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The fundamental questions in Olmec archaeology mirror those in other parts of the world where stratified societies arose independently from other regions. How did some individuals acquire greater authority and power than others, and how did they pass those qualities on to their successors? What mix of material, social, and ideological sources of power did they employ? How did leaders and society more generally foster cooperation toward mutually beneficial ends and enforce social norms? To what degree were followers complicit in the surrender of their autonomy, and to what degree was their compliance coerced?

In the Olmec case, however, efforts to address fundamental questions are beset with a number of interpretive issues, the first of which is to define what one means by Olmec. The term Olmec, derived from an Aztec name for inhabitants of the Gulf Coast and adjacent areas in the fifteenth century CE has been applied to an archaeological culture of the Early (1450–1000 BCE) and Middle Formative (1000–400 BCE) periods in southern Veracruz and western Tabasco as well as to an art style shared to varying degrees by societies across much of Mesoamerica in the same time frame. In this essay I use Olmec in the former sense to refer to the archaeological culture and the societies that produced it in the southern Gulf lowlands (Pool 2007: 12–15; for extended discussion of this dual usage and the interpretive issues it presents, see also Grove 1989; Lesure 2004). Although monumental stone sculpture and large constructions constitute its most impressive products, Olmec material culture is more consistently expressed across settlement types in the technological style and iconography of more humble black and differentially fired ceramic vessels with carved and incised designs and particular figurine forms (Arnold 2012; Blomster et al. 2017; Pool and Insoll 2017). By convention, archaeologists refer to the preceding Initial Formative (2000–1450 BCE) culture in this region as pre-Olmec and the Late (400–1 BCE) and Terminal Formative period (1–300 CE) as Post- or Epi-Olmec, despite substantial cultural continuity between them.

Just as controversy surrounds the Mother Culture proposition that the Gulf Olmecs uniquely created the institutions and practices that would come to define later Mesoamerican civilization (see, e.g., Diehl and Coe 1995; Flannery and Marcus 2000), so have characterizations of Olmec sociopolitical organization and its material base provided ample fodder for academic debate. Closely tied to the (diffusionist) Mother Culture versus (coevolutionary) Sister Culture debate, antagonists have long argued over whether Olmec political society was organized as a state (e.g., Bernal 1969: 188–189; Clark 1997; Caso 1965; Coe 1968; Coe and Diehl 1980: 147; Heizer 1960) or a chiefdom (e.g., Sanders and Price 1968: 126–128; Flannery 1998: 55–57; Flannery and Marcus 1994: 385–390; Sharer 1989: 4–5; Diehl 1973, 1989; cf, 2004: 95). One problem with this debate is that a particular interpretation of Olmec sociopolitical organization frequently has been directed specifically toward support of either the Mother Culture or Sister Culture position (under the assumption that states have the capacity to influence distant societies and chiefdoms do not) rather than treating sociopolitical hierarchy and interregional interaction as distinct (albeit related) phenomena (see, e.g., Diehl and Coe 1995; Flannery and Marcus 2000).

Also problematic is the tendency to frame the question in unitary terms as, “How was Olmec society organized?” instead of investigating how Olmec societies may have varied through space and time. Historically, this tendency derives from treating the successive apogees of the largest Olmec centers as an indication that all of the Olmec realm was united under a single capital during that site’s florescence (e.g., Diehl and Coe 1995). Over the last three decades, however, archaeological investigations have painted an increasingly complex picture of intraregional variation in Formative Gulf settlement systems and overlap in the occupation of major Olmec sites (Borstein 2001; González 1996; Loughlin 2012; Pool 2003; Pool and Loughlin 2016; Pool and White 2005; Rust 2008; Santley and Arnold 1996; Santley et al. 1997; Stoner 2011; Symonds et al. 2002). The recent observation of such complex variability raises interpretive issues about the scale, complexity, connectedness, and autonomy of contemporaneous Olmec polities in the Gulf lowlands.

Intertwined with debate over Olmec sociopolitical organization is whether the largest Olmec settlements can be considered urban (compare, e.g., Clark 2007; Flannery and Marcus 2000). This concern stems in part from traditional evolutionary theory that closely associates the city and the state as essential components of civilization (e.g., Childe, 1950) and therefore with claims for the Olmecs’ status as Mesoamerica’s first civilization. Recent scholarship increasingly disentangles the city from the state, recognizing the possibility of nonurban states and stateless cities (e.g., Jennings 2016) and applies fuzzy, polythetic definitions of the city (e.g., Hutson 2015; Smith 2006, 2016). Rather than defining cities or urban centers according to strict demographic thresholds such as Sanders and Price’s (1968) minimum of 5,000 inhabitants at a density not less than 2,000/km², recent studies employ polythetic definitions in which a settlement should possess most, but not necessarily all, of a set of characteristics to be considered urban. Here I follow Monica L. Smith (2006), with slight modification, in expecting that cities should exhibit higher population, higher population density, and greater social differentiation than other settlements in the region and should provide specialized administrative, economic, religious, or more broadly ideological services for the region (see also Blanton 1976; Hutson 2015; Wirth 1938). By this definition, the largest Formative period centers in the Gulf lowlands qualify as cities, but they all fall at the lower end of population size or population density for preindustrial cities. More important than whether any particular settlement qualifies as a city, though, is understanding urbanization – that is, the set of historical processes and social practices by which cities and their sustaining settlement systems arise. Whether or not one considers any Olmec center a city, such processes, including nucleation of population, expansion and hierarchization of regional networks, and the centralization of functions at nodes in those networks, were clearly at work in parts of the southern Gulf lowlands after 1450 BCE.

With respect to the economic base for emerging Olmec centers, investigators traditionally assumed that maize-based agriculture was crucial to the emergence of Olmec sociopolitical hierarchy (Coe 1981; Coe and Diehl 1980; Sanders and Price 1968; Sanders and Webster 1978); however, investigations since the 1990s have increasingly undermined that assumption. Although pollen and phytolith evidence confirms maize was cultivated after about 5000 BCE in the southern Gulf lowlands (Pohl 2007; Pope et al. 2001), the accumulating botanical and faunal data point to a mixed hunter-fisher-gardener (Killion 2013) subsistence pattern with variable reliance on hunting, fishing, gathering, and cultivation of maize and other domesticates through the Early Formative period (Arnold 2009; Cyphers et al. 2013; Peres 2017; Peres et al. 2013; VanDerwarker 2006; VanDerwarker and Kruger 2012; Wing 1980). In some areas, expansion of settlement and a reduction of mobility in upland areas suggests increased reliance on rainfall maize agriculture (Arnold 2009; Borstein 2001; Killion 2013), while greater representation of maize iconography in Middle Formative (1000–400 BCE) Olmec art implies a greater cultural, and perhaps dietary, importance of the crop (Taube 2000, 2004). The complex variation in space and time undoubtedly reflects the intersection of diverse environmental and sociopolitical conditions, including highly variable resource risk and predictability, as Ann Cyphers and her colleagues (2013) have recently underscored for San Lorenzo (see also Pool 2007: 89–91; Stark et al. 2000: 38–39). Cyphers et al. argue that more important than direct control of productive agricultural lands was the mitigation of risk and uncertainty through management of aquatic resources and recessional planting in the adjacent alluvial plain to the northwest – as well as control of the intraregional transportation network connecting riverine and terrestrial traffic.