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

egarding subsistence, settlement, political organization, and ideology have either not
been specifically addressed or adequately examined. An exception to this condition and a
clear demonstration of the significance of this type of investigation is illustrated by the
recent work of VanDerwarker (2006) on Formative period Southern Gulf Coast
subsistence systems.
The lack of data is not an indictment of the researchers, but an acknowledgement
of the limitations of inquiry caused by restricted funding, the limits imposed on field
projects, and the lack of an overall investigative design that would contribute to a more
focused approach and fuller understanding of the Olmec phenomenon. Stark (1997:10)
has noted another difficulty that is shared by numerous researchers in that “many studies
remain archival manuscripts and licenciatura theses, to which access is difficult for the
profession.” In some cases field reports have not been made available to researchers as
well.
Nevertheless, for those outside the sphere of Formative period Mesoamerican
studies, these limitations have not prevented a diversity of models and inferences to be
developed about the Gulf Coast Olmec. There has been much written about the Southern
Gulf Lowland inhabitants and the breadth of their application to a variety of social
theories has been discussed in Chapter 1. The majority of these models and hypotheses
have been formulated from relatively limited direct information derived from the site of
San Lorenzo, with occasional reference to La Venta. Therefore, the definition and usage
of the “Gulf Coast Olmec” in cross-cultural social theory is based, almost exclusively, on
two sites that are temporally and differentially distributed across the landscape.
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