The laborious passage to La Venta from undertaken by Blom and La Farge is now a matter of a half-hour drive over a paved highway. But, unfortunately, La Venta, the glory of the ancient Olmec, has lately changed much for the worse. In place of the luxurious tropical vegetation that once covered the place, and the simple life then followed by its peasants, there are now all the horrors of modern industrial civilization. An oil refinery belches fumes, an airstrip bisects the archeological site, and gas flares light up the night sky across the waste-clogged swamps. La Venta has fallen victim to the oil under its surface and is dying in its own black blood.
But when Stirling first laid eyes upon it, La Venta was an island set in the marshes lying east of the sluggish Tonalá River, which divides the states of Veracruz and Tabasco as it flows north to the Gulf of Mexico. It is likely that the Tonalá once bordered on the island itself, for according to the oil geologists, La Venta is being pushed up – at an almost imperceptible rate - by a deeply buried salt dome, a relic of the shallow sea that covered the southern Gulf Coast plains several million years ago. As the island rose, the ancient river was divided and flowed around it (this might well have been the situation during Olmec times). As the salt dome continued to ascend, the Tonalá was displaced to its present course some three miles to the west.
A dozen miles north of La Venta lie the beaches of the Gulf Coast, frequently pounded by fierce nortes (storms that sweep down from Texas and northern Mexico in the wintertime, lashing Veracruz and Tabasco with cold rains). Sand from the great lines of beach dunes is carried south, as far as La Venta itself. Then the southers blow hot and dry from the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec during April and May, bringing to the Olmec region its only true dry season. Torrential, monsoon-like rains begin at the end of May and last through November when the norte season begins again. Small wonder that archeologists tended to avoid Olmec country like the plague.
But Matthew Stirling was an exception. His first trip to La Venta took place in 1940, after the Tres Zapotes excavations. The Stirling party proceeded east from Coatzacoalcos over dirt roads, then by launch up the mangrove-bordered Tonalá River until they reached the mouth of the Blasillo, a tributary from which it was possible to reach La Venta by foot or mule. At the juncture of the two rivers, by pure accident, they came upon the camp of one of the first oil geologists to prospect in the region: Unluckily for Mexico’s past, he found what he was looking for.
In those days, La Venta was a sort of tropical paradise, presided over by an eighty-year-old Indian, Don Sebastián Torres, who had arrived fifty years before with his small family and had cut down the tall jungle to carve out a modest living as a corn farmer. The Torres family has survived, but there is little left of their peaceful island.
Stirling and his wife, Marion Illig, who was his secretary at the Bureau of American Ethnology and accompanied him on most of his trips, were immediately invited to stay at the Torres settlement, and they began to hear about the mysterious stones seen by Blom and La Farge. The family also told them that on fine nights, the ghosts of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and his court were supposed to dance and sing in the ruins. The loneliness and danger of living in the jungle had certainly stimulated their imaginations. The dangers were not imaginary, however. One night during the Stirlings’ stay that season, a large jaguar killed three of the family’s hogs only 200 yards from their house. Day after day, Don Sebastián’s son-in-law took Stirling to various stones that he knew, and Stirling saw for the first time the 100-foot-high “pyramid” that dominates La Venta - a monument subsequently proven to be one of the weirdest constructions known in the New World.
The monuments at La Venta turned out to be remarkable. In a short time, Stirling had seen the six stones described by Blom and La Farge, and a great many more. By the end of the 1940 season, no fewer than four Colossal Heads had been located and exposed, all similar to the great basalt head of Tres Zapotes, but each with a slightly different type of “football helmet” bearing its own distinctive ornament. Head No. 1, for instance, has a device shaped like a capital U that might he related to the Maya moon glyph. Stirling presumed that all were portraits, and he was probably right. Even more outstanding than the heads were the “altars” of La Venta. The most exciting find was Altar 5, aptly termed the Quintuplet Altar. This enormous block of basalt had been carved on three sides. On its front, a richly garbed and mitered male personage emerges from an oven-like niche: He is seated cross-legged and carries in his arms an infant - no ordinary child, but the cleft-headed, part-jaguar creature with snarling mouth, the same creature identified as the hallmark of the Olmec art style. On the sides of the altar were carved additional figures in relief: four adults with elaborate shoulder capes and headdresses, each holding a gesticulating, crying, were-jaguar baby. What did this strange scene, so realistically and delicately carried out, really mean? Did we have here a king and his four wives, with the infants representing his own royal line of descent?
Needless to say, Stirling’s early finds at La Venta aroused great interest. One new monument was the most controversial of all. This was the great Stela calculated by Stirling to weigh fifty tons, the largest of all the monuments ever found at La Venta. It measures no less than fourteen feet in height. On its front surface is a complex scene executed in relief with the same mastery as the Quintuplets. Two standing human figures with towering headdresses face each other, while above them float chubby little dwarfs whose features again recall the divine Olmec were-jaguar. It is the face of the right-hand personage that is so curious, for here we do not have the flat-faced, almost African visage of the Colossal Heads, but a goateed individual with a long, aquiline nose: Among archeologists, he quickly became known as Uncle Sam.
In the first place, the realism and complexity of the relief led opponents of Olmec priority to claim the monument as clearly contemporary with the Classic Maya. Secondly, the presence of Uncle Sam inspired Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer and author of Kon-Tiki, among others, to claim a Nordic ancestry for at least some of the Olmec leadership. The first supposition was wrong, for Stela 3 is clearly Olmec and surely pre-Classic; as for the second, it is extremely misleading to use the testimony of artistic representations to prove ethnic theories. The Olmec were American Indians, not blacks (as Melgar had thought) or Nordic supermen.
But it was while digging in front of Altar 1 (a huge monolith representing a cross-legged Olmec leader holding a rope leading to bound captives on both sides) that Stirling found what was a harbinger of the riches yet to come from La Venta’s buried depths: jade. The Olmec were beyond any doubt the greatest craftsmen in the New World in the working of this extremely hard stone. Jade was far and away the most precious substance known to all the Indians of Mesoamerica. A great ruler like Emperor Moctezuma counted his riches not in gold (which was not known here until after CE 900) but in the precious green stone.
Jade is a generic term applied to several different kinds of minerals, of which the two most important are nephrite and jadeite. The peoples of Mesoamerica, including the Olmec, only knew the more precious jadeite. The word jade, in fact, was first applied to the green stones by the Spaniards in Mexico, who believed them to be effective in relieving kidney complaints and thus used the term piedra de hijada (stone of the kidney), later shortened to jade.
Until recently, the source of Mesoamerican jade was unknown. But in 1954, the late mineralogist William Foshag, knowing that jade is developed within formations of serpentine, suggested that jadeite pebbles and boulders could probably be found along the terraces of the Motagua River, which flows through serpentine hills in eastern Guatemala. This turned out to be the case. It is currently believed that the Classic Maya relied almost exclusively on this source for the exquisite jade used for plaques and other carvings found interred with their honored dead. But the best Maya jade is apple-green in color; only a fraction of Olmec jade is of this hue. The greatest Olmec pieces are, on the contrary, blue-green in color and quite translucent, while a few are of the transparent, dark green “jewel jade” so prized by the Chinese. Thus it appears that while the ancient Olmec got some of their raw material from the Motagua, like the later Maya, there was some other source for the blue-green variety. Unfortunately, that site is still unknown.
La Venta clearly cried out for a major archeological effort, and the Smithsonian Institution decided to back it. The Stirling group returned in 1942, with a great deal more comfort than previously, for the Mexican oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) had drilled a successful wildcat well in the vicinity and had made a camp at La Venta. They brought Dr. and Mrs. Stirling part way to La Venta by airplane. They had also run a canal connecting the island directly with the Tonalá River. The discovery of Olmec civilization at La Venta was therefore running a neck-and-neck race with the modern destruction of the site. Already settled on the island was Dr. Philip Drucker, a veteran of the Tres Zapotes dig. In addition to being an archeologist, Drucker was one of the greatest experts on the Indians of the Northwest Coast (British Columbia and Alaska) and loved adventure: He was at different times in his life a cowboy, a professional rodeo performer, an officer in the U.S. Navy, and a cattle rancher in the wilds of southern Veracruz. In 1942 and most subsequent seasons at La Venta, Drucker provided the continuity, whatever the institution in charge.
The 1942 season was fantastically successful: Two major tombs were found, unbelievably rich in jade offerings and other precious substances, each piece carved in the most sensitive and fully developed Olmec style. Stirling had little difficulty in persuading the National Geographic Society to back another expedition to La Venta in 1943: this time with Waldo Wedel of the Smithsonian, since Drucker was on active wartime duty with the Navy. Once more, there seemed to be no end to offerings and jade-stocked tombs: In addition, Wedel hit upon two of the buried serpentine pavement masks that are among the most striking features of La Venta.
And what were the world of archaeology’s thought about the Olmec “problem” at this time? In 1941, the Mexicans – principally Alfonso Caso and Miguel Covarrubias – were proclaiming that the Olmec civilization of Veracruz and Tabasco was the “mother culture” of Mexico. Stirling thought that way, too, for in a popular article that year he said of the Olmec: “Their culture, which in many respects reached a high level, is very early and may well be the basic civilization out of which developed such high art centers as those of the Maya, Zapotecs, Toltecs [probably meaning Teotihuacán], and Totonacs.”
But also in 1941, Thompson published his famous paper, attempting to demolish that theory. The effect this had on American archeology was profound, for by 1943, even Stirling had changed his mind about the age of Olmec civilization: “Their culture developed side by side with that of the Old Empire [i.e., Classic] Maya, but it differed widely in most aspects.”
La Venta would then supposedly have been abandoned “between A.D. 500 and 800,” according to Stirling. In subsequent years, interest in the Olmec subsided, except among the Mexicans. Covarrubias went on a kind of one-man crusade for the Olmec, continuing to proclaim their immense antiquity, but this was mainly based on his artistic intuition rather than any new data provided by the 1941-1943 digs at La Venta.
By 1950, with the perfection of the radiocarbon system of dating, it was clearly time to take another look at the Olmec “problem.” Who was right? In a major study of the Olmec brought out in 1952, Drucker himself leaned to a late date for La Venta, aligning it with the early Classic Maya (CE 300-600). But he was obviously not content with what was then known about the Olmec capital, for in 1955, he joined forces with Dr. Robert F. Heizer, a University of California archeologist who was the leading authority on the prehistoric Indians of his state, for a massive investigation of the main ceremonial group at the site, again under the auspices of the Smithsonian and supported financially by the National Geographic Society. By this time, enough was known of La Venta to enable them to concentrate their forces (fifty laborers working 100 days) to get the most information in the shortest time. They knew that most of the offerings and tombs at La Venta were placed in relation to an imaginary line that bisects the site in a north-south direction. In the following year, the first radiocarbon dates for La Venta began to appear from the University of Michigan laboratory: between 800 and 100 BCE.
In subsequent years, Heizer and Drucker returned to La Venta several times. More radiocarbon samples were gathered, the earlier ones rechecked. La Venta is, indeed, ancient, and it is certainly as strange a site as ever was.
It is now fairly certain that the first Olmec came to La Venta around 1100 years before Christ – as far back as the Early Formative. Where they came from remains unknown. Presumably, the island was then covered by a tall, tropical forest that they had to laboriously clear with stone axes and fire. These pioneers had a pretty clear idea of what they were to do: construct a great temple center along a natural ridge running in a north-south direction in about the middle of the island. Leveling off the ridge by cutting and filling (just like any modern engineer), they seem to have begun the great clay “pyramid” that eventually was to reach a height of over 100 feet, then a series of courts flanked by low mounds of specially selected colored clays to the north of it. This layout is not oriented to true north, but rather to a point 8° west of it. What did the orientation of the center line mean to the Olmec? We have no answer, but most scholars in this field think that an astronomical explanation must be sought - and adjusted for the night sky as it was 3,000 years ago.
The next building phase might have taken place between 1000 and 800 BCE and was marked by a stupendous display of organized work. The Olmec obviously believed in the principle of conspicuous waste when it came to expending labor and materials. Typical of this would be the features known as Massive Offerings. One of them was carried out in the following manner. First, an enormous pit representing the removal of 15,000 cubic feet of tough clay was dug down through a mound on the north of the Ceremonial Court, to a depth of sixteen feet. Then a course of serpentine blocks was placed on the bottom and the pit filled up again – but for what? Even more extraordinary were two other similar Massive Offerings. One such pit was fifty by sixty-one feet on a side and twenty-four feet deep: On its bottom had been placed over 1,000 tons of serpentine slabs. The third such feature (put in during the next building phase) measured over seventy-seven feet on a side, was thirteen feet deep, and some 60,000 cubic feet of material had been taken from it before the serpentine floor was laid in.
Even more mysterious are the three identical mosaic pavements that were set in place toward the end of this feverish period of construction. There are two on platforms flanking the south side of the Ceremonial Court and one just north of the Great Pyramid. Each consists of about 485 carefully shaped oblong blocks of serpentine covering an area of a little more than fifteen by twenty feet, set in colored clays. Although there has been some dispute about what the motif of the pavements is, the generally accepted idea is that it represents the mask of the Olmec were-jaguar, highly conventionalized, with the typical cleft at the top of the head and diamond-shaped appendages below the face. The contrast of the green serpentine with the yellow and orange sands that fill the features is, indeed, striking. Magnificent though they are to modern eyes, they also were destined to be Massive Offerings, for it appears that they were covered over almost as soon as they were finished. Lastly, on top of the clays that covered the mask of the Southeast Platform, the Olmec laid down an offering of twenty jade and serpentine celts (small stone axes) arranged as a kind of cross, with a concave mirror of hematite placed in the vertical bar of the “cross.” (More mirrors were found at La Venta in offerings of a slightly later date.)
These mirrors were made of some iron-rich ore that takes a high polish, such as hematite, ilmenite, or magnetite. The reflecting surfaces are concave, and it has been found that they had been ground, by a totally unknown process, to optical specifications, being just slightly parabolizing in curvature (the radius of curvature grows progressively greater as the edge is approached). They always have two perforations on one edge and thus could have been worn as chest ornaments: Indeed, sculptured figures at La Venta and San Lorenzo - another great Olmec site - prove this. But they must have had some other use. Experiments show that one can throw images of the outside world on a blank surface with them, and it is also sure that they can be used to start fires on a hot day. They must have given their owners, the Olmec rulers of La Venta, great ritual power and prestige.
On and on the site went after 800 BCE, probably being added to and dug into until its final abandonment, which, according to radiocarbon dates, must have been within the Middle Formative period, about 400 or 500 BCE. These two final building phases saw the careful placement of some of the finest Olmec offerings at La Venta and, in fact, all of the New World.
One of the richest such deposits was Offering No. 2, found in 1955, which has no fewer than fifty-one polished celts, mostly of jade or serpentine. Five of them are finely engraved with typically Olmec designs. Once more, these laboriously manufactured articles were wasted in their almost immediate burial.
Offering No. 4 was discovered in the late afternoon during the 1955 Drucker-Heizer expedition, just before the regular shift ended. “It was necessary to expose, record, photograph, and remove the find in the few hours of remaining daylight” because of the fear of looting overnight. Under the floor of the Ceremonial Court, sixteen figurines of jade or serpentine and six celts of the same materials had been arranged in a little group obviously meant to be a scene from real life. The figurines are typically Olmec, depicting men with loincloths and with bald or shaven heads that are deformed from childhood binding. One rather eroded figure stands with his back to a line of celts; the others are arranged about him and face him. Was he meant to be their leader? As the excavators, Drucker and Heizer, say, “We can only wonder.”
But this is not the end of the story. After the offering had been originally placed and covered up, a series of floors of brightly colored clays - orange, rose, yellow, and white - were laid down over the entire court. Then, no one knows how many years later, somebody dug a pit down through these floors as far as the tops of the figurines and celts; and then, just as mysteriously, filled the pit up again. Clearly, the people had kept some sort of record of where this offering was and had seemingly been rechecking to make sure it was still there.
These burials rival in richness some of the famous tombs of Old World archeology. Most of them were uncovered by the Stirling expeditions of 1942 and 1943, for they belong to the final building phases of La Venta and thus lie near the surface. Unfortunately, the extremely acid soil of La Venta over the centuries has eaten away all traces of skeletons; nothing is left but the most imperishable of the loot buried with the dead Olmec lord. The three best-stocked sepulchers were in Mound A-2, on the north side of the Ceremonial Court, along the center line. The northernmost one is, indeed, curious, for it was built of gigantic basalt columns that in their natural form imitate tombs of wooden logs. On the limestone-slab floor were found the bundled remains of what had probably been two infants, surrounded (as in all La Venta burials) with brilliant red pigment. When these children, who must have been princes among their own people, were laid to rest, they were accompanied by a treasure-trove in jade: four figurines (one a seated woman with a tiny hematite mirror fragment on her breast), a jade clamshell, beads, ear ornaments, an awl-like object that probably was used to draw sacrificial blood, a jade sting-ray spine, and a pair of jade hands. Also in the same tomb were a magnetite mirror and the tooth of an extinct giant shark.
Just to the south of this tomb was another, this time a sandstone sarcophagus. Again there was little or no trace of bones, but since it is big enough to contain an adult body, and pigment covered its floor, it was surely a tomb. Its exterior was carved with a fearsome representation of a flame-browed were-jaguar, while in its clay-filled cavity were found more beautiful jades: paper-thin ear spools (somewhat circular, out flaring objects set into the ear lobe), a serpentine figurine, and another “awl” for ceremonial bloodletting.
Then La Venta comes to an end. The cause and nature of its fate is lost in mystery. All construction comes to a halt, no more tombs are built and stocked, no more offerings are made beneath its multicolored floors. Its rulers and people are gone, and year after year, the nortes come howling in from the coast, shrouding the ruins of La Venta in drift sands. Olmec civilization had died.
Everything at La Venta is exotic, in the sense that it was brought from somewhere else. Even the brightly colored clays had been specially selected and brought to the island, for they are not indigenous. Likewise, the jade and serpentine (ton after ton of the latter) came from a distant and as yet unknown source. But the greatest wonder is that most of the volcanic basalt used in their monuments can only have come from the Tuxtla Mountains, sixty miles due west of La Venta.
Dr. Howel Williams is the leading expert on volcanoes. He has long been intrigued by the Olmec “problem”; and in 1960, he began explorations and studies with Robert Heizer that have largely solved the mystery of the rock source of the Olmec carvings at La Venta. By making thin sections of small pieces of rock taken from these monuments, it is possible to compare them under magnification with samples from identified lava flows in the Tuxtlas. It now seems that most of the La Venta carvings are made from basalt in the region of the Cerro Cintepec, an ancient cone among the many that make up the Tuxtla range. The lower slopes of these mountains are strewn with gigantic boulders of exactly the same kind of basalt. Apparently, the Olmec came here and either carved them on the spot or brought them to La Venta for working. Some are certainly large enough to make a fair-sized Colossal Head, and possibly their natural shape suggested the idea of the huge heads in the first place.
If this question has been answered, an even larger one remains. How did they ever get the stones to La Venta from the Tuxtlas? The engineering problems involved would be formidable even today. Certainly, part of the journey could have been on enormous rafts, floated down the westernmost feeder streams of the Coatzacoalcos River, then along the coast, east to the mouth of the Tonalá. But they would have had to have been dragged at least twenty-five miles overland to reach navigable waters within the Coatzacoalcos drainage. Since the Colossal Heads, for instance, weigh an average of eighteen tons each, the problem was, indeed, daunting.
During the fourth and last building stage at La Venta, the rulers suddenly hit upon a new architectural device: They surrounded the Ceremonial Court with a kind of fence made up of huge columns of prismatic basalt. These columns are also seen in the large tomb to its north. Where did they get these? As one flies along the jungle-covered coastline of the Tuxtla region, prismatic basalt can be seen in its natural state, the columns breaking off from the lava fields that once reached the sea. If this really was their source, the quarrying must have been a fearsome operation carried out from rafts, for this coast is often lashed by a heavy surf. One wonders how many great Olmec stones now rest on the bottom of the sea.
La Venta is dominated by its gigantic “pyramid,” an earth or clay construction now measuring about 100 feet in height, it sits upon a wide, low platform, on the south of which a number of fine monuments have been recovered. In all of the published plans of the main ceremonial complex of La Venta, the pyramid is shown looking as a pyramid should: four-sided, somewhat rectangular in a north-south direction, with a flat top. Back when the site was first mapped, an almost impenetrable jungle covered the structure, and the surveyor assumed, from a line of site cut across it, that it was perfectly normal in form. He was very wrong.
Encroaching “civilization” has revealed the true picture, which is quite strange, indeed. The oil camp of La Venta has now turned into a sizable and ugly town; one of the most sordid red-light districts in Mexico lies at the foot of the Great Pyramid, and the entire surface of this mighty construction has been completely cleared as a kind of park for the edification of the townsfolk and the ladies of easy virtue in the area.
Drucker and Heizer were the first to realize that this so-called pyramid was unlike anything they had ever seen before, and in 1968, Heizer and a University of California group made a detailed map of it. It now looks like a sort of truncated cone, but the sides of the cone are fluted; that is, ten enormous ridges, with gullies between, fan out on all sides. Some of this may be due to erosion, but the major part of this ridge-and-gully construction was deliberately made in ancient times. The whole thing resembles a gigantic, upside-down cupcake.
Heizer tried to puzzle out the reason for such a construction. Actually, the closest parallel to the form of the Great Pyramid can be seen in the same Tuxtla Mountains from which the stone for the monuments came. Dozens of small volcanic cones dot the region around the beautiful Lake Catemaco, in the center of the Tuxtlas. Flying over this region one day, the thought suddenly struck him: The La Venta pyramid was an imitation volcano. Exactly the same sort of ridges and gullies can be seen fanning out from each cone. Here was an example of architecture imitating nature.
As to why the Olmec did this, Heizer has a final suggestion. Wherever the Olmec homeland was, the people must have learned there how to move and carve huge basalt boulders. The Tuxtla Mountains would be the logical place: So, on moving to La Venta, they took “a little bit of home” with them, to remind them of their volcano-surrounded origin point. A search for ancient Olmec sites should be made in the Tuxtlas, though they may never be found. The same volcanoes were spewing cinders and lava until the eighteenth century, and the evidence may well lie deeply buried, never to be uncovered.