Читать книгу Mesoamerican Archaeology - Группа авторов - Страница 40

At 1500 BCE the landscape of the southern Gulf lowlands of Mesoamerica stood on the cusp of a transformation. For over three millennia its human inhabitants had supplemented the natural boundary of its rivers, marshes, swamps, lakes, savannas, and forests by planting maize in small plots cleared in part by burning the natural vegetation during the dry season (Pope et al. 2001). In dwelling on the land, making gardens, walking the trails, marking fishing holes, disposing of their dead, and recounting stories of it all, the Olmecs’ ancestors had already constituted a landscape in concert with the natural environment and the forces they perceived to inhabit it.

Though their settlements were relatively small and overall population density was low, the inhabitants of Olman were not isolated from one another or from the world around them but shared raw materials, technologies, and artifact styles. Throughout the region, even among the relatively mobile inhabitants of the Tuxtla Mountains, people made similar neckless jars (tecomates) and other vessel forms, which they decorated with a common variety of plastic techniques, including rocking stamping, with a shell moved backward and forward in the damp clay. Obsidian, though not abundant, was acquired even in small sites, probably through down-the-line trade from Central Mexico and Guatemala, as was serpentine and other greenstones used in ritual. At El Manatí, people continued their two-century-old practice of offering greenstone axes, rubber balls, and healing plants to the forces that controlled water in both its benevolent and destructive aspects. Thus, by the end of the Initial Formative period at 1450 BCE, some of the basic elements of Olmec subsistence, technology, and ritual were in place, and they had already begun to shape the landscape physically and conceptually in ways that would remain little changed in parts of Olman for a thousand years, while other parts would see impressive settlement growth, social differentiation, and landscape transformation.