Introduction

Shortly before the Spanish Conquest, Aztec priests buried an ancient Olmec carving as an offering in their paramount temple, the Templo Mayor, at the heart of their capital Tenochtitlan in central Mexico. This small greenstone figure, a 2000-year-old object originally from distant Gulf Coast lands, symbolizes the fundamental place that the Olmecs held in Meso-american culture. It represents the crystallization of a constellation of cultural traits that first appeared in the Formative period and were to continue as the foundation of indigenous culture in Mesoamerica as late as Aztec times. These cultural traits were tangible signs of significant social changes that took place in Formative Mesoamerica. This was the time of a transition in social structure that led to the emergence of rulers who centralized power and institutionalized social hierarchy. Traditionally, scholars have considered the Olmec to have represented an advanced chiefdom type of society. Nevertheless, evidence emerging for multi-tiered settlement patterns, imposing palace structures, and gifting relationships with elites in distant lands strongly suggests that the Olmec had a state-level society.

Here we trace the emergence of core Mesoamerican social structure and cultural traits and examine the role of the Olmec in shaping their development. We focus on the Olmec sites of the Mexican Gulf Coast region. There is disagreement over the role played by the Olmec polities of southern Veracruz and western Tabasco during the roughly thousand year-long period during which the Mesoamerican (see Americas, Central: Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya; Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica) cultural framework of rulership, gift economics, trade, gaming, religiosity, literacy, and historical praxis emerged. Over the course of the twentieth century, one group of scholars came to favor a ‘mother culture’ model giving the Olmec preeminence in the formation of Mesoamerican cultural patterns. Another group of scholars has favored a more decentralized vision of inter-regional cultural hybridization whereby emerging polities across the central core of Mesoamerica mutually contributed to, and participated in, the discourse of creation of statecraft and its attendant systems of rituality and symbol. The most important of the Olmec contemporaries are the sites of Coapexco, Tlapacoya, and Tlatilco in the in the Basin of Mexico, Chiapa de Corzo, San Isidro, and Libertad in Chiapas, Chalcat-zingo in Morelos, Teopantecuanitliin in Guerrero, La Blanca in west Guatemala, and Chalchuapa in El Salvador. The investigations are the work of archaeologists such as Grove, Gillespie, Cyphers, Niederberger, Tolstoy, Paradis, Martinez Donjutin, Love, and Clark and other New World Archaeological Foundation archaeologists.