Kings Of Cooperation

The Olmec city of Tres Zapotes may have owed its longevity to a new form of government.

- Lizzie Wade

On a sweltering day in 1862 at the foot of the Tuxtla Mountains in the Mexican state of Veracruz, a farm worker was clearing a cornfield when he hit something hard and smooth lodged in the earth. He thought it was the rounded base of an iron cauldron buried upside down, and, it being the 1860s, he reported the find to the owner of the hacienda where he worked. The farmworker’s boss told him to dig up the cauldron immediately and bring it to him. As the farm worker labored to uncover the object, he realized he had found not a large iron bowl, but a gargantuan stone sculpture with a pair of glaring eyes, a broad nose, and a down turned mouth. What had appeared to be the base of a cauldron was actually the top of a helmet worn by the glowering figure. What the farm worker had unearthed was a colossal Olmec head, one of the first clues to the existence of that ancient culture.

Over the next century and a half, archaeologists would uncover many more of these heads along the Mexican Gulf Coast and discover the ancient cities where they were carved. The site of that first fateful discovery became known as Tres Zapotes, after a type of fruit tree common in the area. Along with the sites of San Lorenzo and La Venta, Tres Zapotes was one of the great capitals of the Olmec culture, which emerged by 1200 b.c. as one of the first societies in Mesoamerica organized into a complex social and political hierarchy.