How Olmec elite helped legitimize their political power through art

In an article recently published in Latin American Antiquity, Dr. Jill Mollenhauer argues that the Gulf Lowland Olmec, one of Mesoamerica’s earliest major civilizations, sometimes incorporated aesthetic and ritual practices associated with their rock art into their sculptures. She argues that this allowed Olmec elites to harness the spiritual and natural potency of the wild and sacred landscape and bring it into the domestic and urban centers, where it legitimized their political power.

The Olmec were an early Mesoamerican civilization that existed during the Formative period (1800BCE–300CE). While they are often associated with producing colossal heads, they also engaged in creating rock art.

Dr. Mollenhauer recalls how surprised she was at the sheer abundance of rock art when she first started her research. “I was surprised to find an incredible amount of rock art in and around the Gulf Olmec region (particularly in the Tuxtlas) that is known locally but rarely reported. It showed me how much work needs to be done to better document and understand its production and use (although I also came to understand the challenges that come with its study, including the problems of dating and chronology for many rock art sites). I’m incredibly grateful to the many archaeologists and local experts that shared their knowledge of regional rock art sites with me.”

Rock art and sculpture are distinct forms of art. While rock art is made in situ (original position), sculptures were quarried and brought in from different areas. In fact, because very few suitable stones exist within the local environment, large volcanic blocks had to be imported from far away.

Olmec rock art is inherently linked to the landscape in which it was made, demarcating the inherent sacredness of the landscape. Often found along travel routes, caves, and rocky hillsides, it was linked to the wild and the dangerous, often demarcating the sacred homes of spiritual forces.

Meanwhile, sculptures were often part of the built environment and thus associated with domestic spaces, morality, government, and cosmic order, making them, in some ways, an antithesis to the rock art associated with the wild, dangerous, and sacred.

Yet many Olmec sculptures share aesthetic and ritual practices with rock art. For example, many of the La Venta sculptures preserve the natural irregular surfaces and outlines of the stone from which they are carved. Instead of shaping the rock to their needs, the sculptors adapted their images to the natural contours, just as they would for rock art.

This same preservation of the natural contours of the rock can be found in boulder sculptures. These not only preserve the rock’s natural outline but also its mass. Such boulders were placed in areas associated with the gods and ancestors, such as cave entrances.

Some contemporary Maya groups still make pilgrimages to such sites, which they perceive as entrances to the home of the earth lord.

Dr. Mollenhauer elaborates on this, saying, “There are several works that document both ancient and contemporary Maya rituals at rock art sites. I was told that there is still ritual activity carried out at the Cobata petroglyphic field (where the Cobata colossal head was recovered), and there is documentation of pilgrimage to the Olmec sculpture originally located at the San Martin Pajapan volcanic peak before it was moved to the state anthropological museum in Xalapa.

“So there is evidence of continued pilgrimage and ritual activities around both Olmec-style rock art and Olmec sculptures, although it’s hard to trace a direct line from the Formative period ritual practices to these more modern iterations.”

Additionally, some rock art contains pits and grooves, frequently associated with ritual activity in the vicinity of rock art. These same grooves and pits are found on many of the sculptures. While initially believed to have been the result of later cultures resharpening their tools, it has also been suggested they, too, like rock art, were linked to ritual practices. Finding such grooves and pits on Olmec stone monuments may indicate that people started treating freestanding sculptures conceptually similar to rock art.

Although not entirely clear, there are some indications for the significance of these pits and grooves, says Dr. Mollenhauer. “There are some interesting ethnographic trends in the production of cupules and grooves that often relate them to rain and fertility. That is a possibility, but another is the collection of potent substances (i.e. pulverized rock dust) from the sculpture as a part of pilgrimage practices, as Joel Palka suggests, although these aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“There is also documentation in the mid-20th century of local Popoluca hunters striking one of the sculptures from Estero Rabon with machetes before searching for game before it was again removed to the state museum.”

One of the questions Dr. Mollenhauer wanted to answer was why rock art aesthetics and ritual practices were adapted into sculpture. She argues that in adapting rock art aesthetics and ritual practices, the lines between the wild periphery and the domestic center were deliberately blurred.

One way Mesoamerican elites established power and legitimacy was by establishing ancestral ties to the landscape. By co-opting rock art aesthetics and rituals inherently linked to the landscape into the sculptures on the borders of their territories and within their urban centers, they were positioning themselves within that symbolic landscape. The landscape’s ideological and spiritual potency would be brought into the civic center and directly associated with the Mesoamerican leaders and elite.

Just as pilgrimages to rock art sites demarcated humans as subordinates to the deities, pilgrimages to the sculptures were linked to humans being subordinates to their political rulers.

By creating sculptures that referenced these locations, the Olmec weren’t merely producing art; they were constructing tangible spaces for spiritual and social engagement within their cities.

While later Mesoamerican societies continued this practice, it was to a lesser degree, says Dr. Mollenhauer. “Rock art and sculpture continue to coexist in later Mesoamerican societies, but there does seem to be less intentional appropriation of rock art aesthetics as free-standing sculptures start to incorporate text, calendrical information, and elements like celestial and basal registers to create a bounded narrative field that frames the imagery.”

Dr. Mollenhauer hopes her work does two things: “1) allow us to recognize the intentional choices of Olmec sculptors, in this case to connect their works to the ritually-charged spaces of rock art and its associations of sacred landscape and pilgrimage and 2) highlight the importance of rock art as a distinct and impactful form of art in its own right, one that continued to be produced and used by later Mesoamerican cultures alongside other forms of art-making.”

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