![]() ![]() That’s why, Beard suggests, it wasn’t the colossal stone heads but Olmec Wrestler (date unknown) that became “the poster boy not just for the Olmec but for all ancient Mexico,” beginning in the 1960s. In her new book, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization, classicist Mary Beard invokes the example of the Olmec heads to assert that “ how we look can confuse, even distort, our understanding of civilisations beyond our own.” She argues that 18th-century scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann cited the Apollo Belvedere-a sculpture of an idealized human form, either Greek or Roman, its date of creation unknown-as being the “very pinnacle of classical art.” Future generations understood the work as a manifestation of expertly worked out proportions and “civilized” society. The stone heads join the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge as some of archaeology’s greatest quandaries, indicating powerful and inexplicable prehistoric building abilities. Even now, researchers don’t quite understand how the Olmecs transported the material from quarries, or what the sculptures’ precise purpose was. Carved from single blocks of basalt, and reaching up to 10.8 feet tall, their particulars are still up for debate. As of 2018, archaeologists have located 17 stone heads (also called cabeza nextepetl), many around La Venta and San Lorenzo in the Tabasco region (near the original Tres Zapotes site). Serious discoveries commenced, including the revelation that the Maya civilization had actually evolved from this newly uncovered group, the Olmec. “One of our important objectives will be to try to determine whether the people who developed the culture of the Tres Zapotes region were Maya,” Stirling told the New York Times. Impressed, the National Geographic Society funded another expedition to the region. Stirling traveled to the region to photograph the head. Finally, in 1938, Smithsonian Institution archaeologist Matthew W. Today, hand-carved artifacts still offer our greatest opportunity for insight into their lives-and a testament to the potency of the art and craft that they left behind.Īfter Melgar y Serrano, public interest in Olmec sculpture languished for almost a century. In their own Nahuatl language, the Aztecs called the group “rubber people.” The Olmecs had indeed invented the material by mixing latex from Panama rubber trees with moonflower juice they would continue to be defined by what they made. ![]() The Aztecs, who lived millennia later (from the 13th through the 16th centuries), developed the moniker. Since their discovery, these Olmec heads have spurred new research and interpretations that, more than anything, offer insight into how we look at other cultures.Įven the Olmecs’ name derives from how other people saw them. By suggesting an ancient blending of Mexican and African cultures, Melgar y Serrano was implicitly arguing against the ideas of racial purity that led (and still lead) to violence and oppression. Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829 under an African-Mexican president, and Melgar y Serrano’s statement suggested ideas about race far ahead of his time (slavery, of course, was legal in the United States until 1865). Scholar José María Melgar y Serrano visited first, in 1862, theorizing that the sculpture’s “negroid” attributes indicated long-ago migrations from Africa to the “New World.” Immediately, perceptions of the artwork adopted political overtones. Rumors spread, opening up mysteries and lines of inquiry for future generations of archaeologists.Īs it turns out, the work was made by a pre-Columbian civilization that lived from about 1200–400 BC, called the Olmec (the head itself was probably made and buried before 900 BC). It had smooth, flattened features and appeared to be wearing a helmet. In 1858, a peasant discovered a massive stone head in the ground at Tres Zapotes in southeast Mexico, on the Gulf Coast.
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