Page 126 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Santiago Tuxtla

We passed the night at the fishing port of Alvarado and continued our
journey east the next day. The road we were following wound in and out
of fertile hills and valleys, giving us occasional views of the Gulf of
Mexico before turning inland. We passed green meadows filled with flame
trees, and little villages nestled in grassy hollows. Here and there we saw
private gardens where hulking pigs grubbed amongst piles of domestic
refuse. Then we crested the brow of a hill and looked out across a giant
vista of fields and forests bound only by the morning haze and the faint
outlines of distant mountains.
Some miles farther on we dropped into a hollow; at its bottom lay the
old colonial town of Santiago Tuxtla. The place was a riot of colour:
garish shop-fronts, red-tile roofs, yellow straw hats, coconut palms,
banana trees, kids in bright clothes. Several of the shops and cafés were
playing music from loudspeakers. In the Zocalo, the main square, the air
was thick with humidity and the fluttering wings and songs of bright-eyed
tropical birds. A leafy little park occupied the centre of this square, and in
the centre of the park, like some magic talisman, stood an enormous grey
boulder, almost ten feet tall, carved in the shape of a helmeted African
head. Full-lipped and strong-nosed, its eyes serenely closed and its lower
jaw resting squarely on the ground, this head had a sombre and patient
gravity.
Here, then, was the first mystery of the Olmecs: a monumental piece of
sculpture, more than 2000 years old, which portrayed a subject with
unmistakable negroid features. There were, of course, no African blacks
in the New World 2000 years ago, nor did any arrive until the slave trade
began, well after the conquest. There is, however, firm
palaeoanthropological evidence that one of the many different migrations
into the Americas during the last Ice Age did consist of peoples of
negroid stock. This migration occurred around 15,000 BC.
4
Known as the ‘Cobata’ head after the estate on which it was found, the
huge monolith in the Zocalo was the largest of sixteen similar Olmec
sculptures so far excavated in Mexico. It was thought to have been carved
not long before the time of Christ and weighed more than thirty tons.

Tres Zapotes

From Santiago Tuxtla we drove twenty-five kilometres south-west through
wild and lush countryside to Tres Zapotes, a substantial late Olmec centre
believed to have flourished between 500 BC and AD 100. Now reduced to a
series of mounds scattered across maize fields, the site had been
extensively excavated in 1939-40 by the American archaeologist Matthew

4 Ibid., p. 125.

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