Visualizing Culture, Society, and Ideology in Mesoamerica: Books on Olmec, Izapan, Classic Maya, and Teotihuacán Archaeology and Art

The four books under review make important contributions to the study of Mesoamerican art and archaeology. Together they cover a long time span (c. 1400 BCE to 900 CE) and a broad geography, considering aspects of sociopolitical development, public architecture, art styles, and worldview in four major cultural traditions: Olmec, Izapan, classic Maya, and Teotihuacán.

Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica examines the origins and development of Olmec society and culture, and its impact on contemporaneous and later Mesoamerican societies and cultures. Pool notes that, in the restrictive sense that he himself favors, the term Olmec first referred to an art style recognizable on jade artifacts (e.g., effigy axes, celts) and monumental stone sculptures (e.g., colossal human heads, rectangular altars) whose geographic center seemed to lie in the southern gulf coast of Mexico, known as the heartland, or Olman. As archaeological projects at La Venta and San Lorenzo began to provide firm dates (c. 1500–400 BCE), Olmec was recognized as a major formative-period culture that some considered a mother culture of Mesoamerica. A broader definition applies the term Olmec both to Gulf Coast archaeological culture and to artifacts used or produced elsewhere, whose style and symbolism nevertheless relate to those at heartland sites. Although Pool finds merit in this definition used by scholars such as John Clark and Mary Pye—who argue that Olmec signifies a set of cultural practices embodied in Olmec style art and artifacts, yet shared by several societies and peoples—he notes that the spread of Olmec iconographic motifs is fundamentally an elite phenomenon, in that the adoption and display of these material symbols benefited local leaders by identifying them as cultural Olmecs, that is, as participants in broader networks of trade and political alliance also able to contact and mediate supernatural sources of power.

One important contribution of Pool's book is its recognition of the complex evolution of early to middle-formative Mesoamerican culture. Although Olmec is sometimes described as a "horizon style," there have been vigorous challenges to the notion that the adoption of related symbol systems by elites of different regions represents a one-way dissemination from the Gulf Coast to peripheral zones.¹ Pool sees parallel paths of development, stating that there was never a single, unitary Olmec society (282). He brings together an abundance of data to demonstrate that even in Olman there were diverse types of settlement and political organization. San Lorenzo's many and diverse monuments (e.g., colossal heads, table altars, figural sculptures) and possibly elite residential structures indicate that it was the paramount political administrative center during the early formative period (1400–1000 BCE). El Remolino to the north, Loma del Zapote (including El Azuzul) to the south, and possibly Potrero Nuevo to the east were secondary centers. Another important regional center was Estero Rabón, which may have rivaled San Lorenzo prior to 1400 BCE but afterward became a secondary administrative center in the San Lorenzo polity. Olmecs in the Tuxtla Mountains instead lived in small, shifting settlements, and the large center of Laguna de Los Cerros, though trading with San Lorenzo, may have been an autonomous polity.

The transition from the early formative to middle formative period (c. 900–400 BCE) witnessed the rise to power of La Venta, Tabasco, which replaced San Lorenzo as the dominant sociopolitical capital and center of architectural and artistic activity in Olman. Settlement data cited...