The Olmec city of Tres Zapotes may have owed its longevity to a new form of government

By LIZZIE WADE

March/April 2017

On a sweltering day in 1862 at the foot of the Tuxtla Mountains in the Mexican state of Veracruz, a farmworker was clearing a cornfield when he hit something hard and smooth lodged in the earth. He thought it was the rounded base of an iron cauldron buried upside down, and, it being the 1860s, he reported the find to the owner of the hacienda where he worked. The farmworker’s boss told him to dig up the cauldron immediately and bring it to him. As the farmworker labored to uncover the object, he realized he had found not a large iron bowl, but a gargantuan stone sculpture with a pair of glaring eyes, a broad nose, and a downturned mouth. What had appeared to be the base of a cauldron was actually the top of a helmet worn by the glowering figure. What the farmworker had unearthed was a colossal Olmec head, one of the first clues to the existence of that ancient culture. Over the next century and a half, archaeologists would uncover many more of these heads along the Mexican Gulf Coast and discover the ancient cities where they were carved. The site of that first fateful discovery became known as Tres Zapotes, after a type of fruit tree common in the area. Along with the sites of San Lorenzo and La Venta, Tres Zapotes was one of the great capitals of the Olmec culture, which emerged by 1200 B.C. as one of the first societies in Mesoamerica organized into a complex social and political hierarchy. The key to the Olmecs’ rise appears to have been a strong, centralized monarchy. The colossal heads, each one depicting a particular individual, are likely portraits of the Olmec kings who ruled from ornate palaces at San Lorenzo and La Venta. Even though Tres Zapotes yielded the earliest evidence for Olmec kingship, 20 years of survey and excavations there suggest that, at its height, the city adopted a very different form of government, one in which power was shared among multiple factions. Further, while other Olmec capitals lasted between 300 and 500 years, Tres Zapotes managed to survive for nearly two millennia. The city, therefore, may have weathered intense cultural and political shifts not by doubling down on traditional Olmec monarchy, but by distributing power among several groups that learned to work together. According to University of Kentucky archaeologist Christopher Pool, who has spent his career excavating the city, that cooperative rule may have helped Tres Zapotes endure for centuries after the rest of Olmec society collapsed. When Pool arrived at Tres Zapotes in 1996, he was the first archaeologist in over 40 years to take a serious interest in the site. Tres Zapotes had been recognized as an important Olmec center since shortly after the discovery of the colossal head, and in the decades to follow it had yielded a plethora of intricate figurines and stone monuments, including another colossal head. But important details of the site’s history remained unknown, including its size and how long it had been occupied. Pool set out to map the full extent of the ancient city, survey the ceramics he found scattered across the ground, and excavate the most compelling areas. Battling dense fields of sugarcane, swarms of mosquitoes, and the occasional poisonous snake, Pool painstakingly reconstructed the layout of Tres Zapotes and how it had changed over time, and began to be able to compare it to the other great Olmec capitals. Between 1000 and 400 B.C., in a period called the Middle Formative, Tres Zapotes was a minor regional center covering around 200 acres. At the time, La Venta and its all-powerful king dominated the Olmec heartland. Like its predecessor San Lorenzo, which flourished between 1200 and 900 B.C., La Venta was organized around a single dominant plaza featuring administrative buildings, elaborate monuments, and elite residences. The kings whose likenesses are memorialized by the colossal heads lived in palaces that brimmed with precious exotic goods, such as greenstone imported from Guatemala and polished iron-ore mirrors from Oaxaca and Chiapas. Their subjects, meanwhile, lived in modest households arrayed around the central plaza. The concentration of wealth and power in the center of the city, as well as art that glorified individual rulers, suggests that “the Olmecs had a cult of the ruler,” says Barbara Stark, an archaeologist at Arizona State University who works on the Gulf Coast of Mexico.

During La Venta’s height, Tres Zapotes operated under a similar model. As the nineteenth-century farmworker was the first to discover, it too had rulers represented by colossal stone heads. Despite being a relatively small city, it was also organized around a dominant central plaza. Elite burials discovered by Pool were filled with grave goods such as ceramic goblets and jade beads fashioned into jewelry. Another burial Pool uncovered contained no objects at all, hinting at possible social or class differences within the city’s population at that time. While Pool doubts that Tres Zapotes was under La Venta’s direct control during the Middle Formative period, it was clearly part of the same cultural and political tradition. Around 400 B.C., La Venta abruptly collapsed. Archaeologists still aren’t sure why, but they have found evidence that traders stopped bringing luxury goods into the city. “A lot of [the Olmec rulers’] authority was supported by great displays of exotic wealth,” Pool says. When access to those goods was cut off, the resulting loss of status could have destabilized the monarchy’s control. Evidence shows that the city was quickly abandoned, and, absent any mass graves or other signs of violence, it seems that people likely poured out of the once-grand capital, looking for a new place to call home. Researchers believe that it’s possible many of them moved to Tres Zapotes, 60 miles to the west. The city quickly expanded, covering 1,200 acres by the beginning of the Late Formative, shortly after 400 B.C. As he mapped the site’s growth, Pool discovered that the newly dominant Tres Zapotes didn’t look much like its predecessors, San Lorenzo and La Venta. They had both been organized around one outsized and opulent central plaza. In Tres Zapotes, however, Pool identified four separate plazas evenly spaced throughout the city, each about half a mile apart and ranging from about four to nine acres in size. “No one of these plaza groups is dramatically larger than the others,” Pool says. He also discovered that their layouts are nearly identical. Each has a temple pyramid on its west side, a long platform along its north edge, and a low platform set on an east-west line through its middle. According to John Clark, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University who studies the Formative period, “The site pattern is completely different from anything else I know for an Olmec site.” It’s so different, in fact, that archaeologists have dubbed the Late Formative culture at Tres Zapotes “epi-Olmec.” Pool wondered if the seat of power in Tres Zapotes had moved from plaza to plaza over time, perhaps as the various groups jockeyed for control. But when he radiocarbon dated material from middens behind each plaza’s long mound, he discovered that they had all been occupied at the same time, from about 400 B.C. to A.D. 1. The ceramics Pool recovered from the different plazas were similar in style and technique, providing more evidence that they were occupied simultaneously—and that no one group dominated the others. Pool realized he wasn’t looking at signs of political conflict. He was looking at signs of political cooperation. “There was a change in political organization from one that was very centralized, very focused on the ruler,” he says, “to one that shared power among several factions.” Pool is careful to point out that Tres Zapotes wasn’t a democracy as we think of it today. “I’m not saying that everybody in this society was getting together and agreeing on things,” he says. “It may have been more like an oligarchy.” But there are signs that Tres Zapotes may have been more equitable than traditional Olmec capitals. For instance, the elites in the plazas and the commoners who lived outside of them all used similar styles of pottery. “Everyone pretty much has the same range of stuff,” says Pool. He has discovered that, unlike at La Venta and San Lorenzo, the leaders of Tres Zapotes didn’t import exotic goods, and so weren’t reliant on trade networks. Craft workshops attached to the plazas show that the people at Tres Zapotes made ceramics and obsidian tools locally. “All that,” says Pool, “suggests a more flattened kind of sociopolitical hierarchy than you see elsewhere.”