Big History by Cynthia Stokes Brown

Author:Cynthia Stokes Brown [Stokes Brown, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595588456
Publisher: New Press, The

Urban Centers in Mesoamerica

The founding urban culture of the Americas, emerging in about 1000 BCE, belonged to the Olmecs, located on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in the present states of Tabasco and Veracruz. This seems to have been a society of about 350,000 people living in small towns who built three ceremonial sites at which to gather intermittently. The Olmecs developed no system of writing with which to represent speech, but rather used glyphs, or pictographs, as mnemonic devices to remind them of certain gods or ideas.

Without writing to give us access to Olmec ideas, we can only make inferences from their material culture. They carved huge heads out basalt boulders, each with a unique, distinctive face and some of which stood 11 feet (3.4 meters) tall, weighed 20 tons, and had been transported by boat and/or over land some 50 miles. Their gods had dual male/female natures. The Olmecs loved jade, in which they frequently carved jaguars, or men transformed into jaguars.

The Olmecs were the first to play the “ballgame,” or tlachli in their language of Nahuatl. The game used a long stone court (100–200 feet or 30.48–61 meters) shaped like a capital “I” with sloping sides. Players wore gloves, girdles, and deerskin hip guards. A rubber ball had to be hit with hips or knees, never with hands or feet, into hoops placed at both ends. Carvings on the stone walls of some courts depict the losing team’s captain being decapitated—or was it the winning team’s captain, since sacrifice was considered an honor?

The Olmecs carved a “Calendar Round,” a complex calendar based on fifty-two years, with an overlap of two different day-count systems. One, the ritual system, consisted of 260 days divided into 13 months of 20 days. The other, the solar system, consisted of 365 days divided into 18 months of 20 days, with 5 extra, unfavorable, days at the end. Any day in the two systems would intersect every fifty-two years. With this cyclical view of history, the Olmecs apparently expected repetition of the essential patterns, such as royal dynasties and military invasions. They made a “long count” of years back to August 13, 3114 BCE, formulated on a base-20 math system, using a bar for 5, a dot for 1, and a shelllike character for 0.

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