The Olmec Culture

The Olmec Culture

The Olmec Culture

For many years, the Olmec culture was thought to be the 'mother culture' of Mesoamerica, because of the great influence that it exercised throughout the region. However, more recent perspectives consider this culture to be more of a process to which all the contemporary peoples contributed, and which eventually crystallized on the coasts of Veracruz and Tabasco. The ethnic identity of the Olmecs is still widely debated. Based on linguistic evidence, archaeologists and anthropologists generally believe that they were either speakers of an Oto-Manguean language, or (more likely) the ancestors of the present-day Zoque people who live in the north of Chiapas and Oaxaca. According to this second hypothesis, Zoque tribes emigrated toward the south after the fall of the major population centers of the Gulf plains. Whatever their origin, these bearers of Olmec culture arrived at the leeward shore some eight thousand years BCE, entering like a wedge among the fringe of proto-Maya peoples who lived along the coast, a migration that would explain the separation of the Huastecs of the north of Veracruz from the rest of the Maya peoples based in the Yucatn Peninsula and Guatemala.

The Olmec culture represents a milestone of Mesoamerican history, in that various characteristics that define the region first appeared there. Among them are the state organization, the development of the 260-day ritual calendar and the 365-day secular calendar, the first writing system, and urban planning. The development of this culture started 1600 to 1500 BCE, though it continued to consolidate itself up to the 12th century BCE. Its principal sites were La Venta, San Lorenzo, and Tres Zapotes in the core region. However, throughout Mesoamerica numerous sites show evidence of Olmec occupation, especially in the Balsas river basin, where Teopantecuanitlan is located. This site is quite enigmatic, since it dates from several centuries earlier than the main populations of the Gulf, a fact which has continued to cause controversy and given rise to the hypothesis that the Olmec culture originated in that region.

Mesoamerican chronology divides the history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica into several periods: the Paleo-Indian (first human habitation3500 BCE), the Archaic (35002000), the Preclassic (2000 BCE200 CE), the Classic (200 CE1000CE), and the Postclassic (1000 CE1697 CE). Some of the period divisions are taken from the history of the Maya: The Preclassic-Classic boundary marks the first Maya "collapse," the Classic-Postclassic boundary marks the second, and the end date of 1697 marks the conquest of the last independent Maya city-state, Tayasal. However, this chronology applies to other pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations as well.

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