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In terms of the human landscape, the most profound trends of the Middle Formative period were the depopulation of the middle Coatzacoalcos and upper San Juan valleys and the growth of populations in the Tonalá and Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basins around La Venta and Tres Zapotes, a pattern that suggests migration out of the center of Olman toward its margins. Population in the middle Coatzacoalcos fell by over 90% (Symonds et al. 2002: 88–90), and the settlement pattern returned to one resembling that of the Bajío phase some 500 years before, with a midsized village at the summit of the San Lorenzo plateau, where the remaining inhabitants continued to erect some mounds while living among the images of long-dead rulers and their monumental works (Figure 2.3). In the upper San Juan Basin, population fell by about 63% (Borstein 2001: 191), as people moved away from the riverine lowlands toward more upland areas. Increased reliance on maize overall means that larger parts of Olman would have been cleared for swidden fields, especially in those regions experiencing population growth, though there is little reason to suspect that population pressure resulted in extensive deforestation.

San Lorenzo’s loss appears to have been La Venta’s gain, as population increased on the island and along the Barí and Blasillo rivers, where old villages grew into secondary centers and new villages and hamlets emerged (Figure 2.6). Over the 600 years of the Middle Formative period the urban landscape of La Venta was expanded and elaborated with four architectural complexes formed by low mounds arranged around two plazas constituting the civic–ceremonial core, all oriented 8° west of north and centered conceptually, on Mound C-1 (Figure 2.9). As described in detail already, the elites of La Venta forged social memories through construction programs, monument settings, and the burial of offerings large and small that reinforced their claims to power and authority at the center of their realm. They also appear to have placed sculptures at significant places in the broader landscape, marking them as sacred places as well, perhaps, as making claims for the extension of their political authority and their control over resources at considerable distance. To the west 76 km, a sculpture in the round whose head is nearly identical in form and style to broken Monument 44 of La Venta was set at the cleft peak of the San Martín Pajapan volcano (Figure 2.10). The more complete Pajapan monument depicts a kneeling human wearing a headdress with a backward-curved cleft element and a feline visage from the cleft forehead of which sprouts vegetation. In his hands he grasps a bar with both hands, one underneath as if poised to set it upright – a position that has been interpreted as representing the raising of a pole – the axis mundi – at the center of creation (Reilly 1987; Schele 1995: 107–108). The discovery of a nearly identical monument beyond the Tuxtlas on the outskirts of the town of Lerdo de Tejada (Figure 2.10) and of the torso of a seated monument from Angel R. Cabada that closely resembles La Venta Monument 77 suggest that La Venta may have had substantial control over an area extending some 165 km to the west along the coast in the Middle Formative period (Pool et al. 2010a).

Figure 2.10 Clockwise from left: San Martín Pajapan Monument, La Venta Monument 44, Lerdo Monument.

San Martin Pajapan image by Frida27Ponce, retouched by Peter Hanula for Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode). La Venta Monument 44 photo by Linda Schele © David Schele, Schele Collection No. 128028, Courtesy Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org). Lerdo photo by author.

As the rulers of La Venta created their bejeweled capital in the midst of the eastern swamps, Tres Zapotes emerged as a regional capital at the edge of the alluvial plain at the opposite end of Olman. The Olmec rulers there appear to have pursued similar strategies at a more modest scale than at La Venta. Of the 50 sculptures thus far recovered from Tres Zapotes, 11 can be assigned to the Olmec culture on stylistic grounds, including 2 colossal heads, 2 stelae, 4 full-round sculptures, 2 tenoned busts, and a carved greenstone column (Pool et al. 2010b). Early rulers portrayed themselves with colossal heads, which came to be set at the eastern and western limits of the site in similar fashion to the colossal heads and sandstone dwarves at the northern and southern limits of La Venta’s central ceremonial zone. Later Olmec rulers commissioned stelae, one of which shows the ruler as axis mundi standing between earth and sky, flanked by attendants; on one side dwarf-like figures wield celts and on the other a serpent (associated with the earth and underworld) vies against a jaguar (associated with the night sky) descending from above (Pool et al. 2010b) (Figure 2.11). At the center of the site a low platform surrounded by natural basalt columns and covering an offering of celts, pottery, and monkey bones. Within the enclosure lay a basalt slab through which was inserted a greenstone column that bore an incised mat representing ruling authority and a cleft associated with were-jaguar personifications of the earth and maize – in effect an axis mundi marking the center of the Tres Zapotes realm.

Figure 2.11 Tres Zapotes Stela A.Drawing by Ayax Moreno. Courtesy of the New World Archaeological Foundation.

Other sculptures were deployed in outlying settlements. Most impressive is the colossal head of Cobata, set in a pass across the mountain ridge that extends northward from the extinct volcano Cerro el Vigía, 10 km to the east. Larger (at an estimated 50 tons), and more rustically carved than other colossal heads, the Cobata head is the only colossal head not recovered from an Olmec center. Similar in execution to nearby petroglyphs and boulder sculptures, the elites of Tres Zapotes may have commissioned it from rural carvers to mark an eastern boundary of the polity and to claim control over the sacred and material resources the mountain (Pool and Loughlin 2017; Pool et al. 2010b).

With a total extent of 150 ha including adjoining pockets of occupation, Tres Zapotes was not as large as La Venta’s estimated 200 ha (González Lauck 1996),³ and its known Middle Formative sculptural corpus is only about a tenth that of La Venta. Nonetheless, it was the largest settlement in Western Olman, it certainly dominated much of the area between the eastern slope of the Tuxtlas and the Papaloapan delta and the presence of ruler images in the form of colossal heads and stelae identified it then and now as the capital of an Olmec polity. Moreover, the distinctive style and regalia of the Tres Zapotes heads and the greater orientation of the site’s obsidian assemblage toward particular central Mexican sources argue for its autonomy from La Venta (Pool et al. 2010b, 2014). Thus, politically and economically, the Middle Formative landscape of Olman continued to be a heterogeneous one, with regional capitals at either end and less expansive communities in between.