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Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades

Stirling’s find of dated stela: Stirling 1939 (“knees,” “hurried,” 213), 1940a; Coe 1976b. Stirling’s position was held previously by William Henry Holmes, scourge of amateur “relic hunters.” In his
National Geographic
article, Stirling says the first giant head was discovered in 1858; others put the find at 1862 (Bernal 1969:29). Following an earlier, mistaken understanding of the Mesoamerican calendar, Stirling believed that the stela was earlier than now thought; I use the modern date. Because carbon-dating had not yet been invented, he had the dates of Maya emergence wrong, too. Still, he was right to be puzzled by the Olmec.

 

Second Veracruz trip, first Olmec article: Stirling 1940b (“designed,” “‘The ticks,’” 312; “basic civilization,” 333; “mysterious,” 334).

 

The Olmec: Among the few general book-length overviews are Coe 1996 (especially valuable for its illustrations of Olmec art); Pina Chan 1989; and Bernal 1969 (1968), the last still surprisingly useful despite its age. All espouse the “mother culture” view, which has come under increasing fire.

 

“enigmatic people”: Baird and Bairstow 2004:727. Similar language can be found in the
Eyewitness Travel Guide: Mexico
(New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2003), 254. These characterizations are common in the popular press (e.g., Stuart 1993a [“the Olmec stand for many as a kind of ‘mother culture’ to all the civilizations that came after, including the Maya and the Aztec,” 92]; Lemonick 1996 [“More than 1,500 years before the Maya…, the mysterious Olmec people were building the first great culture of Mesoamerica,” 56]).

 

Olmec emerge abruptly: Some researchers have hypothesized that Olmec society was stimulated into existence by a migration from the Pacific coast, but recent ceramics research in Veracruz casts doubt on this idea (Arnold 2003).

 

“quantum change”: Meggers 1975:17.

 

“There is now little doubt”: Coe 1994:62.

 

Bad name: Bernal 1969:11–12. Actually, the name is even worse than I indicated. “Olmec” doesn’t refer to a people, but to the political phenomenon that began and ended with their cities. The people in those cities may still be around, but called something else.

 

Mixe-Zoquean: Campbell and Kaufman 1976.

 

Olmec rubber: Hosler, Burkett, and Tarkanian 1999; Rodríguez and Ortiz 1994.

 

1800
B.C.:
Rust and Sharer 1988.

 

San Lorenzo: Coe and Diehl 1980; Cyphers ed. 1997.

 

Olmec theology: Reilly 1994.

 

Thrones changed into sculptures: Porter 1989.

 

Africa-Olmec and Shang-Olmec connection: For the Africa-Olmec connection, see Barton 2001; Winters 1979; Van Sertima 1976. Van Sertima’s claims are attacked in Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano, and Barbour 1997. For the Shang-Olmec connection, see Xu 1996; Meggers 1975; Ekholm 1969. I am grateful to Mike Xu for sending me a copy of his manuscript. Meggers was critiqued in Grove 1977 and responded in Meggers 1977.

 

Olmec sculptures of fetuses and pathological conditions: Tate and Bendersky 1999; Dávalos Hurtado and Ortiz de Zárate 1953. I am grateful to the Bancroft Library staffers who went to considerable trouble to find the second article for me.

 

Olmec appearance: Bernal 1969:76–79.

 

Mirrors: Heizer and Gullberg 1981.

 

Destruction of sculptures: Grove 1981.

 

La Venta: Rust and Sharer 1988. A succinct description is in Bernal 1969:35–43.

 

“not only engendered,” “established the pattern”: Bernal 1969:188. A well-argued contemporary version of this view is Diehl 2005.

 

Competitive interaction in Mesoamerica: Flannery and Marcus 2000 (“chiefdoms in the Basin,” 33). I thank Joyce Marcus for walking me through these ideas.

 

Zapotec rise: Blanton et al. 1999; Marcus and Flannery 1996; Flannery and Marcus 2003 (“virtually unoccupied,” 11802; radiocarbon dates, 11804); Spencer 2003.

 

Oldest writing: Marcus pers. comm. (750
B.C.
), 1976 (glyphs and translation); Flannery and Marcus 2003. See also, Serrano 2002. The reason I have called the temple carving the first “securely” dated writing is that two other candidates for the title of first written text exist, but neither can be dated accurately because their archaeological context is unknown. Both are from the Tlatilco culture north of present-day Mexico City; they may have been made as early as 1000
B.C.
One seal shows three glyphs that some think resemble Olmec writing. The other, a true mystery, bears what look like letters in a script of which there are no other extant examples (Kelley 1966). A third candidate for earliest Olmec writing exists. In the 1990s a team led by Mary Pohl of the University of Florida discovered a cylindrical greenstone seal two miles from La Venta. Dated to 650
B.C.,
the seal bears a bas-relief bird with a comic-book speech bubble bursting from its mouth. Pohl and two colleagues identified the glyphs in the bubble as precursors to the Mayan glyphs for the date 3-Ajaw (Pohl, Pope, and von Nagy 2002; Stokstad 2002). The identification is controversial. The text cannot be Mayan, they say, because Maya civilization was not firmly set in place until centuries later. Nor can it be Olmec, because other Olmec texts seem not to be related to Maya glyphs. According to John Justeson, a linguistic anthropologist at the State University of New York in Albany who has deciphered other Olmec texts, “Although many accept the greenstone glyphs as plausibly being writing, what [Pohl’s team] read as a ritual calendar date on the ceramic is scarcely accepted by anyone” (email to author).

 

Inanna temple example: Urton 2003:15–16.

 

Zero as number: Teresi 2002:79–87 (GPA example, 80).

 

Tres Zapotes date: In fact, the initial 7 (the
baktun
figure) was missing, because the stela was broken. Stirling guessed that it was a 7, a supposition that was proven correct in 1972, when the other part of the stela was discovered (Cohn 1972).

 

Tentative assignation: In
The Olmec World,
for instance, Bernal never directly says that the Olmec invented zero. He merely describes the Long Count, remarking that it “necessarily implies knowledge of the zero” (Bernal 1969:114).

 

More than a dozen systems of writing: Coe 1976a:110ff. Coe lists thirteen forms, but does not include Olmec and whatever is on the Tlatilco seals.

 

Deciphered Olmec stela: Stuart 1993a, 1993b; Justeson and Kaufman 1993; 1997; 2001 (Chiapas potsherd translation, 286).

 

Monte Albán dispute: I have borrowed the formulation in Zeitlin 1990. Some argue that not enough data exist to resolve the question (O’Brien and Lewarch 1992).

 

Slabs as slain enemies: Marcus 1983:106–08, 355–60.

 

Fight with Tilcajete: Spencer and Redmond 2001.

 

N ˜udzahui marriage politics: Spores 1974.

 

8-Deer’s story: Pohl 2002; Byland and Pohl 1994:119–60, 241–44; Caso 1977–79 (vol. 1):69–83, (vol. 2):169–84; Smith 1962; Clark 1912.

 

Wheeled toys: Stirling 1940b:310–11, 314; Charnay 1967:178–86.

 

Egypt and wheel: Wright 2005:46.

 

Moldboard plow: Temple 1998 (“so inefficient,” 16). I am grateful to Dick Teresi for directing me to this book and example (“as if Henry Ford”: e-mail, Teresi to author).

 

Lack of relation between technology and social complexity: I lift this point bodily from Webster 2002:77. See also Ihde 2000.

 

Osmore Valley geography: I am grateful to Mike Moseley and Susan DeFrance for guiding me through this area, and to Patrick Ryan Williams and Donna Nash for showing me Moquegua and Cerro Baúl.

 

Wari and Tiwanaku: A succinct overview is La Lone 2000. Surprisingly little has been written about Wari. Among the few recent books are Isbell and McEwan eds. 1991 and Schreiber 1992. The most widely cited recent works on Tiwanaku are Kolata 1993 and Kolata ed. 1996–2003. William Isbell has pointed out that the two names refer simultaneously to cities, states, and religions. He has suggested that the Spanish names Tiahuanaco and Huari be used for the physical ruins and the Aymara and Runa Suni spellings Tiwanaku and Wari be used for these polities’ political and cultural styles (Isbell 2001: 457).

 

Sixth-century climatic disaster: Fagan 1999:Chap. 7. The major apparent victims were the Moche, who flourished in a three-hundred-mile strip along the northern coast after 100
A.D.
Drought put Moche society in crisis; El Niño rains led to floods that destroyed entire villages and canal systems. El Niño also changed ocean current patterns to deposit river sediments on the shore. These quickly turned to dunes, which winds blew toward the Andes, threatening farmland. The Moche tried to regroup—and failed.

 

Potato’s advantages and status vis-a-vis maize: McNeill 1991, Murra 1960.

 

Wari religion: It should be emphasized that the common image of the Staff God did not mean that the deity meant the same thing in every culture (Makowski 2001).

 

Terracing, arable land, abandonment: Peruvian ecologist Luis Masson has estimated that 1.2 to 1.4 million acres was terraced on just the west side of the Andes, 75 percent of which is now abandoned (pers. comm., cited in Denevan 2001:173–75); Cobo 1990:213 (“flights of stairs”); Moseley 2001:230–38 (“patenting and marketing,” 233; prospering of Wari despite climatic assault, 232).

 

Isbell-Vranich article: Isbell and Vranich 2004 (“repetitive,” 170).

 

Wari and Tiwanaku in Cerro Baúl: Interviews, DeFrance, Moseley, Nash, Williams; Williams, Isla, and Nash 2001.

 

Geertz’s four states: Geertz 1980:121–22.

 

Chiripa: The major recent work on Chiripa is described in Hastorf 1999. A summary is Stanish 2003:115–17.

 

Pukara: Stanish 2003:138–48, 156–60, 283–84. Stanish suggests that a drought that began in about 100
A.D.
may have induced Pukara’s collapse (157). But the drought may not have occurred—its existence has been deduced from a study of Lake Titicaca bottom sediments (Abbott et al. 1997). But the lake-sediment data, as the authors noted, conflicted with previous ice-core studies; in addition, the depositional processes were sufficiently poorly understood that one could not judge when the putative dry periods began and ended.

 

Rise of Tiwanaku: Stanish 2003:chap. 8, 2001.

 

Tiwanaku as predatory state: Kolata 1993:81–86, 243–52 (“predatory,” 243; “lower cost,” 245).

 

Akapana: Interviews, Nicole Couture, Michael Moseley, Alexei Vranich; author’s visit; Cieza de León 1959:282 (“how human hands”); Kolata 1993:103–29. Wendell Bennett excavated at Akapana in the 1930s, but the first major excavations at Tiwanaku in general did not occur until the late 1960s, with the work of researchers from the Instituto Nacional de Arqueología de Bolivia, led by Carlos Ponce Sanginés. Ponce’s work has come under fire, because he published little of his data and because he “restored” Tiwanaku landmarks inaccurately. In the 1980s Alan Kolata of the University of Chicago led a large team that produced the first comprehensive overview of the city and its environs.

 

Kalasasaya and Gateway of the Sun: Author’s interviews, Couture, Vranich; Kolata 1993:143–49.

 

Isbell-Vranich vision of city: Isbell and Vranich 2004.

 

Lack of markets: Kolata 1993:172–76 (“a city was,” “symbolically,” 173).

 

Vranich picture of Tiwanaku: Interviews, Vranich; Vranich 2001; Vranich et al. 2001:150–52; Isbell and Vranich 2004.

 

Cerro Baúl final days: Interviews, deFrance, Moseley, Nash, Williams; Moseley et al. 2005 (“was likely,” “Later,” 17268).

 

Chimor history: Sakai 1998; Moseley and Cordy-Collins eds. 1990.

 

Chimor irrigation and canal: Denevan 2001:152–57. Some scholars attribute the uphill sections to tectonic uplift; Denevan finds the regularity of the error difficult to reconcile with tectonic causes (156).

 

Layout of Chan Chan: Shimada 2000:esp. 102; Moseley 1975a.

 

Fall of Chimor and execution of Qhapaq Yupanki: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:102–03; Rowe 1946:206.

 

Chimor and Thupa Inka: Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999:72–73, 77–79; Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:102–03, 112–15.

 

Nazca lines: The original report, which I have not seen, is Mejía Xesspe 1940. Von Däniken’s claims are found in, among many other titles, Von Däniken 1969, 1998. Calendrical and astronomical theories are (to my mind) convincingly dismissed in Morrison and Hawkins 1978. The best explanation I know of the current geology-and-water hypothesis is Aveni 2000. For a variant, see Proulx, Johnson, and Mabee 2001.