People began living in San Lorenzo's environs more than 3,000 years ago. The city itself, arrayed around a huge man-made plateau, was constructed around 1150 B.C. It thrived for some 250 years, supporting thousands of residents. At some point around 900 B.C., San Lorenzo met its doom, probably by the hand of an invader. Though the defeated city was re-occupied, its time as the Olmec capital was over.

Olmec culture as a whole, on the other hand, continued to thrive for another 500 years, with cities such as La Venta -- located near present-day Tabasco, Mexico -- inheriting the mantle of art and culture pioneered at San Lorenzo. By around 400 B.C., these cities too were abandoned. The collapse was so complete that by the time of the Spanish Conquest, Aztec residents of Tenochtitlan knew only through legend that they ruled over lands once occupied by a power at least as great as their own.

The Aztec did, however, inadvertently provide the lost civilization a name. Aztec ambassadors explained to Hernán Cortez that the people he'd encountered along Central Mexico's coastal plain --the heartland of ancient San Lorenzo's reach and influence -- were called "rubber men," or "Olmec" in the Aztec's native Náhuatl, because they supplied the rubber balls used in ritual games. European scholars later applied the term to the distinctive Gulf Coast pottery, ceremonial axes and anthropomorphic sculptures that kept turning up in private collections.

At first, neither historians nor art experts quite knew what to make of these artifacts. In the middle of the 19th century, anthropologists who published a description of the "colossal heads" located in west-central Mexico suggested they were evidence of a lost tribe of Africans. Others offered even more outlandish theories.

Such ideas notwithstanding, over the years additional finds added to a growing sense that there was, at the very least, a common aesthetic at work among the objects' creators. Eventually scholars surmised that Olmec artifacts represented the work of a separate and distinct Mesoamerican civilization. As the idea of Olmec originality gained currency, the question of whether they predated, or were contemporaneous with, other indigenous cultures in the region rose to the forefront of academic debate. This became known as the "Olmec problem."

In the 1940s, formal surveys and excavations of Olmec sites near Veracruz, Mexico -- most famously at the Mexican Gulf Coast sites of Tres Zapotes and La Venta by Matthew Stirling of the Smithsonian Institution -- had formally documented both the antiquity and uniqueness of the Olmec culture. Eventually, using radiocarbon dating and other techniques, Stirling, along with his wife, Marion, and their collaborators, advanced the theory that the Olmec and their immediate ancestors were first in the sequence of pre-Columbian civilizations that later produced both the Maya and Aztec. By 1942, one of Stirling's colleagues, the legendary Mexican archaeologist Miguel Covarrubias, had so fully embraced the idea of Olmec primacy that he declared, "This great culture is without doubt the mother of the other cultures."

Michael Coe, author and emeritus professor of anthropology at Yale University, is widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on the ancient Olmec and Maya. Early in his career he embraced the work of Stirling and Covarrubias, eventually leading excavations during the mid-1960s that greatly expanded these scholars' earlier investigations.

During three digging seasons at San Lorenzo, for example, Coe used a combination of radiocarbon dating, stratigraphic excavation, and site mapping to build a strong case for that city as the locus of Olmec primacy.

"Up until this point nobody had really mapped an Olmec site properly, and no Olmec site had been dug to the bottom stratigraphically," Coe recalled during a conversation from his home in New Haven, Conn. "The previous work at La Venta and elsewhere didn't convince a lot of people, simply because they didn't use these methods."

Published by the Office of Research.

©2006 Curators of the University of Missouri. Click here to contact the editor.