Coe presented his San Lorenzo findings in 1967 at a now-famous conference held at Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C. He says his paper persuaded most doubters that Stirling and Covarrubias were correct: that the San Lorenzo Olmec did, in fact, predate any other Mesoamerican civilization.

But Coe didn't stop there. The unrivaled scale and splendor of the site's ruins, he argued, suggested that San Lorenzo had a powerful influence on neighboring peoples, and that its iconographic vision, whether by choice or by force, became universally adopted.

"The distinctive kind of pottery that you find in San Lorenzo -- especially the pottery that is carved with designs related to the Olmec religion, the Olmec iconography -- is widespread in Mesoamerica," says Coe, reeling off a list of finds at sites populated during what anthropologists refer to as the early and middle formative periods, 1800 B.C. to 300 B.C.

"I always felt that all of this stuff originated in the San Lorenzo area. It was just identical; there wasn't any question that it was Olmec. ... At the time San Lorenzo was such a huge, powerful site that, boy, you'd be crazy not to think the stuff came from there," he says.

Not everyone was convinced, however. Over the years an influential group of researchers argued vehemently that there was no hard evidence linking Olmec-style objects unearthed at other sites to those found at San Lorenzo. Bold claims for the site's primacy were speculative at best, they said, since plenty of other sites from the period showed evidence of advanced art, architecture and social organization. Why shouldn't we credit these sister cities with contributing to the rise of the Maya and other advanced Mesoamerican cultures?

Coe counters by arguing that this whole line of enquiry is based on a misguided conservatism. "It goes back to the older Maya scholars who, at first, just could not conceive of the fact that there was a civilization earlier than theirs. It took years to convince these people -- I mean there was absolutely knuckle-headed opposition against all the radiocarbon dates, all the stratigraphy, everything else. They just couldn't bring themselves around to the idea that Mayan culture was derivative in any way, or appeared later than the Olmec. Now there is no more controversy, because you'd be out of your mind to hold up that point of view.

"The same thing has been going on with the idea of San Lorenzo and the Olmec heartland being the cultura madre. And again, just like the previous controversy about the dating, these guys are going to have to give up eventually."

For now, however, proponents of the "sister cultures" theory are holding their ground. Kent Flannery, a professor and museum curator at the University of Michigan, and David Grove, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, are among he most prominent. In a harshly worded rebuttal to the Science paper, published in the August 9 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Flannery, Grove and eight additional co-authors blasted Blomster, Neff and Glascock for their paper's "sampling bias, anthropological implausibility, and logical non sequiturs."

"For more than 50 years," the article says, "there have been two competing models for the role that these societies played in the development of later Mesoamerican civilization. For most archaeologists, each region is considered to have contributed its share of key elements. ... For a vocal minority, however, the Olmec are seen as a 'mother culture' that dominated, inspired, and ultimately raised the other regions to the level of civilization. This feat was allegedly achieved through the diffusion of an art style in which Olmec cosmology, religion, ideology, and iconography somehow lay encoded. This view downplays evidence that each region contributed its own repertoire of ceramic motifs, some more varied and elaborate than those at San Lorenzo, and that in the adoption of features like adobe architecture, lime plaster, stone masonry, and solar or astral building orientation, the Olmec lagged behind the highlands."

When using ancient objects to determine who might have influenced whom, researchers must first establish an artifact's origin, or provenance. If a decorated bowl, for example, was created in a particular cultural center and then exported into the hinterlands, anthropologists might infer a patron-to-client relationship. Proving that a bowl of similar design and quality was actually produced in the hinterlands might indicate a cultural exchange occurring on more equal terms.

Published by the Office of Research.

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