Olmecs: the “Gauls of Mexico”

The first sculpture attributed to the Olmecs was unearthed in 1858. However, it took almost a hundred years for archaeologists to begin to realize the extent of their influence on the cultures of the Gulf of Mexico.

In this new episode of the Europe 1 Studio podcast "At the heart of history", Jean des Cars explains how the gradual discovery of the Olmec civilization has turned everything we thought we knew about complex Mesoamerican societies upside down. 

A capital discovery

Mexico, 1858. In Tres Zapotes, 500 kilometers south-east of Mexico City, a local farm worker is busy.

His boss ordered him to plow the soil of a clearing destined to become a cornfield.

Suddenly he stumbles upon something hard.

He digs.

In a few minutes, a rounded gray shape emerges on the surface of the turned earth.

The smooth curvature of the object leaves no room for doubt: it was shaped by the hand of man! 

The peasant runs to warn the owner of the farm, 7 kilometers away.

Out of breath, he explains to her that he found what he thinks to be a large iron pot turned upside down in the field where he was working.

The farmer immediately sets up a group of men whom he summons to dig up this enigmatic discovery.

Amateur archaeologists spare no effort, intrigued by what they might find ...  

The furrow of a helmet, furrowed eyebrows, one round eye, then two, a slight squint, a flat nose, a fleshy mouth ... After several hours of hard work, they finally release a colossal head which measures them with a sinister air.

They don't know it yet, but this basalt face, four feet tall, and weighing nearly eight tons, is the first Olmec sculpture unearthed in the world.  

The discovery is substantial.

However, this large head exhumed from a field in Veracruz did not interest anyone at the time.

It takes 4 years for a researcher to come and analyze the statue.

This is the Mexican José María Melgar y Serrano, who will deliver the first description illustrated in the "Bulletin of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics", in 1871: 

“In 1862, I was living in San Andrés Tuxtla, a city in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. During my excursions, I learned that a colossal head had been unearthed a few years before near a farm in the area. I went to the farm and begged its owner to take me to see it. We went, and I was amazed by the artwork in front of me. C 'was, without exaggeration, a magnificent sculpture. But what impressed me the most was the Ethiopian type of the statue: I thought to myself that there were undoubtedly blacks in this country, and this since its origins. This head was not only important for Mexican archeology, but also for the whole world. "

For Serrano, the “Ethiopian” characteristics of sculpture tend to prove the presence of individuals of the African type within the “New World” from pre-Columbian times.

In the rest of his article, he supports this hypothesis with the help of numerous archives and archaeological references, such as representations found on medals, or a wall in Chichen Itza, in Yucatan, depicting an Indian man, a white and a black one whose features seem to correspond to those of the giant head of Tres Zapotes. 

But despite this first spotlight and these fascinating conjectures, the head falls ... into oblivion.

It was not rediscovered until seventy years later, in 1906, by the German anthropologist Eduard Seler who, with his wife, found other sculptures on the site.

At the end of the 1920s, Albert Weyerstall explored it in his turn.

He unearths new artefacts. 

It was at this time that we began to use the term "Olmec".

Precisely in 1929, when the American archaeologist Marshall H. Saville uses it in two reports about "ritual axes" discovered at Tres Zapotes.

These anthropomorphic figurines carved from colored stone, whose broad expressive head rests on a stocky body which is refined, at its base, to take the tapered shape of a blade, all offer similar aesthetic characteristics… and singular.

They represent hybrid characters, sporting the features of felines or amphibians. 

To qualify the particular aspect of these objects, Saville borrows a word from the Aztecs: "olmec".

In their language, Nahuatl, it referred to the inhabitants of the area, when they dominated the region.

The latter providing them with the rubber balls necessary for their games, they had prosaically baptized "Olmecs", which means "rubber people". 

The term appeals to Saville who uses it, not to define a culture, but a "simple" artistic style that can be found in an area he believes is circumscribed to the south of the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

No one suspects that the Olmecs are much earlier than the Aztecs to whom they owe their name a posteriori ... Nor that this "artistic style" is only one of the many inventions initiated by their society whose political and cultural influence extends, in fact, to the whole of Mesoamerica, and to its most sophisticated civilizations.  

But besides, what is "Mesoamerica" ​​... and above all: who are these famous Olmecs ?!

The Olmecs, "mother culture" of Mesoamerica 

Mesoamerica is a pre-Hispanic cultural area, that is to say a set of geographical areas grouping together civilizations that shared many common cultural traits before the Spaniards burst onto the American continent at the beginning of the 16th century.

We owe the term to the German anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff who introduced it in 1943 to evoke these "cousin" civilizations.

Concretely, the area covers approximately one million square kilometers and covers the entire southern half of today's Mexico as well as the western edge of Central America.

It includes almost all of Guatemala, Belize and a small part of northern Honduras. 

In 1942, eight years before the first carbon-14 dating that won the Nobel Prize for American physicist and chemist Willard Frank Libby, Alfonso Caso, one of the founders of Mexican archeology, had a hunch.

While most of the major excavation campaigns that will bring to light the extent and influence of Olmec culture have not yet taken place, he said at a congress of the Mexican Society of Anthropology: "This great culture, found in older levels, is undoubtedly the mother of other cultures. "

The concept of "mother culture" applied to the Olmecs was born! 

Then contested by other specialists in the region, it is nevertheless corroborated by eighty years of scientific excavations.

They proved, notably thanks to radiocarbon dating from the end of the 1950s and in the 1990s, that the Olmecs were indeed at the origin of artistic traditions and social uses that Mesoamerican civilizations appropriated and transmitted during millennia. 

Social hierarchies, embryos of political institutions, economic systems going beyond the framework of self-sufficiency, shared religious beliefs and practices giving rise to symbolic representations… The Olmecs, whose development in the coastal plain of the Gulf of Mexico dates back to 1700 BC.

AD are the very type of the first complex societies to emerge during the second millennium BC.  

It is thus among them that we find the first ritual deposits dedicated to a fundamental element: water.

Collected near a source in El Manatí, and dating from 1600 BC.

Around AD, these deposits consisted in particular of polished axes in green stone - the same as the famous "ritual axes" described by Saville!

We know today that until the end of pre-Hispanic times, green stones were considered by all Mesoamerican populations as particularly valuable elements because of their symbolic load, according to the chain that connects the color green to water and to the life.

A tradition directly inherited from the Olmecs.

There are many others ...  

Sculpture, manifestation of power and narrative program

In the 1930s, the American archaeologist Matthew Stirling discovered Saville's reports on the polished stone axes of Tres Zapotes.

The rites with which they are associated arouse the keenest interest in him.

In 1938, he visited the site and photographed the head described by Serrano in 1871. At that time, it was the only Olmec colossal head identified in the world, but he sensed, rightly, that the area did not did not reveal all his secrets ...  

Supporting photos, he shared his intuition with the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic, which gave him their support to launch an excavation campaign the same year.

Eight years later, in 1946, he directed the first scientific excavation of a colossal Olmec head in San Lorenzo.

To date, we know of seventeen, all carved in basalt, all remarkable for their size (from one meter forty seven to three meters high) and their mass (between six and fifty tons!) Characteristics which bring us , even today, to wonder about the way in which their creators went about delivering the giant stone blocks necessary for their making.

It should be noted that the humid tropical zone in which they had settled is totally devoid of basaltic rock. 

Transporting these blocks over a hundred kilometers (from the source of the basalt to their place of life), cutting them and presenting them was, in itself, a manifestation of power. 

In fact, Olmec sculptures very often aim to establish political legitimacy, to affirm or commemorate them. 

They allowed this people to translate their stories visually, using sculptural paintings made up of several statues.

One of them, of imposing size, was discovered in the 90s, during excavations undertaken in El Azuzul, near San Lorenzo.

This composition, both magnificent and enigmatic, features two young men, probably twins, sitting on their heels.

In front of them, two jaguars, also seated, sport a fierce expression.

Their disposition can only be intentional.

It probably evokes a confrontation, which suggests that the scene is the representation of a myth ...  

We do not know the content, but we can decode the symbols that the artist (s) have introduced in their sculptures and in the positioning of these.

First of all, the two figures each hold a ceremonial staff, one hand on it and the other below, as if about to wave it.

It is an attribute of power which indicates that these are high ranking individuals.

Then, the presence of jaguars is not trivial.

This feline is the most powerful predator in the Mesoamerican world.

Associating the twins with this impressive and fascinating animal is a mark of prestige.

Introduced by the Olmecs, it will be taken up by many cultures throughout the rest of the pre-Hispanic period. 

But that's not all !

The two men were discovered facing east, which can be interpreted as an association between political authority and the rising sun.

Archaeologists therefore believe that they are very distant ancestors of the Mayan twins conquerors of the powers of the underworld, hero of Popol Vuh, a very famous Mayan story collected in colonial times.

From there to think that the statufie myth of El Azuzul inspired the Mayan legend, there is only one step ...  

It should also be noted that this kind of arrangement was not limited to monumental sculpture.

La Venta's Offering 4, for example, is another painting of sculpted figures used for narrative purposes.

But this time, the figures represented are only about twenty centimeters high!

Composed of sixteen individuals and six axes fashioned from different gemstones, the scene appears to show a gathering of fifteen people around a central authority standing in front of several axes which probably represent monumental stelae.

It evokes the ceremonial gatherings that certainly took place in the area. 

But imposing or tiny, these paintings of sculptures are not the only means employed by the Olmecs to immortalize their stories ... 

Olmec writing systems 

They seem in fact to have also sketched, perhaps from the beginning of the last millennium before our era, a first form of writing which would have transcribed their language.

Unfortunately, very few identified traces remain, but it is assumed that one of them appears on a spectacular stele discovered in La Mojarra.

It dates from the middle of the second century AD, and features more than six hundred readable glyphs.

It is the longest known inscription on the Gulf Coast to date.

But in terms of writing, perhaps the most beautiful vestige of Olmec genius still comes from Tres Zapotes ...    

It was there that, with the financial support of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic, Matthew Stirling and his wife, Marion Illig, began, in 1938, their first excavation campaign in the footsteps of the Olmecs.

A most logical starting point since, let us remember, it is on this site that the very first statue attributed, later to this little-known culture, was discovered: the "colossal head 1" or "monument A", of which I spoke to you at the start of this episode. 

After a year spent excavating the area, the Stirling couple unearthed a shard of a stele.

They clean it and identify on its reverse a series of vertical signs that seem familiar to Marion Illig.

These dots and horizontal bars remind him of the signs the Mayans used to record dates in their "Long Count" system.

She knows that a point is one and a bar is five.

This allows him to decrypt a series of digits: 16.6.16.18.

It assumes it is a date but it is incomplete.

He is visibly missing a fragment of the stele ... 

It was not until thirty years later, in 1969, that he was found.

In reality, the Stirling couple had only discovered the lower part of the stele which would later be called "Stele C" by Tres Zapotes.

The missing portion makes it possible to decode, finally, the complete date which is written there.

It carries the higher temporal unit, what the Mayas called the "baktun": it is a seven. It was therefore necessary to read "7.16.6.16.18", which, in our calendar, corresponds to 3114 before J.-C. 

It's a relatively simple observation, but it calls into question everything we thought we knew at the time about the origins of the Long Count!

In fact, at the time, he made the Tres Zapotes stele the monument providing the oldest known date in the calendar system to which it refers.

"Beaten" since by the "stele 2" of Chiapa de Corzo, which, if one supposes that its baktun is also 7, indicates 36 before J. - C., it nevertheless proves that the system of the Long Count was introduced by populations descended from the archaeological Olmecs.

A system that the Mayans will appropriate and use in all their royal chronicles to record historical facts, which is why we discovered it.  

In short, the Olmecs also invented the Long Count which, until 1969, was unanimously attributed to the Mayans. 

The end of the great Olmec history, which still has many gray areas, is generally placed around 400 BC.

However, it probably continued, in a residual manner, until around 500 AD.

In fact, Olmec-style relics continued to be used as offerings over the centuries following the demise of this civilization, until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519. The influence of the Olmecs on Mesoamerican cultures was therefore not just foundational, it was also extremely enduring. 

The term "Gauls of Mexico" may make you smile, but above all it reveals that the Olmecs, and the complex Mesoamerican societies they influenced, are less distant from us than we think.

In Europe, we often perceive them as myths which we no longer know, in the long run, if they really existed.

However, this was the case, and they are very similar to our Gauls: a founding people whose cultural and symbolic heritage we still carry today.

A heritage which is also celebrated even on the Mexican national flag since its central coat of arms, representing an eagle on a cactus which devours a snake, evokes an Aztec legend.

Perhaps she too was inspired by the mysterious Olmecs ...     

"The Olmecs and the cultures of the Gulf of Mexico", from October 9, 2020 to July 25, 2021, 

Bibliographical references: 

Dominique Michelet, in collaboration with Cora Falero Ruiz and Steve Bourget,

(Skira, 2020)

José María Melgar y Serrano,

(Bulletin of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics, 1871)

Michael D. Coe,

(Dumbarton Oaks, 1981) 

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"At the heart of history" is a Europe 1 Studio podcast

Presentation: Jean des Cars

Author, production & distribution: Timothée Magot

Director: Matthieu Blaise

Graphics: Karelle Villais