Dominating the horizon was a great earthen pyramid, more than a hundred feet tall, its base measuring roughly four hundred feet per side, its peak offering a view of the distant gulf. In its day, the pyramid was the largest, most sophisticated building in Mesoamerica, and it was still the most impressive manmade structure along this section of coast. More than two millennia of weather had softened the monument’s outlines and lent it a fluted, conical shape, which led some to conclude it had been constructed to mimic the nearby mountains, but recent research suggests that its sides were originally square and stepped.
Around the pyramid lay a vast ruined city, with dozens of earthen platforms and mounds arrayed on a long, narrow ridge surrounded by swamps. It was on one of these platforms that Stirling uncovered his strange basalt structure. Inside, he found a raised area paved with flagstones and covered in blue clay and the reddish mineral cinnabar. Resting on this platform were the bones of two children, so badly decomposed that at first Stirling mistook them for three. It was impossible to say who they were or how they’d died, but the elaborate burial bespoke their importance—as did the rich offerings found beside them.
At Tres Zapotes, Stirling had made some astounding finds that forever changed our idea of the Olmecs. Now, at La Venta, he unearthed some of the earliest carved jades ever discovered. Carefully laid out in the children’s tomb, along with other offerings, was a ransom in stone: a bright-green pendant in the shape of a jaguar tooth; sculptures of a clamshell, frog, leaf, and flower; a pair of large rectangular ear ornaments incised with eagles’ heads; a long awl with a bulbous handle, used for ritual bloodletting; a bundle of stingray tails, apparently the remains of a necklace, with a central “tail” fashioned of jade; oblong beads artfully worked to resemble pieces of bamboo; a pair of hands, their wrists flexed at ninety degrees; and four green eyes, which may once have been set in wooden masks that had decayed in the tropical humidity.
There were also four standing jade figures with typical Olmec features—wide, down-turned mouth, flat nose, and an intentionally deformed head. Another statuette depicted a seated woman, so coated in red cinnabar that she didn’t even resemble jade; her lips parted, her arms folded across her chest, her long hair hanging down her back, she was so delicate and expressive that Stirling considered her “the most exquisite example of jade carving known from ancient America”; others have since judged her one of the great masterpieces of Mexican art. Stirling was so captivated by the trove that he entitled his 1942 National Geographic article about La Venta “Finding Jewels of Jade in a Mexican Swamp.”
During his seasons there, Stirling would uncover more spectacular jades, including a stone box containing three hundred artifacts—ear ornaments, a necklace with beads in the form of pumpkins and a carved turtle at either end, and dozens of jade celts. Like the Humboldt Celt, these were simple polished stones about the size and shape of an axe head (though Humboldt had called his find an Aztec hatchet, it was Olmec). Some of the jades unearthed at La Venta were in tints of green, but others were carved in the luminous tone that was being called “Olmec blue.”
Then, in the mid-1950s, a decade after Stirling’s last expedition there, another strange hoard was discovered at La Venta—six celts and sixteen human figurines, most carved in a ghostly sea green and all carefully buried standing upright in a circle, as if reenacting some real-life ceremony. In the coming years, archaeologists would unearth more deposits of jade celts at La Venta and other Olmec cities. Though most were plain, some were incised with fanciful figures, and a few, like the large celt known as the Kunz Axe (after George Kunz, who bought it in Oaxaca around 1890), were carved in half-human, half-jaguar forms; for more than a century, that specimen has resided at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The significance of the celts is still uncertain. Whereas some believe they’re just what they seem—axe heads used during religious rites—others suggest they represent units of measure (like the gold bullion stacked in a modern vault) or the cobs of the sacred corn plant. Whatever else their meaning, to the Olmecs the heavy jades surely represented great wealth. Why would they bury such a fortune, where it would lie, at least to our way of thinking, useless and wasted? It’s thought that sometimes the caches served as extravagant offerings to the gods, as at the dedication of a palace or temple. In the case of royal graves, it’s possible they offered succor to the spirit of the deceased—or perhaps the great lords weren’t considered dead at all, and so no one dared strip them of their earthly possessions.
Besides the jades, Stirling and his successors discovered dozens of stone monuments at La Venta, including a sandstone sarcophagus incised with a jaguar-like creature and seven large “altars,” now thought to be thrones. The most spectacular of these shows an ornately attired man emerging from what seems to be a cave, cradling in his outstretched arms an infant with a cleft head and snarling jaws, apparently part human and part jaguar. Also uncovered were four colossal heads like the one at Tres Zapotes, each with a different-style helmet and distinctive features, supporting Stirling’s theory that they were the likenesses of actual rulers.
The largest stela discovered in the city, standing fourteen feet high and weighing fifty tons, depicted two men wearing huge headdresses; the long nose and goatee of one earned him the nickname Uncle Sam, and even inspired Norwegian author and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl to suggest that Norsemen had settled La Venta. Others who couldn’t fathom that the sophisticated Olmec civilization had arisen in the New World tried to trace its roots back to Atlantis, Egypt, and other improbable sources. As evidence that the founders had come from China, some pointed to similarities in the two cultures’ use of jade, their calendars and astronomy, their association of the four cardinal compass points with certain colors, even the fact that both saw a rabbit instead of a man in the moon. Considering the supposed African features of the colossal heads, some speculated the Olmecs had migrated from that continent.
Matthew Stirling with the largest of the colossal stone heads he unearthed at La Venta, eight and a half feet high and twenty-two feet in circumference. Each of the heads was carved with distinctive features, leading Stirling to conclude they were the portraits of flesh-and-blood rulers.
Courtesy of Richard Hewitt Stewart/National Geographic Stock
In 1955, three researchers from Stirling’s alma mater of Berkeley, including his collaborator Philip Drucker, brought the recently perfected technology of radio-carbon dating to bear at La Venta. The technique takes advantage of the fact that, as living plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere, they also take in the naturally occurring, mildly radioactive isotope carbon-14. As animals eat the plants, the isotope enters their cells; then when those animals are consumed in turn, the carbon-14 passes to the carnivores, until every link of the food chain carries the element’s mark. When the plants and animals die, they stop absorbing carbon-14, and since the isotope decays at a known rate over millennia, investigators can measure the amount remaining in a specimen to determine how many years have passed since its death.
Testing bits of charcoal from La Venta, Drucker and the others were able to show that the city was already well established by 800 B.C.—a thousand years before the Maya reached the height of their civilization. For four centuries, La Venta was the great capital of the Olmecs, its center occupying some five hundred acres, its surrounding population reaching perhaps twenty thousand souls. Then, about 400 B.C., the city was abandoned; though the causes are murky, it’s thought that environmental factors, such as a change in course of the Río Palma, may have played a role.
Finally, in 1969, a farmer working near Tres Zapotes uncovered the errant top of Stela C. The missing number was 7, just as Stirling had predicted. There was no longer room for argument: At least one other great culture had existed in Mesoamerica before the Maya, and Matthew Stirling was credited as its discoverer. Today, the unprepossessing bottom half of Stela C sits in the
Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, where its terse label gives no hint of its seminal role in shaping our understanding of pre-Hispanic civilization.
Even while Stirling was conducting his digs at La Venta, Petróleos Mexicanos, Mexico’s state-owned oil monopoly, had begun tapping the site’s oil-rich salt dome. Today, it’s not archaeologists’ huts that stand in the shadow of the great pyramid but wells and derricks, and the jades and monumental heads and thrones have been relocated to museums, including a spectacular sculpture garden in the state capital of Villahermosa.
Matthew and Marion Stirling worked in Mexico for the Smithsonian and National Geographic from 1939 to 1946. Marion had taken graduate courses in archaeology at George Washington University, and she helped Matthew write his articles and typed all his correspondence. (“How unfortunate,” a Maya lady once confided to her, “that your husband never learned to read or write!”) Besides his pioneering digs at Tres Zapotes and La Venta, Stirling was first to excavate the smaller, later site of Cerro de las Mesas, where he unearthed a fabulous cache of 782 jades, including a miniature moon-faced mask; bright-green ear ornaments mottled like lichen; human figures; long, hollow pieces resembling canoes; a pendant in the form of a macaw; and a carved infant that Stirling considered “one of the finest jades ever found in Mexico.”
In 1945, after a hunter was startled by a great stone eye peering up from a forest path, Stirling discovered another Olmec site, San Lorenzo, which had risen to prominence at least three centuries earlier than La Venta, giving it pride of place as the first great capital of the Olmecs. Straddling a 150-foot-high, largely manmade ridge surrounded by marshes, San Lorenzo claimed what scholar Richard A. Diehl has called “one of the best pieces of real estate in the Olmec world”—easily defended, dry even during times of flood, convenient to sources of freshwater and food, with plenty of fertile land and easy river transportation. At its height, between 1200 and 1100 B.C., San Lorenzo counted a population of perhaps ten thousand, more than any other city in Mesoamerica at the time.
Although they boasted no great pyramid like the later La Venta, the people of San Lorenzo built hundreds of mounds and platforms, some supporting simple houses, others defining public plazas and ceremonial courts. Then, sometime around 900 B.C., as La Venta was expanding its influence, San Lorenzo was largely abandoned. It used to be believed that the cause was revolution or conquest, but now factors such as economic failure or environmental catastrophe are thought to have played a role. Though people continued to occupy the site until about 400 B.C., the same time that La Venta was abandoned, San Lorenzo never regained its former stature.
Over the decades, San Lorenzo has given up more than a hundred sculptures, including magnificent carved thrones and colossal stone heads—but strangely little jade. It’s been suggested that at the time, fine pottery was still the ultimate status symbol, and that only after luxury ceramics became so readily available that they lost their cachet, did the Olmec elites turn to jade, which was more exotic, more difficult and costly to work, and imbued with supernatural powers besides. On the other hand, archaeologist Michael Coe believes that there is jade at San Lorenzo, but it just hasn’t been discovered yet. It seems a plausible assumption, especially since the even earlier site of El Manatí, less than ten miles away, has yielded offerings of handsome jade celts. But for the moment, it’s not San Lorenzo but the later La Venta that marks the pinnacle of Olmec jade.
Matthew Stirling led the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology for nearly three decades, until 1957. Then, even after retiring, he continued his fieldwork in places such as Panama, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. In the last, he hoped to find the mines where the Olmec had procured their jade; though he was unsuccessful, he did discover more jade artifacts there. In his final years, Stirling was honored as an elder statesmen among American archaeologists, revered not only for his contributions to the science but also for his generosity toward younger colleagues.
Half a century later, Michael Coe, Matthew Stirling’s successor at San Lorenzo, sits in the spacious upstairs studio in his New Haven, Connecticut, home and shares with me his fond memories of his mentor, who always seemed to have a cigar and glass of whisky in hand while recounting a droll anecdote or a suspenseful story. To Coe, Stirling was “a prince among archaeologists.” Though his techniques may not have been superscientific, Stirling “knew how to smell out real finds” and “had the archaeological equivalent of a gardener’s green thumb.” He also had an abiding affection for the peasant farmers of Veracruz, which was reciprocated. When, in later years, the Stirlings paid a visit to San Lorenzo, dozens of locals came to pay their respects. And Coe confesses that when he went to work there, he passed himself off as Stirling’s nephew, to trade on his predecessor’s popularity.
Looking back over his discoveries in the land of the Olmecs, Stirling expressed “the satisfaction of doing a job which far exceeds the pleasure of mere travel, and the hope that we have added a little bit to human knowledge in revealing for the first time an interesting chapter of New World history.” Matthew Williams Stirling died of cancer in 1975, at the age of seventy-eight.
Despite all the expeditions that followed, to Marion Stirling their early work at Tres Zapotes was the most exciting. “Everything was new to us,” she wrote; “not only the archaeology, but the manner of living in palm-thatched houses which the natives built for us, as well as making friends with the villagers and learning their customs.” After Matthew’s death, Marion married a U.S. Army general; she died in 2001, aged ninety.
Richard A. Diehl has noted that even today, “Olmec history resembles a story for which we have only a few chapter headings and text fragments.” Many Olmec cities, spread over six thousand square miles in the Mexican states of Tabasco and southern Veracruz, have yet to be excavated, and the others have been explored incompletely. Their writing survives only in fragments, as on the Humboldt Celt. But thanks to the work of Matthew Stirling and his colleagues, we know something of these shadow people.
We know that the Olmecs helped to spread the roots of Mesoamerican civilization, not through conquest but through trade, to the other cultures that rose and fell in the region over the next two thousand years, from the Maya to the Teotihuacanos and from the Toltecs to the Aztecs. We know that Olmec society was complex, governed by rulers and priests who mediated between mortals and a bewildering pantheon of deities, including those who presided over the rain and the all-important corn crop, and many who combined the features of various animals and even humans, especially the ubiquitous half man, half jaguar. We know that the Olmecs erected temples on earthen platforms and conducted public ceremonies that featured bloodletting, human sacrifice, and a sacred ballgame. They pioneered writing in the Americas, via their little-understood hieroglyphs, perhaps invented to identify the images on their monuments.
As archaeologists came to a better understanding of Olmec history, they made a new realization about Stirling’s Stela C from Tres Zapotes: Though the stela had helped to prove that a sophisticated civilization existed before the Maya, it turns out that the monument is three centuries too late to be considered Olmec (as is the even more recent Tuxtla Statuette). So, though it’s widely assumed that the Olmecs employed a complex calendar and were among the first in the world to use the concept of zero, there’s no hard evidence for either of these accomplishments.
But there’s no doubt that the Olmecs stand at the first flush of jade culture in the New World, trading the stone and creating some of the most sophisticated and beautiful carvings ever produced in this hemisphere. In fact, our knowledge of them comes mainly from these objects. Though they are the “rubber people,” perhaps they should have been called the Tetlecs, from the Nahuatl for “stone.” And even more than the Maya, the Olmecs excelled at carving in the round, with a unique style—simple, sensual, vigorous, naturalistic, and surprisingly modern in feel. They were as adept at creating colossal, expressive portraits
in basalt as at shaping sensitive figurines in jade—all without wheeled vehicles or draft animals to transport the raw material and with no more than stone tools to work it. As Matthew Stirling put it, “La Venta people,” the Olmecs, “were America’s great artists. They erected huge basaltic monuments in the form of stelae, altars, and colossal heads, marked by artistic realism and simple artistic restraint.”
Though they were so different, both types of Olmec sculpture—the monumental basalt portraits and the diminutive jade ornaments, figurines, and celts—served the same purpose: to display the wealth and bolster the authority of the rulers who commissioned them. The quarries where they dug their basalt were discovered at the Cerro Cintepec volcano, and it is supposed that the great stones were moved to San Lorenzo and La Venta by floating them on rafts where possible and manhandling them over dry land where necessary. Yet even as troves of Olmec jades continued to be unearthed, the location of the raw material remained a puzzle. As Matthew Stirling lamented, echoing Edward H. Thompson, “The source of the jade used in ancient Mesoamerica has always been a mystery. No mines are known where the material exists in situ. Apparently it was found in the form of pebbles or boulders in stream beds.” But what stream beds, where?
In the late 1960s, Michael Coe suggested that the Olmecs’ jade had originated on the Nicoya Peninsula of northwest Costa Rica, where blue jades had been found as grave offerings. He even speculated that the Olmecs had established military posts along the Pacific Coast in present-day Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador in order to secure a steady supply of the stone. But unless the quarries were discovered, such ideas would remain conjecture.
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