La Venta

The Olmec are the earliest of the great Mesoamerican civilisations, and La Venta was their capital during its final and grandest phase. It grew from around 1200 BCE, reached its height between roughly 900 and 400 BCE, and was then abandoned. No one knows why the site was left, and the Olmec left no readable writing to explain it.

Because so much that defines later Mexico appears first or early in Olmec work, from pyramids and the ballgame to a ritual calendar and jaguar and serpent imagery, they are often called the mother culture of the region. Some archaeologists prefer to see them as one influential culture among several. Either way, La Venta stands near the source of a tradition that ran for the next two and a half thousand years.

Four colossal heads were found at La Venta, each carved from a single block of volcanic basalt and standing up to nearly three metres tall. They are thought to be portraits of individual rulers, wearing close-fitting helmets, and the stone for them was quarried in the Tuxtla Mountains and moved more than eighty kilometres without wheels or draught animals.

Dominating the site is the Great Pyramid of Complex C, an earthen mound more than thirty metres high and among the oldest large pyramids in Mesoamerica. Long taken for a simple cone, it may originally have been rectangular with stepped or fluted sides, worn round by twenty-five centuries of rain.

La Venta was above all a ceremonial place, and its most remarkable treasures were meant never to be seen again. Beneath the plazas, the Olmec buried caches of polished jade celts, mirrors of iron ore, and figurine groups arranged as if in council.

They also sank massive offerings of serpentine, a green stone hauled in from far away. In one deposit, some fifty tons of finished serpentine blocks were laid down and then sealed under thousands of tons of clay. Other offerings formed mosaic masks of the earth or jaguar, completed and immediately covered over. The labour was enormous, and the point seems to have been the giving, not the display.

In the 1950s, oil and gas were found around La Venta, and the state company PEMEX began to develop the area, damaging the ancient ground. To save the monuments, the Tabascan poet Carlos Pellicer led an effort to move many of them, some weighing over twenty tons, through swamp and forest to the state capital.

The result was the Parque-Museo La Venta, opened in Villahermosa in 1958, where more than thirty Olmec sculptures now stand outdoors among tropical vegetation and native animals. It remains the main place to meet the art of La Venta face to face.

The original site is a quiet, humid clearing on the Tabasco lowlands. The southern end was taken over by petroleum works, the great heads and altars have gone to Villahermosa, and replicas now mark where they once stood. What survives on the spot is mainly the shape of the land: the mounds, the plazas, and the eroded bulk of the Great Pyramid.

It asks for imagination. There is little to read on the stones and few crowds, but standing at the foot of the pyramid you are on ground that people planned and shaped more than three thousand years ago, at the very start of urban life in this part of the world.