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

Park (1992:90) presents the Olmec as an example of a major civilization that
owes its success to intensive recession agriculture and water management techniques. He
emphasizes that many societies that practiced recession agriculture in alluvial riverine
environments went on to become advanced civilizations in part due to their ability to
overcome risk (chaos) and the institution of common property. His hypothesis holds that
the highest agriculturally producing lands remained in the possession of the upper levels
of the social hierarchy. In a similar argument, Spencer and Redmond (1992:151-154)
equate the high-yield recession-type agricultural practices of the inhabitants of the
western Venezuelan llanos region to similar situations and successes among the Gulf
Coast Olmec. They also suggest that the sociopolitical development of chiefdom level
societies in the Late Glaván period (AD 500-600) mirrored the political economy model
of the Olmec. The surplus created by the exceptional crop yields was a major factor in the
increase in population levels, the appearance of a three-tiered settlement hierarchy,
construction of mounded architecture, and differentiation of social status.
Price’s (1977) cross-cultural discussion concerns how shifts in the mode of
production led to alterations in the mode of social organization. She identifies the Gulf
Coast Olmec as a “pristine” society (see Fried 1967) that defined the linear evolution of
complex society. She contends that San Lorenzo, La Venta, and Tres Zapotes were
“clearly peaks in local stratification networks” that had regular interaction with each
other and belonged to a culturally and temporally unified society (Price 1977:212).
Strange (1982) examines how religious control is diminished as technological
control over social and environmental systems advance, and posits that, when these
socioeconomic systems break down, the culture collapses. To illustrate his point, he
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