505CHAPTER 14 THE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS OF MESOAMERICA
THE ANCIENT WORLD
From at least 2000 B.C., Mesoamerican religious traditions, like the region itself,
began to evolve a distinctive identity. In fact, one of the strongest early expressions
on the archaeological record that suggests incipient political and social integration
above the level of village cultures occurs in the form of supernatural motifs in what
is known as the Olmec Style. This is most clearly expressed in hundreds of objects—
rendered in such diverse media as monumental sculpture, carved jade figurines, ce-
ramics, and mosaic pavements—that depict a “baby-faced” human-jaguar motif
(Figure 14.1).
Originating around 1150 B.C. in the Central Gulf Coast of Mexico, this distinc-
tive iconography appears to be associated with the ascendancy and expansion of a
major cult that came to wield considerable political and ideological influence over
large parts of Central and Eastern Mexico by the time of Christ. This iconography ap-
pears to link political authority with divine ancestors via the half human–half ani-
mal deity. So sudden was the rise of this great style and so notable were the large
ceremonial sites from which it emanated, such as San Lorenzo and La Venta, that the
Mexican scholar Miguel Covarrubias (see the Introduction) advanced in the 1950s
the hypothesis that the Olmec civilization and its associated theocratic state appara-
tus constituted the major formative culture from which multiple subsequent ex-
pressions of Mesoamerican civilization evolved (on the rise of Mesoamerican
civilization, see Chapter 1). There is now increasing evidence that leads us to believe
that it was not just the Olmec culture, but rather several such influential Formative
period polities, that provided the foundation of Mesoamerican civilization. We can
assert with a high degree of certainty that Mesoamerica as we know it, from its in-
ception in the Formative period as a great regional configuration of common ideas
and adaptations, did not acquire its singular character through surplus-producing
agriculture and village life alone. Mesoamerican civilization evolved, perhaps like all