Olmec-style Iconography
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Research Year:  1995
Culture:  Olmec
Chronology:  Pre-Classic
Location:  Veracruz, Guerrero and Puebla, México
Sites: Arroyo Pesquero, Las Limas, La Venta, Las Bocas

The Olmec Art Style

Three thousand years ago, Mesoamerica experienced the development of a geographically dispersed art style whose origins can be traced to the Olmec archaeological culture. Olmec art visualized a shamanic belief system that also functioned as the ideological foundations for political power. The symbol system, which is central to any discussion of Olmec art, was expressed as incised images on a range of objects and mediums. Olmec art is thematically conservative, primarily restricted to visually describing cosmology, the inhabitants of the supernatural Otherworld, ritual activity, and political power derived from supernatural access. Many of the objects created in the Olmec style functioned as empowered accoutrements in the shamanic rituals through which political power was sanctified by supernatural power. Much of the monumental art executed in the Olmec style was created as a permanent record of this shamanic ritual activity. The iconography and symbolism that are central to any discussion of the Olmec style were to be inherited by all later Mesoamerican cultures. The ideological messages conveyed by this highly developed Olmec symbol system continued to function as the underlying matrix for both political power and religion throughout the lengthy history of Mesoamerica.

My recent viewing of several objects in private collections has served to underscore the need for new and accurate renderings of the secondary incised images, which are carried by such objects. For example, a close observation of a jade mask from the Olmec heartland site of Arroyo Pesquero formerly in the Dyker collection (Figure 1) reveals that the published drawings of this object are inaccurate in at least one critical detail. That missing detail was a thumb carried on the two hand-paw-wing motifs incised on the left side of the mask.

At first glance this may seem a small detail, an error that occurs primarily because the incising in this area is so shallow that the two tiny thumbs failed to pick up the red coloring that was applied to accentuate the visibility of design. Before my observation, I was prepared to posit the existence of a set of paired motif oppositions derived from the inaccurate drawings of the Dyker mask iconography. Specifically I had written a comparison of the left and right thumb/thumbless oppositions on the Dyker Mask and compared it to a similar left and right thumb/thumbless opposition carried by the incised imagery on the legs of "Slim," another important Olmec-style object from a private collection. I argued that the existence of a similar set of oppositions on these two Olmec works of art established an iconographic pattern, based on aquatic and terrestrial locomotion, that could be interpreted as "fin" opposed to "paw" and thus water supernatural opposed to land supernatural. In this case, a close observation of the art object in question revealed the error in the published drawings. Undoubtedly, this episode underscores the necessity of accurate drawings in the dissemination of correct iconographic information.

Following are 37 updated versions of similarly inaccurate drawings:

Submitted 01/01/1997 by:
Frank Kent III Reilly