The Mother Culture

Nearly a thousand years before Alexander the Great, Veracruz was home to a magnificent city of the first Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmecs. The Olmec people probably appeared along the central Gulf coast between 1500 and 1300 b.c. Their history before that is a blank — even their name for themselves is unknown. (“Olmec” is a modern label borrowed by archaeologists from early postconquest accounts of a “People of Rubber” in southeastern Mexico.) By about 1300 b.c., the Olmecs were living in the Coatzacoalcos River Valley and had developed a distinctive art style. Close to an obscure present-day village named San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, they founded a ceremonial building complex on a tremendous raised earthen platform. I’m sorry to say that the site is nothing much to look at today, partly because it was deliberately destroyed and buried in ancient times and partly because the most spectacular sculptures were taken to museums elsewhere. But it was a revelation for archaeologists fifty or sixty years ago.