An Unexplored Realm in the Heartland of the Southern Gulf ... - Famsi

embedded misconceptions about these ancient people that are contradictory to present
archaeological evidence, which does not support the assumptions of an unchanging
society.
In 1892, Francisco del Paso y Troncoso employed the phrase “Olmec type” as a
descriptor for a number of ceramic figurines that had been found in Guerrero and
Morelos, Mexico (Pina-Chan 1989:25). Believing these artifacts stylistically resembled
the artwork being discovered along the Southern Gulf Coast, he named the style after an
indigenous community that lived along the coast at the time of Spanish contact. “Olmec”
was a well-intentioned designation but, in actuality, a misnomer created by subjective
interpretation, incomplete data, and unsubstantiated assumptions. The usage of the term
initiated geographic and chronological confusion that created persistent problems (see
Diehl 1989; Grove 1989).
The term “Olmec,” as used by Paso y Troncoso, referred to the Aztec’s Nahuatl
term Olmeca-Huixtotin. The initial difficulties arose because the Nahuatl name denoted a
Late Postclassic group of people who inhabited a limited portion of the Southern Gulf
Coast (c. AD 1400-1500). This group had neither a connection with the Formative people
who occupied the Southern Gulf Lowlands more than 2,000 years earlier (Diehl 2004:14;
Scholes and Warren 1965), nor to the societies of Morelos and Guerrero where the
artifacts were recovered. Thus, temporal and spatial discord was immediately embedded
in the term itself.
The use of the term “Olmec Heartland” while providing a convenient
geographical reference, as in the title of this dissertation, worsened the interpretive
situation. The concept of a heartland implies a core and periphery, internal and external
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