[Aztlan] AN OLMEC ABSTRACT

[michael ruggeri]

Listeros,

Here is an abstract from the latest issue of Archaeology Magazine on  
the Olmecs;

Beyond the Family Feud
Volume 60 Number 2, March/April 2007
by Andrew Lawler
After decades of debate, are younger scholars finally asking the  
right questions about the Olmec?


The lush, wet environment of the Laguna de los Cerros site, aerial  
view above left, typifies the Olmec heartland between the later Aztec  
(Tenochtitlán) and Maya (Palenque) regions. (Ken Garrett)
It's a drizzly autumn morning in the eastern Mexican city of Xalapa,  
near the heartland of what many scholars say was Mesoamerica's first  
civilization. At the city's elegant anthropology museum, amid one of  
the finest Olmec collections in the world, Yale archaeologist Michael  
Coe points at the giant squat stone head staring sullenly at us.  
"Look at this," he says enthusiastically. "When it was made, the Maya  
area didn't even have pottery, and the biggest sculpture from this  
time in Oaxaca"--an important valley to the west--"could fit in this  
guy's eye." The Olmec, Coe insists, "were the Sumerians of the New  
World."

An energetic man even at 77, he is part of an older generation of  
scholars who have spent a good part of their professional lives  
arguing among themselves over whether the Olmec birthed the rudiments  
of Mesoamerican civilization, or whether they were one among many  
contemporary peoples who contributed art, technology, and religious  
beliefs to the Aztec, Maya, and other cultures that Cortes and the  
Spanish encountered 2,500 years later. But that lingering "mother- 
sister" debate--often vociferous, occasionally unseemly, and  
sometimes downright nasty--obscures a quiet revolution in research on  
early Mesoamerica. While the elders bicker, a younger batch of  
archaeologists is pursuing other questions, asking, for example, how  
the ordinary Olmec lived and worked, and what they ate.

Such fundamental matters until now were largely neglected amid the  
academic fracas, which has focused on monumental structures, evidence  
of kings, and the iconography of the elite. "Everyone is flying a  
flag from their own valley," sighs Mary Pye, a 40-something  
archaeologist in Mexico City who is also in Xalapa for a conference  
on the Olmec. "Forget mother-sister," she says. "It's more  
complicated." The more nuanced picture emerging of early Mesoamerica  
does not fit that of either warring camp. Those who back the Olmec as  
the first civilization traditionally point to the early adoption of  
maize, the growth of urban centers, and the export of finished goods  
such as pottery throughout Mesoamerica to clinch their argument.  
Opponents emphasize the complexity of other cultures in different  
areas, such as Oaxaca. But the new research shows that during the  
early critical phase of urbanization the Olmec may have shunned  
maize, lived mostly as fishermen, and sought luxury items from  
distant places, while simultaneously expanding their cultural  
influence throughout the region.

Andrew Lawler is a staff writer for Science and lives in rural Maine.


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© 2007 by the Archaeological Institute of America
www.archaeology.org/0703/abstracts/olmec.html



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