Olmecs Erotic

The Olmecs were the people who built the first large ceremonial centers in Mesoamerica, on the hot, river-cut Gulf lowlands of what is now southern Veracruz and western Tabasco, Mexico, between roughly 1200 and 400 BC. No living community calls itself Olmec, and the name itself is borrowed: it is Nahuatl for rubber people, a label that Nahuatl speakers of the Aztec era gave the region's inhabitants some two thousand years after the fact. What the Olmecs called themselves is unknown, and so is their language, though the most widely accepted guess is an early form of Mixe-Zoquean, the family still spoken by the Popoluca, Mixe, and Zoque of the same region today. That guess rests on loanwords for cacao, incense, and maize processing that spread from this area into Mayan and other Mesoamerican languages, a fair clue to who was teaching whom.

What makes the Olmecs recognizable is their sculpture. The colossal basalt heads, seventeen of them known, each cut from a single boulder quarried in the Tuxtla mountains and hauled tens of miles across swamp and river, show individual faces under close-fitting helmets, almost certainly portraits of rulers. Their two great capitals rose and fell in sequence: San Lorenzo, a plateau settlement with basalt drainage lines and monuments that were later deliberately smashed and buried, and then La Venta, on an island in the coastal marshes, with an earthen pyramid, buried pavements of serpentine mosaic, and caches of jade and polished iron-ore mirrors that no one was meant to see again. Their religion is read entirely from objects: the recurring figure that fuses a human infant with a jaguar, snarling and cleft-headed, is among the oldest deity images in Mesoamerica, stingray spines in offerings point to ritual bloodletting, and the rubber balls preserved in the spring shrine of El Manatí, the oldest found anywhere, point to a ballgame that later peoples would play for two thousand years. The Cascajal Block, a serpentine slab incised with signs around 900 BC, may be the earliest writing in the Americas, though not everyone agrees it is writing at all.

By about 400 BC the major centers were abandoned and the eastern heartland emptied out, for reasons still argued over: shifting river courses, volcanic ash falls, or the collapse of the elite order that held it all together. Whether the Olmecs were the mother culture of Mesoamerica or one ambitious sibling among several is an open debate, but the jade, the rulers carved in stone, and the deity images that define the region's later civilizations all appear here early and fully formed. Their legacy is less a bloodline than a template.