Page 129 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 17

The Olmec Enigma

After Tres Zapotes our next stop was San Lorenzo, an Olmec site lying
south-west of Coatzecoalcos in the heart of the ‘Serpent Sanctuary’ the
legends of Quetzalcoatl made reference to. It was at San Lorenzo that the
earliest carbon-dates for an Olmec site (around 1500 BC) had been
recorded by archaeologists. However, Olmec culture appeared to have
1
been fully evolved by that epoch and there was no evidence that the
evolution had taken place in the vicinity of San Lorenzo.
2
In this there lay a mystery.
The Olmecs, after all, had built a significant civilization which had
carried out prodigious engineering works and had developed the capacity
to carve and manipulate vast blocks of stone (several of the huge
monolithic heads, weighing twenty tons or more, had been moved as far
as 60 miles overland after being quarried in the Tuxtla mountains). So
3
where, if not at ancient San Lorenzo, had their technological expertise
and sophisticated organization been experimented with, evolved and
refined?
Strangely, despite the best efforts of archaeologists, not a single,
solitary sign of anything that could be described as the ‘developmental
phase’ of Olmec society had been unearthed anywhere in Mexico (or, for
that matter, anywhere in the New World). These people, whose
characteristic form of artistic expression was the carving of huge negroid
heads, appeared to have come from nowhere.
4

San Lorenzo

We reached San Lorenzo late in the afternoon. Here, at the dawn of
history in Central America, the Olmecs had heaped up an artificial mound
more than 100 feet high as part of an immense structure some 4000 feet

1 The Prehistory of the Americas, pp. 268-71. See also Jeremy A. Sabloff, The Cities of
Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 35.
Breaking the Maya Code, p. 61.
2 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 268.
3 Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, p. 158.
4 ‘Olmec stone sculpture achieved a high, naturalistic plasticity, yet it has no surviving
prototypes, as if this powerful ability to represent both nature and abstract concepts
was a native invention of this early civilization.’ The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico
and the Maya, p. 15; The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 55: ‘The proto-Olmec phase
remains an enigma ... it is not really known at what time, or in what place, Olmec culture
took on its very distinctive form.’

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