The Olmec who anciently inhabited Mexico's southern Gulf Coast organized their once-egalitarian society into chiefdoms during the Formative period (1400 BC to AD 300). This increase in political complexity coincided with the development of village agriculture, which has led scholars to theorize that agricultural surpluses gave aspiring Olmec leaders control over vital resources and thus a power base on which to build authority and exact tribute. In this book, Amber VanDerwarker conducts the first multidisciplinary analysis of subsistence patterns at two Olmec settlements to offer a fuller understanding of how the development of political complexity was tied to both agricultural practices and environmental factors. She uses plant and animal remains, as well as isotopic data, to trace the intensification of maize agriculture during the Late Formative period. She also examines how volcanic eruptions in the region affected subsistence practices and settlement patterns. Through these multiple sets of data, VanDerwarker presents convincing evidence that Olmec and epi-Olmec lifeways of farming, hunting, and fishing were driven by both political and environmental pressures and that the rise of institutionalized leadership must be understood within the ecological context in which it occurred.

Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica offers the most thorough and up-to-date book-length treatment of Olmec society and culture available.

Between 1400 and 400 BC, in what is now Mexico and Central America, the Olmec people created a magnificent culture, one too often overshadowed by those of the Maya and the Aztec. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of over 250 Olmec works of art - ceramic, jade and stone - on display at the Art Museum, Princeton University in December 1995, and travelling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Here is the story of America's oldest - and oddest - civilization, the Olmecs of the southern Mexican jungles. Virtually unknown to archaeologists until the early twentieth century, their true importance is only now being realized and shedding new light on how the Indian peoples of the Americas came to be here.

"The African presence in ancient America"--Jacket subtitle.

A survey of the Olmec culture and people which flourished in Mesoamerica's Formative, or Preclassical, period--from 2,000 B.C. to A.D. 100.