritually buried underneath a layer of packed white sand, indicating that this was deliberately created. So all of the were in a circle facing, and the kelts were on the outside. Here's a view of what the excavation looked like. Here are some of these greenstone figures. The heads are enlarged, but they also have these kind of, again, broad faces. They have these very organic forms. And then here are some of the kelts. These are, again, greenstone, or highly polished stones. And these are ceremonial axe heads. They didn't have a lot of metalworking in the Mesoamerican sphere, and so if you are making, you know, something to cut down a tree, you know, flint and stuff like that, and obsidian is great for cutting flesh and other softer things, but if you want to cut a tree, you need a polished axe to do that. And so these are polished axe bits. These show a lot of wear. They were probably ceremonial, and they themselves are incised with what appear to be the faces and the representations of gods. So these are representing probably victims. These are being offered as surrogates for actual victims and some kind of sacrificial process. And all of this jade and greenstone are going to be very, very important. Jade, okay, just to get some weird, you know, just get a little nerdy into the roots here, technically only jadeite and nephrite can geologically and mineralogically be called jade. But in the ancient world, especially in Mesoamerican sphere, they weren't so particular. Anything that was hard and dense and green that, you know, had the same kind of color or meaning, they valued to the same degree. And so jade objects were very highly valued. First of all, jade is insanely hard to work. When you look at this figure here, and you can see these deeply drilled nostrils and cut details behind the hair, it gives you a sense of how hard this is. Jade is a very, very hard material to work. So working into this detail is really incredible. But jade itself was regarded as valuable. We're not exactly certain why. One assumes that because of the dense color, the beauty of it, jade was regarded as an emblem of life and permanence. In fact, these masks are ceremonial masks. We sometimes call these funerary masks, but oftentimes that's not accurate. They're more ritual or ceremonial masks. Most of them are not full human-sized anyway. They were meant to be worn on a pectoral, that is, some kind of piece of jewelry that you drape on your chest. And again, they have these kind of snarling mouths, angular eyes. Here we see a couple of these that exist. And these jade masks were buried. Again, they're funerary masks, but they don't go over the actual face of the deceased. They do have some of those, but these were actually just buried with the deceased as votive objects. Here we have a couple of these. This one on the right was found in Waka, and it is from the Middle Formative Period. This is such an interesting object because it is found outside the Olmec sphere, but it appears to be an Olmec object that was later incised. So it's an evidence, perhaps centuries after its existence, this object was still being cherished, and we find that. That's one of the things that's really interesting about Olmec objects is that we will find objects that are clearly Olmec objects in Mayan tombs and Zapotec tombs. So it shows that they understood that the Olmec were this ancient civilization that existed. So this object, it's passed down, started in the, probably started in the Veracruz coast, and found its way inland to Oaxaca, and then became a heirloom in a tomb. Really interesting. It also suggests that they're kind of pillaging tombs. These objects were made to be buried intentionally, and so they were probably pillaging tombs and re-interring the objects. So these objects were buried many, many times. So one of the things that pops up the most in the iconography is jaguar imagery. We saw jaguar imagery in the Andean world, but jaguar imagery is going to be even more important in the Mesoamerican sphere. So we see things like this jaguar effigy vessel that shows a pot that you can see. I love how the tail is where the spout is. Isn't that clever? Has this terrifying face and tongue. We also see ceramics that have these highly stylized jaguar faces that exist. Now I hope you realize why this is the case. Jaguars are just terrifying animals. They're the largest cats in the New World. They could easily take out any other predator in the region. So they're the apex predator of the region. Here it is, one taking out a caiman. And when they open their jaws, I know they look like cute little kitties, but they are kind of terrifying animals. I have a brother-in-law, he's an archaeologist, and he was working down on Piedras Negras down in Guatemala. He was on that dig. Dr. Houston, I think. At any rate, he was down there and he had to delay his arrival. So whenever you go to a dig in some of these places, you start flying a plane down to Guatemala City, then you get on a bus, then you get on a river, you get on a boat, the boat takes you, and then it drops you off in the jungle, and then you walk the rest of the way. It's really kind of remote locations to get to. So he got dropped off and he had to walk a few kilometers into camp. And so he was doing this all alone. And they don't recommend you do this, because while he was taking the walk, there was a jaguar. And he noticed the jaguar out of the corner of his eye. And that jaguar mirrored him for several miles as he walked into the camp. And it just was like, you know, a hundred yards off in the jungle, following him, just mirroring him and following him along the way he went. And it was terrifying, because, of course, at any moment, the jaguar could have been on him. But the jaguars are kind wary of humans. So he just decided to keep his focus, keep the corner of his eye on the jaguar, and just keep walking straight as he could. And eventually the jaguar lost interest and took off, but, you know, it could have killed him. So if you've never seen one of these things in action, realize what a terrifying animal it can be. So it makes sense that this animal would then become very evocative. And, of course, the things that, you know, they highlight, these long, pointy tongues, the terrifying teeth, the open mouth. And then you'll notice that it has a kind of cleft in its head. So when we look at the iconography and go back, you can see that, again, long tongue, open mouth, huge fangs. And we also, in the iconography, see that cleft in the head. Which brings us to one of the strangest features of all of Olmec art, the werejaguar. So Matthew Sterling and a bunch of others started noticing that these masks, and especially some of these babies and dwarfs, didn't have fully human characteristics. They were partially human, but then they had upturned noses. So that's, you know, like a jaguar. Had snarling mouths. And then some of them had that cleft in the head. And they were at all stages of different, you know, kind of blends between men and jaguars. That is that some of them seem to have some features of the jaguar, some seem to have others. And there are actual figures, you know, anthropomorphic figures of creatures that have paws like jaguars and faces like jaguars, but are clearly meant to be human. You can see this one has a very jaguar-like face, but ears on the side of its head, and it has almost like paws. This one's face has got ears on the top of its head and is very transformed. And these are neither human nor jaguar. And so the theory began that these must represent some kind of shamanistic transformation. The belief that shaman or holy men could, by means, supernatural means, transform themselves into animals is a common belief throughout the New World, in a lot of cultures. And so we think these are meant to represent shaman. It could represent a specific cultural hero, a folklore hero, who is transforming into this jaguar creature. So, you know. Okay, I have a couple jokes that I have loaded for this. The first is, pretty amazed this didn't show up in Twilight. The other is that, you know, any of you who are into furries, you know, I've yet to see a werejaguar furry, but I'm sure it exists somewhere. So, there's something going on here. Now, it gets even more interesting when you start looking at these infants. So, this is a kelt. This is, again, another one of these ceremonial axe heads. Probably never meant to be used as an axe head, but carved into the shape of an axe head. The body is pretty vestigial, but the head is very ornate, and it has this incredible snarling mouth and upturned nose. And it clearly represents an infant. Of all the werejaguar imagery, the most significant is going to be jaguar infants. These are creatures that have, you know, again, the cleft in the head. They have the snarling, upturned mouth, but ears are on the side of their head, and they're obviously meant to be human infants in some way. And we see a whole endless variety of these popping up everywhere. And most of them are going to be in Greenstone. Here we have another one of these werejaguar babies. It itself is holding a kelt, or a ceremonial axe, and it is riding on the back of a jaguar. Here is another one. This one is one of our more typical kind of Greenstone figures, missing a leg here, but he is holding one of these terrifying, again, werejaguar babies. Now, in these cases, whereas in some cases it's hard to tell if we're talking about infants or dwarves, these definitely seem to be infants. Many of them seem to be bound like infants, the way that infants would be when they were carried. So, what the heck is this all about? And the answer, again, is we don't know. The jaguar werebaby seems to be one of the most important iconographic devices of the Olmec sphere. And probably one of the most famous monuments is the Las Limas figures. This is sometimes referred to as the infant and child. When this was discovered, of course, it was discovered in the Catholic area, and they kind of associated it with Madonna and child. But it's not a Madonna and child. It's not actually even a woman. We have a man seated here, and on his lap and his folded legs, he holds one of these infants. The entire scene is incised. So, you can look at the baby and see this kind of terrifying jaguar face emerging. But carved onto his shoulders are incised figures, and there are, in fact, jaguars carved onto his knees. And there is something like a mask incised upon his face. So, again, a figure offering an infant, a jaguar infant, as an offering. We really wish we had writing and literature from this culture. Perhaps this is one of their great foundational mythohistorical heroes. We don't know. But it definitely does seem to be important. What writing we do have is very, very limited. But it shows that they did have a kind of coherent writing system. So, Dr. Houston was one of the few people who took a look at this early on and argued that this was perhaps the first piece of writing. This dates to the 2nd millennium BCE, maybe somewhere around the year 1300 or 1500 BCE. And the Qas Qahal block was found by road workers who were doing road work and got turned over by a bulldozer, and they noticed the inscriptions. As we look at the inscriptions, there are several things that indicate that this is not just petroglyphs. Pictographs are drawings that have meaning, but you find the meaning in the resemblance of the figure to the object. The writing system is different, and there are several things that indicate that this is a writing system. For one, we have the repetition of emblems. So, we have this strange kind of insect-lizard-looking thing, and it repeats several of the glyphs' repeat. So, in pictographs, every pictograph is kind of unique because it's kind of capturing an idea or a moment or a figure, but the repetition of elements suggests that this is, in fact, writing. And notice that they are grouped. There's our little lizard thing again, and you'll have several grouped here, you'll have several grouped here. And not only are they grouped, they seem to be grouped by type. Over here, we have what appear to be a series of bundles, and these are commonly seen in other glyphs in the Mayan period. So, let me just point out some of the ones that are recognizable. This clearly seems to be an ear of corn. And then there's these two glyphs here, which look very similar. These actually look like thrones or altars, which are also some of these monuments that we find in and around La Venta. So, no one has been able to translate this yet, but everybody agrees that this is more than just a pictograph system. This is a genuine birth of the writing system. It's not anywhere near as sophisticated as the writing systems we will see under the Maya, but several parts of this can be analogized to the Mayan. We also have the first evidence of a coherent dating system. This one's much later. This is the Tres Cepotes stela. A stela is just, again, another upright block of stone. And the writing system has a set of glyphs, but then it has a series of very recognizable numbers that we can see over here. A dot usually represents 1, and a bar represents 5. And so you can kind of translate this as 3 bars of 5 plus 1 dot, that's going to be 16. This one down here has 3 bars and 3 dots, so that's going to be 18. And we can actually identify the glyphs here and come up with the first date. This appears to reference a date in the year 31 BC, so this is the first recorded historical date in the New World that we know of. Unless somebody manages to translate that kipu at Norte Chico, in which case we've got a much earlier date. But this is the first ever recorded date. And the date here follows the dating conventions of the long count. What is the long count? Well, the Maya have several different calendar systems. They have a ritual calendar, which consists of 260 days. They have the yearly calendar, which consists of 360 days plus 5 kind of forbidden or evil days that are tacked on at the end. That gives them the 365 days a year and those rotate along. But then they also have a much longer count for the keeping of very old records and also for projecting very far prophecies or divinations into the future. So a kin is one day, a wino is 20 kin or 20 days, a tun is 18 wino or 360 days. So not a little less than a year, but the five evil days aren't included in the long count. Then you have a katun, which is 22, and then it goes up to a baktun, which is 20 katun, and then eventually you have a long count, which is 13 baktun. And that represents the entire creation cycle. It's really amazing that the Maya put the beginning of the world so far into the remote past from their time. Again, I think a lot of this is based on numerology. This is seen as an elegant system. The numbers, you know, 360 is a sacred number to Babylonians and a lot of other people because it can be divided so many ways. That's why our circle is divided into 360 degrees. And they actually projected these dates well into the future. So 13 baktun is the length of the creation cycle. This is the infamous tablet that gave the long count of 13 baktun that was supposed to end on December 21st, 2012. This was the one that Michael Coe initially interpreted as the Mayan prophecy about the end of the world. He later backed off from that because he no longer believed that the Mayans believed that that was the end of the world. There's been since a lot of discoveries that argued instead that, no, there's going to be something big on that day, a big festival, lots of sacrifice, and then the next cycle will begin. The Maya don't really believe in this kind of end-of-the-world scenario. They believe in a series of never-ending cycles, repeating forever, into the past, into the future. But hey, that caused a lot of anxiety for people. People thought the world was going to end in 2012, and we got a really crappy Roland Emmerich movie out of it. So, yeah. Michael Coe-osis and all, apology for that one. I mean, good heavens, that movie. Moving on. So it's very significant that it appears that the earliest dates that we have for the Olmec correspond to the long count. That's very significant because it suggests that the calendar systems, the dating systems, the ritual calendars, all pass on from the earliest days, and that the Maya are still keeping those. The last kind of major monuments that we have are going to be these monuments that, again, were found buried or sometimes toppled from the tops of those platforms. These might be thrones. They might be altars. And, of course, it's very hard to tell the difference between a throne and an altar. Thrones are kind of broad, flat platforms. They didn't have chairs where you kind of dangled your legs down. You would sit cross-legged on top of this platform. But that platform itself could be regarded as an altar. Kings in the Mayan world often sacrificed their own blood, engaged in bloodletting every day to guarantee the continuing of the world. And so maybe these are meant to represent altars, and maybe they are thrones. Or maybe they're one, or maybe they're the other. In every case, they have a number of features associated with them. This is altar number four, and when you look at altar number four, you can see that it has a figure seated. And he is seated, and he holds a rope. He is seated in what appears to be the opening of a cave. So we have a cave opening. Caves in the Mayan period are associated with the entrances to Xibalba the Underworld. And so perhaps this is a lord of Xibalba. This is a lord of the Underworld. That would make sense. Why is he holding a rope? I'm not entirely certain, but the rope has another figure that holds onto it on the other side. So usually ropes are kind of representations of binding, etc. We then have him under a kind of terrifying face, and then we have a series of banding. Generally, when we see banding of this type, it represents some kind of sky. And so we often call this sky banding. This represents some kind of cloud or sky barrier, and then this represents some kind of rain god, obviously, above it. We will see this kind of banding all throughout the Mesoamerican sphere. So there's a kind of cosmology here. On the very top, we have what was probably the sacred offering. We have this representing the heavens, and this representing the Underworld. Sure enough, we have a bunch of these altars that show people emerging from a cave, and they're still holding those crazy were-jaguar babies. We also have, on the side of this altar, what appear to be two figures, again, holding babies that have cleft heads. These are scary babies, but again, they may represent dwarves. And on some of these altars, we have dwarves acting as kind of Atlante figures. And Atlante is a Greek term, actually. It's any standing male figure that acts as a support. So notice that we have this sky banding again. So they are holding up the sky, and they probably represent the barrier between the heavens and our world. So everything up is the world above, and everything is the world below, or the Underworld. Again, dwarves are often seen in gateways in the Mayan world, so that suggests that they are, you know, guardians, and they can cross over to the Underworld. In addition to all these were-jaguar babies, we start to see what might be the first real evidence of the Feathered Serpent. The Feathered Serpent is known as Kukulkan in the Mayan. It is known as Katsukawato and Nahawato amongst the Mexica and the Aztec. But we generally just call this the Sky Dragon. So we talk about, so they're dragons if they're in the Olmec world, and they're Feathered Serpents everywhere else. But it's all probably the same thing. So we have, it's a little easier to see here, a crested serpent. He has a rattlesnake tail, and his body forms the couch that this figure is sitting on. He comes up, and then he has a crest of feathers. And he also has this kind of feathered, you know, I wouldn't call it headdress, but eyebrows. Eyebrow goes up into a feather. And the figure sitting here is under a banner, again flanked by birds. And these look like quetzal birds with their long tail feathers. He has an elaborate headdress, and he's holding a citrulla. A citrulla is a kind of bucket. It's something that you put water or offerings in to make a kind of offering. So we suspect that this is some kind of either offering to the Sky Dragon, or it might actually be some kind of ancestral spirit. Oftentimes in the Mayan sphere, when you make an offering, the ancestral spirit comes back in the form of a serpent. Serpents are very evocative throughout the New World. Again, anything that moves like a serpent is, you know, like lightning, or fire, or smoke, or blood, is personified as a serpent. So you have blood serpents, sky serpents. In fact, Mishkuatl is cloud serpent, and that describes the Milky Way. The Milky Way is this band of starry light across the sky, and for the ancient Mesoamerican peoples, that represented the sky serpent. So serpent imagery is going to be very powerful, and this may be the first ever representation of this. We see other versions of this. It's interesting that Pukulkan becomes so significant in later periods, because the jaguar imagery and dwarf imagery seems much more important, but definitely we see this. So what does this say for the Olmecs? Who are they? Well, we don't know. There does seem to be evidence for at least bloodletting or sacrifice, and that is definitely a Mesoamerican quality. We definitely see jaguar, and rain, and maze deities, including the feathered serpent and the sky dragon. We see evidence of early writing, and number, and calendrical systems. We see pyramidal shrines and platforms, and we have some circumstantial evidence for ball playing. All of these are things that we will see in later Mesoamerican communities. That strongly, strongly suggests that the Olmec are in fact the Ur culture, the oldest Mesoamerican civilization, going all the way back to probably 2000 BCE, but continuing right up into the tail end of the Preclassic period. So several of these centers are still active probably as late as 400-300 BCE, and maybe even later. They kind of overlap with the middle period, or what we would call the early Classical period. So while this is a very ancient civilization, there's more than enough overlap with the very earliest phases of cultures in, say, Monte Album, and also in the Mayan sphere, to indicate that there's a connection. But will we ever know? We really won't. This culture was gone by the time we get to the middle Classic period, and there's nothing left. Genetically, we can look at some of the remains of these people, and we can compare them up to the Maya. Some of those have been suggested yet, they're the same people. Some of them have been more inconclusive. Personally, I think they are ethnically and linguistically tied to the Maya. There's no doubt that they influenced all the cultures, but I think that the best evidence suggests that the Maya are in fact the descendants of the Olmec, and that the Maya are kind of latecomers to the regions of the Southern Highlands and Yucatan, and that they are probably the remnant of these collapsed Olmec civilizations. I think the evidence is that the cultures in Oaxaca and the Mexican Basin are probably independent cultures. They're probably different ethnic linguistic groups that were influenced by the Olmec and by their high level of civilization. I don't think they are Olmec, but you never can tell. There's just no way to know for certain. That will round us out with the Olmec. We got another lecture coming where we talk about the Zapotec and Monte Albin for a little bit, and then a little bit about Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan is going to be the last pre-classic culture and the first early classic culture. It continues its high point to somewhere around 400 CE, but I think the latest evidence is that there were people still living in Teotihuacan right up until 750 CE, which is well overlapping with the classical Maya region. So we'll get that one out pretty soon, too. Thanks so much for listening. We'll catch you next time. Bye-bye.