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

than a century after their occurrence. The following sections will demonstrate that the
misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and misuse of the data were not limited to 19 th
century observations.
The Gulf Coast Olmec in Anthropological Social Theory
The recognition, identification, and interpretation of patterns of sociocultural
integration among human societies has long been a primary goal of anthropology (e.g.,
Fried 1967; Morgan 1963; Service 1962, 1975; Spencer 2004; Tylor 1976). A significant
alteration in the sequence of human social arrangement was the emergence of complex
societies. The manifestation of these ranked relationships is remarkable because, for more
than three million years, humans apparently lived in autonomous, relatively egalitarian
bands. It is only within the last 7,500 to 10,000 years that these small, primarily nomadic
populations aggregate into larger, more sedentary villages that displayed greater social,
economic, and political complexity (Carneiro 1981:37-39; Earle 1997). Carneiro
(1970:733, 1981:38) argues that the appearance of ranking or hereditary inequality was a
major qualitative change in human history and that all modifications in social
organization that followed (e.g., stratification, states, and empires) were merely
quantitative.
Only a handful of “pristine” civilizations throughout the world are considered to
have developed the consequential change to greater social complexity without previous
archetypes upon which to model their social structure (Diehl 2004:11-12; Smith 2003:17-
19; Trigger 2003). These cultures include the Egyptians and Sumerians in the Near East,
the Indus civilization in India and Pakistan, the Shang culture in China, the Chavín or
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