More than 1,500 years before the Maya flourished in Central America, 25 centuries before the Aztecs conquered large swaths of Mexico, the mysterious Olmec people were building the first great culture of Mesoamerica. Starting in 1200 B.C. in the steamy jungles of Mexico’s southern Gulf Coast, the Olmec’s influence spread as far as modern Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica and El Salvador. They built large settlements, established elaborate trade routes and developed religious iconography and rituals, including ceremonial ball games, blood-letting and human sacrifice, that were adapted by all the Mesoamerican civilizations to follow. And then, about 300 B.C., their civilization vanished. No one knows why. But they left behind some of the finest artworks ever produced in ancient America, the most spectacular of which will be on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington starting next week. Titled “Olmec Art of Ancient Mexico,” the exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Olmec artifacts, ranging from palm-size jade carvings to a 10-ton, monumental stone head. For the next four months, visitors will be able to see treasures that have never before been permitted to leave Mexico. “It’s amazing,” says one of the show’s curators, Peter David Joralemon of Pre-Columbian Art Research Associates in New York City. “The only major Olmec objects left in Mexico are the ones that are too fragile to travel.” For historians the artworks are much more than gorgeous museum pieces. If the Olmec ever had a written language, all traces of it have disappeared. Even their bones are gone, rotted long ago in the humid rain forest. Virtually everything that scholars know about them is based on the remains of cities and on comparisons between their artifacts and imagery and those of later civilizations. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that while the experts have plenty of theories about the Olmec’s origins, social structure and religion, few of these ideas are universally accepted. What scholars do know is that the ancestors of the Olmec, like those of all Native Americans, were Asian hunter-gatherers who crossed into the Americas at least 12,000 years ago, at the end of the most recent ice age. Bits of ancient garbage and the remains of mud buildings hint that by about 2000 B.C., some of their descendants had settled in what is now the Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco, living in small fishing villages along the region’s rivers. By then, says Richard Diehl, an Olmec expert at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, “we know that they had adapted to the environment and probably supplemented their diet with cultivated plants, such as maize and beans. And we know they became more and more dependent on agriculture, perhaps because the population was increasing.” But archaeologists don’t know what transformed a society of farmers into the class-based social structure of the Olmec, with their leaders and commoners, bosses and laborers, artisans and priests. Diehl theorizes that it was population pressure and that as the pre-Olmec villages grew, they naturally stratified. “A new elite class probably asserted its leadership through charisma, control of trade networks and control of people, all of which led to the evolution of a complex society and, eventually, the art style we call Olmec.”
