30 INTRODUCTION
culture was known to be very old (it was thought to have appeared around 900 B.C.),
yet it already exhibited most of the essential traits of the Mesoamerican culture area,
for example, pyramids, carved monuments, sacred calendars, exquisite jade pieces,
and pottery craft items. Quite understandably, the Culture Historians concluded that
the Olmec culture was the “mother culture” from which all other Mesoamerican cul-
tures descended.
For several decades a focal point of Mesoamerican studies consisted of tracing
the historical connections between the Olmec culture and other cultures appearing
through time within the region. For example, the Mexican archaeologist-artist Miguel
Covarrubias (1957) was able to demonstrate that the various Mesoamerican rain
deities were derived from an original Olmec were-jaguar deity (Figure A.13). Other
scholars found historical links between the Olmec calendrical system and those of the
Mayas and Zapotecs. Special attention was given to Olmec religious, artistic, and in-
tellectual expressions rather than to the material conditions that might have influ-
enced the development of those cultural expressions. As one Culture Historian put
it, “The most uniquely distinctive Mesoamerican features are not so much material
as they are ideological, and it was this ideological realm—a kind of Mesoamerican
world view” that was developed early on by the Olmecs and gave Mesoamerica its tra-
ditional unity (Willey 1966:108).
Another focus for the Culture Historians was the traditional Indian community
of contemporary Mexico and Central America. Numerous “ethnographic” studies
of individual Indian communities revealed that many of the Mesoamerican cultural
traits had persisted into modern times. In an important summary of community stud-
ies, Sol Tax (1952) argued that the Mesoamerican culture area had remained largely
intact despite modifications resulting from contacts with modern forces from the
outside. In the 1960s and 1970s, a more general summary of over half a century of
culture historical studies on Mesoamerica appeared in the twelve-volume Handbook
of Middle American Indians.The Handbookessays dealt with both aboriginal and con-
temporary culture areas of Mesoamerica.
In retrospect, it is clear that the Culture Historians tended to see culture as pri-
marily consisting of values and ideas, and thus their primary concern was with the ess-
entialfeatures rather than the materialdeterminants of the Mesoamerican cultures.
For this reason the culture historical approach has been widely criticized as “ideal-
ist.” Another tendency was to study contemporary Indian communities as isolated,
self-contained units in which traditional cultural traits only gradually changed
through contact with outside peoples, a process known as “acculturation.” Eventually,
it was recognized that the focus on isolated communities resulted in a perspective that
was too static and thus insufficiently historical.Cultural Evolutionists
By mid–twentieth century, a general turning away from culture history was taking
place in Mesoamerican studies, partly because that earlier approach focused so much
on ideas rather than behavior, and partly because it described cultural differences be-
tween peoples and areas without providing an explanation of these differences. There