As prehistorical time in the Western Hemisphere spun silently toward 1,000 B.C. approximately a thousand years after man in the Americas had planted the foundation of the first permanent village site (in Mexico), a wave of fierce, misshapened strangers appeared.
Squat, with snarling mouths, elongated, slanted heads and filed teeth jutting like fangs, they frightened and mystified — and dominated — the early farmers of south-central Mexico.
Today, they continue to startle and mystify us. For after more than 200 years of exploration and investigation of pre-Columbian Mexico, we still know very little, really, about this band of unusual invaders. We don’t even know their name or where they came from. We call them the “Olmec” but that is merely a term picked up by Bernardo de Sahagun, the Catholic missionary scholar and 16th century (and Mexico’s first) historian, a word meaning “the rubber people” who legend had it, inhabited the Gulf coast. It was given to Sahagun by Nahuatl-speaking Mexica (Aztec) survivors of Hernan Cortes’ destruction of Tenochtitlan. The name used by these Mexica chroniclers for the supposed “home” of the Olmecs, “Tamoanchan,” is a Mayan term, meaning “The Land of Rain or Mist.”
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