In 1869 appeared a brief notice, signed J. M. Melgar, in the bulletin of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics, part of which translates as follows:

In 1862 I was in the region of San Andres Tuxtla, a town of the state of Veracruz, in Mexico. During my excursions, I learned that a Colossal Head had been unearthed a few years before, in the following manner. Some one-and-a-half leagues from a sugar-cane hacienda, on the western slopes of the Sierra of San Martin, a laborer of this hacienda, while cutting the forest for his field, discovered on the surface of the ground what looked like the bottom of a great iron kettle turned upside down. He notified the owner of the hacienda, who ordered its excavation. And in place of the kettle was discovered the above-mentioned head. It was left in the excavation as one would not think to move it, being of granite and measuring two yards in height with corresponding proportions. . . . On my arrival at the hacienda I asked the owner to take me to look at it. We went, and I was struck with surprise: as a work of art, it is without exaggeration a magnificent sculpture . . . but what astonished me was the Ethiopic type represented. I reflected that there had undoubtedly been Negroes in this country, and that this had been in the first epoch of the world.

The article was accompanied by an engraving of what we now know as Monument A at Tres Zapotes. So struck was Melgar by his theory of black voyages from Africa to Mexico that he took up his pen again in 1871 for further wild speculations, quite in line with the migrationist theories of his time. To him, however, belongs the distinction of being the first to publish an object - remarkable enough in its own right - belonging to what we now know as the Olmec civilization.

One would think that the presence of a colossal stone head (of basalt, not granite) measuring over six feet high would have attracted further notice to the archeological resources of the southern Gulf Coast. Instead, there was only silence, broken in 1905 by the visit of the German archeologist Eduard Seler and his wife, ethnoligist Caecilie Seler-Sachs, to see the head. But the head’s true significance remained unappreciated for many years more.

Another pioneer archeologist-explorer, Frans Blom, born in Denmark in 1893, first came to Mexico as a young man to work for one of the many foreign oil companies drilling along the Gulf Coast. Captivated by the ruins he encountered, he began a long career as a discoverer of the Mesoamerican past. Tulane University in New Orleans had just started delving into the Mesoamerican field, and Blom was put in charge of a two-man exploration of the wild country of southern Mexico and neighboring Guatemala, an area nearly unknown to the scholarly world.

In February 1925, Blom, accompanied by the young anthropologist Oliver La Farge (later to be better known for his Pulitzer Prize novel, Laughing Boy, and for his political and cultural activities in behalf of the American Indian), left New Orleans for the south. These were the days before insecticides and antibiotics had been invented, and it was no light matter to make this journey. Proceeding overland along the Veracruz coast, and incidentally being the first to report the monument on the volcano of San Martín Pajápan (a stone now known to be Olmec), they left the wretched port of Coatzacoalcos by motor sloop for the mouth of the Tonalá River, in westernmost Tabasco. In the steady company of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, they made their way up the river and into a tributary stream, finally arriving at a swamp-bound island they had heard about from local reports.

Blom and La Farge thus discovered La Venta, the greatest Olmec archeological site, with its multitude of great stone sculptures. One of these was another Colossal Head, which they immediately related to the one in Tres Zapotes reported by the Selers. But they would not realize the true significance of their findings, namely, that they had found the oldest New World civilization. On the contrary, their final comment was, “We are inclined to ascribe these ruins to the Maya culture.” Nonetheless, the account of La Venta that they published in Tribes and Temples gave a great impetus to Olmec research.

At this time, the name “Olmec” or “Olmeca” began to creep into the literature on the archeology of this little-known region. The term had been around for a long time; in the sixteenth-century accounts of Father Sahagún and the native chroniclers, it had referred to the people of the southern Gulf Coast, between the Totonac Indians to the north and the Xicalanca Maya to the east, in Tabasco. Derived from the Nàhuatl (Aztec) root ollin, meaning “rubber,” Olmec may be translated as “the rubber people,” that is, people from the lands where rubber is produced. These historic Olmec had wandered far, and in late pre-Hispanic times were definitely involved in political events in the highlands of central Mexico.

One German and two American archeologists earned not only the credit for recognizing a new civilization, but also the blame for naming it Olmec. Hermann Beyer, in a 1927 review of Tribes and Temple, saw the similarity between a small stone carving formerly in his possession and the strange monument encountered by Blom and La Farge at the top of San Martín Pajápan volcano and proposed that both be ascribed to the “Olmec or Totonac civilization.” Marshall Saville, head of the Museum of the American Indian in New York City, compared the San Martin sculpture with several strange “votive” axes and a number of small jade objects from museum collections and realized all were in the same, strange art style, one that emphasized a creature with slanting oval eyes, thick lips, snarling mouth, and a cleft over the forehead. Since it was unlikely the San Martin monolith had been moved very far, he said it was in southern Veracruz that this art style had been produced, by a culture that he, also, called Olmec.

Finally, there is the contribution of George C. Vaillant. American archeology has had few practitioners more brilliant than this Harvard graduate who concentrated his interest on Mexico. In 1928, he began excavating ancient villages in the Valley of Mexico belonging to the pre-Classic, Formative stage village remains that he knew could not represent the beginnings of aboriginal life here and for which he therefore applied the name “Middle Cultures.” Vaillant was then a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, into whose Mexican collection came a lovely little jade carving of a crouching beast with part-human, part-jaguar characteristics, which has become known as a were-jaguar. Like his colleague Saville, Vaillant recognized the affinity of the strange, almost Oriental style in which this piece was fashioned with the huge sculptures that had been published by Blom and La Farge. His 1932 paper on the subject again applied the name Olmec to the new civilization. And so it has stuck, whether inaccurate or misleading, to the great early culture of southern Veracruz and Tabasco. Several attempts have been made over the years to change it to something more lilting, but neither professionals nor public have ever accepted any appellation other than Olmec.

By about 1938, there were strongly grounded suspicions that an entirely new civilization, somehow related to the Maya but different from it, and of an unknown age, was to be discovered in the jungle strongholds of the southern Gulf Coast plain. The man who actually made the discovery was Matthew W. Stirling, who played the same part for the Olmec as Stephens had a century earlier for the ancient Maya. Archeological “discovery” on a big scale means more than an armchair excursion, no matter how brilliant, into the past. It means years of hard work, on-the-ground exploration, and patient excavation. The kind of man who can find an ancient civilization must be multifaceted. A capability for hard work; a good physique; a resistance to biting insects, diseases, and all the other hardships of life in the field before insecticides and other modern refinements came on the market; a good education and wide reading in the related literature; and, most important of all, a great deal of intuition, of being able to see new relationships, and of playing such hunches right: All go into the make-up of the great pioneer archeologist. It also helps to have the courage of one’s convictions in order to weather the criticism such finds are likely to arouse.

Stirling began to be intrigued by the possible existence of an entirely new civilization as far back as 1918, when, as a student at the University of California, he came across a picture of a “crying baby” maskette of jade owned by the Berlin Museum. After joining the staff of the Smithsonian Institution, he continued this interest, struck by the circumstance that objects in the same style were usually of a bluish jade, a kind of stone not found among the other Mesoamerican civilizations. With much excitement, he read the report by Blom and La Farge on La Venta, as well as an account of the first Colossal Head and other monuments at Tres Zapotes (then called Hueyapán) brought out in 1932 by Albert Weyerstall, an American planter in Veracruz. While describing a monument taken from La Venta to the schoolhouse in Villahermosa, Tabasco, Weyerstall added:

Once while questioning an American archaeologist about this particular idol, the writer was informed that it (as well as those still remaining at La Venta) was decidedly not Maya, but pre-Maya - therefore about three thousand years old.

One can only wonder: Who was this remarkable prophet? For this was the only suggestion ever made prior to Stirling’s excavations at La Venta regarding its great antiquity, and it was an extremely close approximation of its true age.

In early 1938, Stirling visited Melgar’s Colossal Head. This was no easy trip, for the network of paved roads that now crisscrosses almost all regions of Mexico was hardly existent. After an eight-hour ride on horseback from Tlacotálpan, he arrived at the hacienda of Hueyapán on the southwestern slopes of the Tuxtla Mountains. It was on the former lands of this estate that the head had been reported to lie, but Stirling soon discovered it was only a mile or so from the little village of Tres Zapotes. Impressed as he was by his first view of the head, he was amazed by the number of great earthen mounds, one almost 150 feet long, in its vicinity. Clearly, this was an archeological site of tremendous importance, and Stirling was able to enlist, upon his return to Washington, the support of the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution for a massive program of excavation at Tres Zapotes. It was the first such enterprise of any scope in southern Veracruz.

So back he came the following January by the same route, this time with a completely equipped expedition. All supplies and the expedition director had to be taken up the Papaloápan River to Tlacotálpan, then by another launch journey up the winding river system until a tiny hamlet was reached, and from there to Tres Zapotes by mule.

Two long field seasons, in 1939 and 1940, were spent at Tres Zapotes. In an ironic act of fate, the greatest find was stumbled across in the first few days after their arrival. In front of a large mound within one of the principal groups at the site, the corner of a worked piece of basalt projected a few inches above the ground. It looked enough like a buried monument to Stirling to warrant excavation. Within a short time, it was clear this was a broken stela that had been set upright in ancient times behind a flat stone altar, recalling the stela-altar complex common in Classic Maya centers. This was no ordinary stela, however, for this monument, now called Stela C, proved to have an inscription on one face and an Olmec-like were-jaguar mask on the other.

Stirling immediately recognized the inscription as a date in the Long Count system used by the Classic Maya. A set of elegantly carved bar-and-dot numbers was arranged in a vertical row. The Maya were able to get along with a combination of only three symbols to write any numeral: a bar for five, a dot for one, and a stylized shell for zero. Four was expressed by four dots, six by a bar and a dot, and ten by two bars. For twenty and higher numbers, positional numeration was used, but this was not needed for Maya dates, which never had coefficients above this figure. Briefly, the Long Count consists of a tabulation of days elapsed since the supposed inception of the calendar, the total being expressed as so many cycles of differing magnitudes. The largest of these cycles is the baktun, containing 144,000 days; next, the katun, 7,200 days; then the tun, with 360 days; the uinal, with 20; and the smallest of all, always at the bottom of the column, the kin of one day. Each of these in the days of Maya ascendancy was shown with its own hieroglyph, while to its left stood the coefficient by which it was to be multiplied.

Stela C resembled the Tuxtla statuette (a duck-billed figure of jade inscribed with a very early Long Count date, found many years before in Veracruz) in that the cycle glyphs were not given, only the coefficients. Although the baktun number was broken off at the top of the stone, Stirling was able to do some quick calculation to arrive at a reconstruction of the whole date. This was (in Long Count form) 7.16.6.16.18. arriving at a day 6 Eznab in their ritual “almanac year” of 260 days. Using J. Eric Thompson’s correlation of Maya and Christian calendars, this was the equivalent of a day in the year 31 BCE. Not only was this earlier than the Tuxtla statuette, but it was some 330 years older than the beginning of the Classic Maya civilization. Here was an Olmec-appearing monument with an inscription in the so-called Maya system that was found far west of the Maya area itself. The immediate implication to Stirling was that Olmec civilization was older than Maya, and at least the calendrical aspect of Maya culture had, in fact, been invented by the Olmec.

Stirling was not alone in this opinion. George Vaillant had also reached the same conclusion, for in his pre-Classic site of Gualupita, just outside the town of Cuernavaca in highland Mexico, he had excavated hollow pottery figures of the purest Olmec style. But even more important was the growing body of opinion favoring Olmec priority in these matters among several influential Mexican archeologists. Among these was Alfonso Caso, who in 1931 had begun the mammoth task of excavating and restoring the huge archeological center of Monte Albán in Oaxaca. He, like Vaillant, was finding that the Olmec art style, with its unmistakable characteristics, had penetrated here as long ago as Monte Albán I, long before the Classic stage. Another was the late Miguel Covarrubias. By profession an artist, Covarrubias’s intellect and enthusiasm had expanded to take in the field of Mexican archeology and anthropology. No other person could rival him in his intuition about the Mesoamerican past and in his feeling for objects and styles. As much collector as archeologist, he had acquired Olmec pieces from both the Gulf Coast and the highlands: Moreover, he had participated in many archeological digs. It was not long before Covarrubias began proclaiming, like Caso, that Olmec was the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica. To this group of scholars, Stela C came as confirmation.

This was not all they found at Tres Zapotes. Several other monuments had been seen by previous travelers, such as a four-foot-long stone “box,” quite fragmentary, carved on its four sides with strange scenes of a battle taking place before swirling clouds. However, this box and other relics from the site are not really Olmec but a later style – important enough in its own right – called Izapan. On the other hand, some objects were fully Olmec. The implication is that more than one civilization occupied Tres Zapotes. Thousands of pottery and figurine fragments found at Tres Zapotes in 1939 and 1940 confirm this assumption: There are probably no less than five phases or cultures represented, extending from Olmec times right up through the Spanish conquest. But the stratigraphic situation is so confusing that other Olmec sites must be examined to find exactly what happened during the Olmec apogee.

Stirling’s next move was obvious: go to La Venta. This turned out to be the most magnificent Olmec site ever dug, for it is the key to Olmec culture. La Venta has provided the first radiocarbon dates run on Olmec material, dates which are far earlier than anyone would have guessed in the years from 1939 to 1943 when Stirling’s great discoveries at the Olmec metropolis followed in rapid succession. If its true time position had then been known, a great deal of controversy would have likely been hushed.

Because of the considerable excitement generated by Stirling’s finds among Mexican and American archeologists, the Mexican Society of Anthropology called a round-table conference on the subject in July 1941. There was general accord among those present – who included Caso, Covarrubias, and Stirling – that the Olmec culture (which they preferred to call “La Venta”) was the first high civilization of Mexico. But in that same month, a bombshell had been prepared and published, under the innocuous title, “Dating of Certain Inscriptions of Non-Maya Origin,” by Eric Thompson, the outstanding Maya scholar of his day and a leading expert on Maya hieroglyphs.

This erudite paper set out to prove several things at once. First, that all of the non-Maya inscriptions from the Olmec area, with their seemingly early dates, were, in fact, late. And second, that the archeological Olmec were no earlier than CE 1200, contemporary with the Toltec of Mexico and Yucatán. Thompson’s attack on the Olmec enthusiasts sounds like a minority view, but in actuality, it was shared by most American archeologists working in Mesoamerica at the time. It was Stirling who was in the minority party. The famous Mayanist Sylvanus G. Morley was also of Thompson’s opinion. Indeed, the whole Maya field was up in arms - what civilization could possibly be more ancient than that of their beloved Maya?

The trouble was that Thompson, with his vast learning, was a hard man to refute. Caso, Covarrubias, and Stirling had the necessary tenacity, but they could not shake what seemed like the soundest scholarship, and there were few archeologists before 1957 who would have cared to go against the Maya experts and place the Olmec before CE 300, that is, in the pre-Classic era. In that year, however, a second bombshell came along: the new radiocarbon dates on La Venta. These ranged from 1160 to 580 BCE.

Stirling had been vindicated: The Olmec civilization was truly the first in Mesoamerica.