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The social, economic, ritual, and political landscapes of Early Formative Olman were heterogeneous and disjoint. The greatest changes transpired in eastern Olman, particularly in the middle Coatzacoalcos valley, where the San Lorenzo Olmecs constructed what was arguably Mesoamerica’s first urban landscape. By the end of the Bajío phase around 1450 BCE, the inhabitants of the village at San Lorenzo were already conducting substantial cutting and filling operations to level the top of the plateau (Arieta Baizabal and Cyphers 2017). Over the four centuries of the San Lorenzo phase (1400–1000 BCE), they would raise the plateau and extend it with terraces to as much as 700 ha (Arieta Baizabal and Cyphers 2017: 62).² Arieta Baizabal and Cyphers (2017: 62) estimate the total amount of earth moved by the end of the San Lorenzo phase at 6–8 million cubic meters of fill, which would make it the largest construction in Early Formative Mesoamerica, although how much of the terracing was centrally directed is uncertain. Nevertheless, the surpluses of food produced in the northern alluvial plain and brought into San Lorenzo from the surrounding countryside along the rivers that encircled it gave the elites of San Lorenzo the means to support work crews and artisans who turned the hill encircled by the waters of the Coatzacoalcos, Tatagapa, and Chiquito rivers into a regional capital resplendent with red-hued elite residences, water features, and stone images of rulers and supernatural beings that told the stories of the origins, their lineages, and their relationships to the natural and supernatural realms of the cosmos. Urbanization not only is a process of emerging centers but also entails a transformation of the sustaining countryside (Jennings 2016: 82). Around San Lorenzo new hamlets appeared, old hamlets grew into villages, and villages at Loma del Zapote and Tenochtitlan expanded but lost their autonomy to become secondary centers, their status proclaimed with small thrones and full-round statues expressing human and cosmic themes (Cyphers 2012).

Thus, in the middle Coatzacoalcos valley powerful rulers of the most urbanized settlement in Mesoamerica used the advantage of a large labor force, abundant wild food sources, cultivable uplands and efficient riverine travel to manage the risks and opportunities presented by interannual variation in rainfall and flood intensities. Their power lay not only in their economic advantage but also in their cooptation of preexisting ritual and beliefs about the relationship of humans to the natural and supernatural forces of the cosmos expressed in a novel technology of meaning and social memory – the carving and setting of monumental stone sculptures in juxtaposition with other sculptures and civil–religious architecture in the capital and its subordinate centers.

Elsewhere in Olman, populations shared common ceramic technologies and styles but contrasted greatly in terms of their settlement patterns, political organization, economies, and construction of more sparsely occupied landscapes. At the height of San Lorenzo in the late Early Formative these ranged from mobile egalitarian groups in the Tuxtla Mountains to a possible three-tiered settlement and sociopolitical system centered on Laguna de los Cerros in the San Juan Basin, with Tres Zapotes, La Venta, Zaragoza and other sites beginning to grow to prominence in their local settings (von Nagy 1997: 267). Sites in the upper San Juan Basin interacted most closely with their neighbors in the middle Coatzacoalcos, and that interaction, whether cooperative or coercive (and perhaps both at different times), undoubtedly shaped the history of the growing center at Laguna de los Cerros and the nearby Llano del Jícaro basalt source. It is notable that with the exception of San Lorenzo, the upper San Juan basin has produced the largest number of Early Formative stone monuments (at Laguna de los Cerros, Cruz del Milagro, and Cuatotolalpan); that can be due not only to the availability of the resource but also the vertical differentiation of its settlement and sociopolitical hierarchies and its interaction with San Lorenzo. More distant settlements were also more autonomous in their economic and social interactions with other regions. At Tres Zapotes, for example, ceramic decoration and figurine styles suggest social ties to Oaxaca and central Veracruz, while trade networks brought in obsidian from the nearest sources in Puebla and Veracruz.