[Aztlan] moving big stones

[Diehl, Richard]

Hola Listeros,

I need help with a problem that has nagged me for a long time. How DID the Olmecs move big stones from workshops like the llano el Jícaro site at the foot of the Tuxtla mountains to San Lorenzo and La Venta? The two most obvious ways are by land or by water. Both were tested a few years back in a segment of the BBC/Nova TV series Secrets of the Ancients. The producers sent a team to southern Mexico to replicate carving and moving of a Colossal head. I served as an advisor to the production and Ann Cyphers and Ponciano Ortiz served as on-site consultants. It was a valiant effort that failed but did manage to highlight some of the practical difficulties the Olmecs must have faced. I was left with the feeling that the Olmecs probably used water transport, perhaps a very large raft of the sort made famous in the national Geographic water-color painting about 13 years ago, whenever possible, and land transport when they had no other option. Those are simply guesses on my part. Do any of you have any ideas? At the moment I am focusing on moving large pieces of stone, not carving. Consider the limitations: no metals for tools, cables, or pulleys, no large domesticated animals, and no wheels. They presumably had sufficient people-power to no only move the stone long distances over swamps, open water, rough, broken terrain littered with either tress or tree stumps, and so forth, but also alternate crews during rest periods, feed the entire party and motivate everyone. We do know the Olmec depicted what I assume were ropes in their monumental art. Ropes seem to appear in the head gear of some Colossal Heads, and two rectangular stone blocks are surrounded by apparent ropes and surmounted by fragmentary remains of sculpted humans seated on the tops, as though they were the bosses of the job.

I am especially puzzled about the mechanics of moving these large blocks up-river by water. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Dick Diehl