Science: New World’s Oldest

Archaeologists generally have accepted five Mexican cultures—Mayan, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, Totonac and Olmec—as being the oldest in North America, and have dated them around A.D. 300. But last week tests performed at the University of

Michigan proved that the little-known Olmec culture antedates the others by about a thousand years.

Two years ago a Smithsonian-National Geographic Society-University of California expedition excavated an Olmec ceremonial center at La Venta, a marsh-surrounded island near the Tovala River. They found among the relics several fragments of charcoal, presumably the remains of ceremonial fires. The carbon 14 content of the charcoal bits taken from La Venta’s lowest level gave its average date as 814 B.C., with a maximum possible error of 134 years.

Since they lived in a rainy region where only the toughest relics avoid disintegration, almost nothing would be known about the Olmecs if it had not been for their curious custom of carving in jade and hard stone and burying the carvings. To judge by their figurines, they bound their babies’ heads to make them abnormally highbrowed. They probably worshiped a jaguar god, or at least they carved fierce stone images of beasts half man, half jaguar. They also carved monstrous human heads nine feet high with petulant baby faces. They floored their ceremonial rooms with clay tinted red with cinnabar, and they made concave mirrors of beautifully polished stone, perhaps for the purpose of starting fires by focusing the rays of the sun.

Dr. Robert Heizer, one of the leaders of the La Venta expedition, believes that the Olmecs’ radiocarbon dates will “force a total chronological reassessment of early American history.” His hope is that the shadowy Olmecs may have had other centers in Mexico or Central America, perhaps in places where the climate is not so hard on relics. A peculiar ruin at Tlatilco near Mexico City may be one of them.

Guided by carbon 14, the modern touchstone of archaeology, the diggers hope to find out what happened during the long dark age between the fall of the Olmecs and the rise of the Mayans.