Around 1,000 B.C. — roughly 1,000 years after the first permanent villages appeared in Mexico — a wave of fierce, misshapen strangers arrived. Squat, snarling, with elongated slanted heads and filed, fang-like teeth, they frightened and dominated the early farmers of south-central Mexico.
They still mystify us today. After more than 200 years of investigation, we don’t even know their real name or where they came from. We call them “Olmec,” a word picked up by Bernardo de Sahagún, the 16th-century missionary-historian, from Nahuatl-speaking Aztec survivors of Cortés’ conquest. It means “the rubber people,” supposed inhabitants of the Gulf coast. The Aztecs called their homeland “Tamoanchán” — a Mayan term meaning “The Land of Rain or Mist.”
Scouting parties of this fiercely religious people reached the south-central highlands before 1,000 B.C., carrying icons of a jaguar god believed to control rain and the elements. They swiftly dominated the region’s fertile valleys with statues of fat, baby-faced were-jaguars, honored through ceremonies in which priests painted their faces black and white, wore jade masks and towering hats, and danced in ocelot-hide capes — rituals that terrified the farmers they ruled.
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