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6 Early Olmec Wetland Mounds Investing Energy to Produce Energy Ann Cyphers and Judith Zurita-Noguera By the time monumentality was explicitly manifested in the massive stone sculptures and earthen edifices created by the Olmec of Mexico’s southern Gulf Coast, its elusive origins were cloaked in the cultural foundations that made their creation possible. The colossal heads of monolithic stone cannot tell us how the rulers they portray came to power since these celebrated examples of Olmec high-energy investments are merely the final result of centuries of sorting out and rearranging complicated social, political, and economic relations in order to mobilize work forces. The same is true of the well-known artificial plateau of the early Olmec capital of San Lorenzo, Veracruz, Mexico (Figure 6.1). The episodic construction of its stacked habitation terraces and relatively flat summit through the placement of six to eight million m3 of artificial earthen fill occurred during its florescence, between 1400 and 1000 bce, and involved work efforts involving a total of 14–18 million person-hours of labor (Cyphers et al. 2007–2008). The design and dynamic construction of the plateau provided tangible but changing parameters for continually modeling and remodeling a pattern of population distribution in which social and political status declined with diminishing elevation and distance from the center of the site. This roughly concentric pattern appears to replicate the cosmic map of the sacred mountain, a model that governed quotidian life and reinforced the principles of sociopolitical differentiation. The origins of plateau building, however, are far less spectacular. During several centuries prior to 1400 cal. bce, the 125-hectare natural promontory was gradually leveled with 1,300,000 m3 of earthen fill, a long-term effort well within work capacity of the early population and thus a task that did not require Early Olmec Wetland Mounds: Investing Energy to Produce Energy · 139 centralized coordination. Yet these early expenditures of energy to shape the landform laid the groundwork for raising the great plateau. Another important but less impressive example of early construction consists of relatively small artificial mounds built in the wetlands (Symonds, Cyphers, and Lunagómez 2002), which are the focus of this chapter. These dry base camps are a previously unrecognized component of San Lorenzo’s settlement pattern (Figure 6.1), but they figured prominently in the wetland -focused lifeways of the founding groups and their descendants. Our data indicate that the initial construction of the majority of these mounds in the broad wetland just north of San Lorenzo likely predates the initial stage of plateau building, making them one of the earliest and perhaps the first manifestations of artificial mound construction by the inhabitants of San Lorenzo. (From now on we will use the accepted Mexican archaeological term islotes instead of the cumbersome but synonymous English phrase “artificial wetland mound.”) As we shall demonstrate, the islotes, taken individually or collectively, do not represent a conspicuous consumption of energy, one of Trigger’s criteria of monumentality (1990). Yet they represent noteworthy labor investments over a long period of time for the people who built and maintained them (see Rosenswig and Burger this volume). These important economic assets constitute technological infrastructure and were built to minimize risk by facilitating a diversified set of subsistence strategies in the surrounding wetlands. Although they have little apparent fit with concepts of monumentality because of the low amount of energy invested in building them, their relevance to the theme of the present volume lies in the returns on that investment. Each islote represented a trade-off, a capital investment of human energy in an earthen structure in order to obtain more dependable and greater returns in food energy; in other words, energy was used to produce more energy (see Price 1971, 1982). Ultimately, as Trigger points out (1990, 125), the production of surplus food is key in controlling labor, which is involved in the creation of power and prestige symbols. In this sense, islote construction and use were relevant to the emergent social and political relations that laid the foundations for Olmec monumentality . In the following sections, we explore the functions of islotes, the nature and source of the labor mobilized to construct them, the identity of their builders and their implications for food production and social development that contributed, at least in part, to subsequent Olmec apogee developments characterized by incontrovertible monumentality—the large-scale earthen and stone monuments imbued with power, artistic [18.117.183.150] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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