Archaeologist explains the Fall of the Olmecs

In this video we're going to talk about the fall of Olmec civilization. Now, Olmec civilization starts maybe as early as 1800 BCE, and really when we're talking about that, a very few artifacts that are found in the lowest levels of the earliest Olmec cities, and they really honestly comprise of like a few lithics and maybe some ceramic sherds, and so it's really not much, but it's enough to say that in those locations people were there living, and those people developed into the Olmecs. Really the big place that started it all first was a city called San Lorenzo. San Lorenzo does have evidence to 1800, but it goes up to about 1400 before it really starts rolling, and it is a full community. Then, you know, the most conservative people would even put that at 1200. But regardless of when that starts, San Lorenzo is our first big giant Olmec city. There are other cities around it, but San Lorenzo is the biggest, sitting on the Cozacalcos River. It's the only one at that time that's making those colossal Olmec heads. So it gets the ball rolling, but about 900 BCE it fades away. Its population decreases severely, and it doesn't put any more monuments up. In its place comes the next big city, La Venta. La Venta is to the west of it, and it's as large as San Lorenzo, and it also has heads. Again, none of La Venta's contemporaries have those giant heads. So in the first period, which we call the early formative, it's San Lorenzo. Only one with heads, but it fades at 900, and then rising comes La Venta, also with heads, and that's the middle formative. It goes from about 900 to 500. Now, since we're talking about the fall, let's talk about that first fall. Why did San Lorenzo go away? Well, there are a lot of theories, and a lot of them have to do with just kind of run-of-the-mill politics, that somehow the polity of La Venta took over, and it took what San Lorenzo had. But there's an interesting theory that I favor that says that San Lorenzo's main subsistence strategy was fishing and harvesting things out of the swamp areas around it. There's a lot of evidence that they're doing a lot of fishing and aquaculture. At 900, La Venta starts to rise, and it's doing much more corn farming. When you look back at San Lorenzo, you see San Lorenzo's actually not a very good place for corn farming. Most of the area around its big plateau that it's built on is seasonally inundated, and the corn would literally drown there. So, there's good reason to believe that that first big fall of the start of Olmec civilization and the restart at La Venta was about the Olmec embracing corn. Their neighbors that they had been trading with were planting corn for millennia before that, but the Olmec not so much. But when La Venta started, one of its foundational subsistence strategies was not aquaculture, it was corn. So, there's a good reason to believe that San Lorenzo's demise had something to do with that. So, we move to La Venta. La Venta is this big giant place, the first place that the Olmec ever built a pyramid. So, it's got this massive pyramid in the middle, it has four heads there, and it has a lot of contemporary Olmec cities that are smaller and trading with it. It's also trading outside of the Olmec area. It's a big, powerful polity that's connected far and wide to its neighbors. We can see that through the Olmec art that gets distributed all across Mesoamerica at this time. Now, it goes to about 500, maybe 400 BCE, and it then becomes abandoned as well. Why did that happen? Well, again, we don't have all the answers. But one thing that I see is that La Venta was distributing art with iconography that had to do with religion. But by about 400, the other areas that they're trading with, the Maya, the Zapotec down in Oaxaca, the people in Central Mexico, they are beginning to flower their own religion. So, at least in part, I think that La Venta's demise was about the other parts of Mesoamerica not needing them anymore. Now, traditionally, archaeology puts the fall of the Olmec civilization right there. When La Venta falls, that's the end of Olmec civilization, and a new civilization starts in that region that we call Epi-Olmec. The Epi-Olmec capital, just like San Lorenzo and La Venta, was a place called Tres Zapotes, on the opposite side of the big volcano where they're getting all the basalt heads from. Tres Zapotes starts up at about 500, 400, so it's a very neat shift of power from La Venta to Tres Zapotes. And Tres Zapotes is the third, and there are only three places where we find these Olmec heads. So, it's very much like the other two, but now archaeologists call it the Epi-Olmec. And there are reasons why, I'll explain in a moment, but I really feel like there's a continuum there. Traditionally, if you want to know when the fall of the Olmecs is, the textbooks say it's about 400 CE. But then we have the Epi-Olmec that continue all the way to 300 CE. And to me, they're Olmec 2.0. They're in the same area, they're doing the same sort of thing, they even have the same colossal heads. So, I differ from a lot of my colleagues that I think that we should really be considering that full Olmec, just a new flavor of it. Why we call them the Epi-Olmec and not the Epi-Olmec is because those are the first sites where we get writing. It's a big misconception that the Olmec started writing. It was actually those Epi-Olmec. There are no texts from La Venta, San Lorenzo, or any of their contemporaries. We get writing, and through that writing, we see them elaborating their calendar system. That's also another thing that it's the Epi-Olmecs, not the Olmecs that did. Tres Sapotes, as I said, is the third one that has Olmec heads. But there's something disturbing about those heads. By the time we get to that 400 BC period, they've built new complexes there, and they've moved the heads, obviously, from a place that we don't know where they started from onto these stone platforms. And we can dig under the platforms and see that their foundations are about 400 BCE. So, they moved those Olmec heads from somewhere, assumably within the site of Tres Sapotes, but maybe not. For all we know, they moved them from La Venta when the leadership picked up and moved over to Tres Sapotes. We're not sure. But so, Tres Sapotes, in my opinion, is still an Olmec site. Technically, it's Epi-Olmec. There, now, we're finally at the final moment. When did the Olmec completely go away? For my money, it's about 300 CE. That's Tres Sapotes. They've been chugging along. They've been building up things. But they're much more insulated. They're not trading with their neighbors anymore. They're not sending out that religious iconography like the Olmecs were. They are making their own pottery, and they're trading not very far and wide at all. Some with the Maya. We see some art differences. But for the most part, they're insular. And then right about 300 CE, the volcano goes off and drops ash onto Tres Sapotes, forcing them to abandon parts of the site. The lowest parts of the site are buried. Then that ash does something terrible to the place, which is it disnudes the entire area. All the trees die because of the ash. And then when the rains come, there's no tree roots to protect the site, and mudslides start happening. And the stuff that was Epi-Olmec gets deeper and deeper buried. People do continue to inhabit the high points of the site. But we can see their culture is changing. They're turning into what we call classic Vera Cruz style. They stop using that Epi-Olmec calendar, and they stop using their writing system. Now they're using symbols that talk about a different calendar, sometimes places, sometimes people, but it's not in a fully elaborated language. So that's the point right there when the Epi-Olmec go away. Right about that time, there's a famous one called La Mojara not far away either, with a huge long Epi-Olmec text. But that's the end of it. So to sum up, when did the Olmec civilization fall? Traditional view, 400 BCE when La Venta stopped functioning. But for my view, it's actually 300 CE when Tres Sapotes was buried by volcanic ash. Hey folks, if you like that video, please consider supporting me through Patreon. For just five bucks a month, you can keep me here in this chair instead of out there somewhere trying to make a living otherwise. I'm as cheap as a cup of coffee, and I'm less bitter. 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