The Mysterious Origins of the Olmec Civilization

The enigma of the Olmec, they left colossal stones, deeply carved in the form of helmeted heads, with Afro-Asian countenances serene and serious, but only hinting at their origins. The large thick lips, characteristically down-turned at the corners, and the broad flat nose separating eyes with a hint of epicanthic folds have puzzled and intrigued explorers and scientists alike for thousands of years.

The seventeen monumental carvings have come to represent the mystery of a society that was in reality the "mother culture" for all the civilizations in meso-america that followed. And all cultures in that area did come after the Olmec, whose cities were cultural centers from at least 2000 BC to around 200 BC.

Their homeland was situated along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in the present day states of Veracruz and Tabasco, on the banks of the Coatzacoalcos River. The dated evidence indicates San Lorenzo Tenochititlan was the first center of Olmec society by as much as 1000 years before La Venta, which became the hub of activity after the decline of San Lorenzo, around 900 BC.

Advanced Culture

From the very first city built, the Olmec engineers included basalt lined underground aqueducts or drainage networks and their crop planting was organized and timed by precise astronomical calculations aided by their advanced mathematics.

The written language, also very advanced, consisted of two types of hieroglyphs, some were logograms representing things or ideas, and other glyphs to indicate syllables that together form a complete grammar. This writing system was the prototype for all the written languages of meso-america that came after, Epi-Olmec, Zapotec, and most notably the Mayan hieroglyphic writing system.

Commercial Empire

The Olmec trading empire was vast at this time with influences as far west as Zazacatla, just 25 miles south of Mexico City and east into Guatemala and Honduras. There are even indications of contact with the Chavin society of northern Peru. The Olmec culture had spread so widely that they held sway over the area that, after their decline, would combine that of both the Aztec and Mayan civilizations at the peak of their power.

The evidence of their geographic range was sparse until 2005 when 1600 pieces of Olmec ceramics were subjected to neutron activation analysis that confirmed that these had all been produced and exported by the Olmec throughout Mexico and Central America. Recent finds in 2007, in the Mexican state of Guerrero are even now extending the record of Olmec influence.

Although the jade they were so fond of carving was imported from as far away as Guatemala, the basalt for metates, drainage tiles and the monumental carvings came from the quarry of Llano del Jicaro only four miles from the Olmec city of Laguna do los Cerros in the Taxtla mountains on the gulf coast. Research shows that the monumental carvings were "roughed in" at the quarry and then the heads were finished at the installation site.

Olmec Origins

The origins of the materials they so artistically and skillfully carved are known but their origins, the people that developed such an advanced culture at so early a period in time, are obscure. There are tantalizing hints that point in equally curious directions to widely varying geographical locations.

Accepted as most likely, in academia, is the land bridge crossing from Asia over the Bering Straits and from there populating the north, central and south Americas. The discovery in 1995 of the "Ice Maiden", a frozen mummy found at 20,000 feet on a mountain in northern Peru, gave genetic evidence that the young female was descended from the Ngobe people of Panama but had traits commonly found in people from Taiwan and Korea. Did these newcomers populate the land or did they pass through the already existing Olmec empire on their way south?

An alternate theory is a migration by sea going vessels. In 1929 Marshall H. Seville (Director of the Museum of American Indians, New York) officially gave the name "Olmec" to the peoples that founded the mother culture of meso-america. Named with the Aztec word for the people that lived in the area while the Aztecs ruled southern Mexico. The name means "people from the land of rubber" but is often shortened to "rubber people" and was the name the Aztec gave to the people that inhabited the land over a thousand years after the original founders had disappeared.

People of the Sea

When the Spanish arrived in the early 1500's the indigenous people referred to the "people of the sea" when speaking of the civilization that had carved the monumental heads. One of those Spaniards, the infamous priest Diego de Landa, wrote of this culture as having made twelve migrations to the New World, while a contemporary Mayan historian, Ixtlixochitl, records that the Olmec came to Mexico in "ships of barks", that they landed at Pontochan and proceeded to establish themselves. Add to this the very West African features of the colossal heads and you get a picture of seafarers colonizing a new land.

Early trips by Arab and Chinese fleets to the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean and then following the prevailing currents to the Caribbean Islands and on past Cuba, then into the Gulf of Mexico are recorded and they are said to have been using charts that had been made thousands of years before. Perhaps the ancestors of the Olmec people created those early maps.

Whether these monumental stone carvers came to Central America by land bridge or ocean going vessel (or flying saucer as some would have it) the mysterious creators of Mexico's Olmec heads will remain an enigma until future archeological discoveries have revealed their secrets.