The Middle Formative, 1200BC-400BC

Sat, Aug 15, 2009

Giant heads are a feature that is particular to Olmec culture and no other in Mesoamerica. (Photo:Mexicanwave)

The Middle Formative era of Mesoamerican development was dominated by the Olmec. The Olmec constructed the most advanced and powerful polities of their time, although relatively little is known of these ingenious and mysterious people. They are generally attributed with developing the first Mesoamerican calendars, as well as written glyphs. They spoke a Mixe-Zoquean language that survives only in highland Oaxaca and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Campbell and Kaufman).

Olmec culture originated on Mexico’s gulf coast but came to dominate much of Mesoamerica. The site of San Lorenzo in Veracruz dates to 1500BC, when it was settled as a simple farming village. Just 150 years later, San Lorenzo had developed a level of socio-political complexity sufficient for an elite to mobilise a sizeable labour force, evidenced by the large-scale landscape and public works projects uncovered there. Little is known about Olmec leaders, except they were believed to be imbued with divine powers.

Subsequently, by 1150BC, San Lorenzo had acquired all the features that distinguish Olmec civilisation – giant stone heads, monumental public architecture, Mesoamerica’s first known ball court, a wealth of ceramic figurines, vessels and iconographic motifs. Many of these features – monumental architecture and ball courts especially – would become chief characteristics of Mesoamerican civilisation as a whole.

By 900BC, San Lorenzo was in decline and eclipsed by the polity of La Venta, where archaeological finds include elite residences, monumental architecture, tombs, offerings and mosaic masks. By the end of the middle formative, around 400BC, La Venta and its contemporary Olmec polities – Laguna de los Cerros and Tres Zapotes – were in irrevocable decline. The widespread influence of Olmec culture was drawing to a close, soon to disappear entirely.

For many years, scholars believed that Olmec culture was the colonial master of many contemporaneous cultures, as well as the originator and ‘mother culture’ of all subsequent Mesoamerican developments. This is no longer believed to be the case.

Many styles and symbols once thought to be classically Olmec have been discovered in great quantities at contemporaneous sites – sometimes in quantities far greater than those in the Olmec heartland. Scholars now believe that such cultures flourished alongside the dominant Olmec polities, were heavily influenced by them, but were not necessarily subordinate to them. Shared stylistic features are now often called ‘X-Complex’ rather then Olmec style.

Such contemporaneous cultures were not as powerful or advanced as the Olmec, but were reasonably complex nonetheless, belonging to a network of chiefdoms that traded goods and shared a common system of emblems. Their societies were stratified into elite and commoners. The elite had access to luxury trade goods, lived in larger homes and were buried in more elaborate tombs.

In the valley of Oaxaca, the polity of San José Mogote was the centre of power and economic activity for a host of secondary and tertiary centres – the former possessed public architecture, the latter were simple agricultural villages. In Chalcatzingo in Morelos, a large civic-ceremonial precinct is strongly reminiscent of Olmec monumental art. Some argue that this site traded closely with the gulf coast Olmec, emulated their style and may even have had marriage ties to it.

In the Mayan lowlands, development was rapid from the middle Formative period, but seems to have occurred without much Olmec influence. Very few Olmec items have been identified in the earliest Mayan settlement of Petén and they did not participate in the same trade networks as the Chalcatzingo and Oaxaca chiefdoms.

Bookmark this post: