Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/4/1/3/720689/artm_a_00103.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 KuBler’S SarcophaguS cold War archaeologieS of The olmec periphery luis m. castaÑeda In the fall of 1959, as art historian George Kubler wrote The Art and Architecture of Ancient America (1962), he corresponded with scholars and curators to clarify the spotty provenance of the numerous objects his survey book would discuss. Many of these artifacts had enigmatic histories, few more so than La Venta Monument Six—a sarcophagus carved with zoomorphic imagery excavated at the site of La Venta, in the Mexican state of Tabasco, by American archaeologist Matthew Stirling. Since the late 1930s, Stirling had gained notoriety for rediscov- ering the art of the Olmecs, Mesoamerica’s oldest and then most mys- terious culture, fi rst studied in Mexico in the 1860s. Yet even decades after this rediscovery, most of the artifacts that Stirling examined were not well understood.1 For Kubler, the unique iconography of the sarcophagus excavated in the Olmec “heartland,” especially what he described as its “ideo- graphic notations,” seemed to connect it formally to the art of better- understood regions of Mesoamerica, such as the Maya region. Kubler suggested this despite the lack of conclusive archaeological evidence to 1 Matthew W. Stirling, “Discovering the New World’s Oldest Dated Work of Man,” National Geographic 76, no. 2 (August 1939): 183–218; and Stirling, “Great Stone Faces of the Mexican Jungle,” National Geographic 78, no. 3 (September 1940): 309–34. See also Stirling, Stone Monuments of Southern Mexico (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Offi ce, 1943). © 2015 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00103 3 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/4/1/3/720689/artm_a_00103.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Stone Monuments of Southern Mexico La Venta Monument Six, basalt, La Venta, Tabasco, c. 1000–400 BCE. Tabasco, Monument Six, basalt, La Venta, La Venta Stirling, Plate 47 in Matthew W. DC: US Government Printing Office, 1943). (Washington, demonstrate these connections at that time.2 Among the sources Kubler consulted to ascertain the provenance of the sarcophagus was Mexican illustrator, art collector, and amateur archaeologist Miguel Covarrubias’s Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (1957). Covarrubias claimed that the sarcophagus had been destroyed as a result of the negligence of its American excavators.3 Kubler wrote to Stirling, as well as to archaeologist Robert Heizer, who had excavated in the Olmec heartland after Stirling, to confirm whether this was true. In his review of Indian Art of Mexico, Heizer politely denied Covarrubias’s accusation.4 Writing to Kubler, Heizer described the accusation less politely, as a “canard without truth.”5 The sarcophagus, 2 George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya, and Andean Peoples (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962), 66. 3 Miguel Covarrubias, Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (New York: Knopf, 1957), 70. 4 Robert F. Heizer, “Review of Indian Art of Mexico and Central America by Miguel Covarrubias,” American Antiquity 24, no. 2 (October 1958): 202. 5 Letter, Robert Heizer to George Kubler, October 26, 1959, George Alexander Kubler Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library (hereafter GAKP-YUL), Accession 1988- artmargins 4:1 M-004, Box 2. 4 he wrote, was “made of a crumby (crumbly too) local sandstone which weathers badly after two to three millennia of burial in the acid tropical soils [of the Olmec heartland].” Although the object “flaked off” and “split into a half-dozen pieces” soon after it was unearthed, Heizer wrote that Stirling’s crew did “a good job of . photographic documen- tation—at least infinitely better than any Mexican archaeologist would or could have done.” Stirling believed that Covarrubias’s drawing of the object featured in Indian Art far exceeded the detail captured by his Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/4/1/3/720689/artm_a_00103.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 photographs.6 Kubler nonetheless reproduced the same photograph of the sarcophagus that Stirling had published in the report of his discov- eries, a grainy print that did not actually illustrate the imagery so cen- tral to his analysis. Kubler’s exchanges with Stirling and Heizer provide a glimpse of the unstable disciplinary environment of the early study of the Olmecs. Recent studies, notably those by Kathleen Berrin and Virginia Fields, Richard Diehl, and Christopher Pool, have accounted for the method- ological divides that defined this period.7 Central among these were the debates about just how ancient Olmec culture was and whether art his- torical or archaeological analyses could better account for the culture’s importance in Mesoamerican history. This essay argues that three interrelated factors underplayed in these studies also shaped the redis- covery of Olmec art during the 1950s and 1960s: the rapid, sometimes violent modernization of the Olmec heartland, primarily the states of Veracruz and Tabasco; the debates surrounding the confusing racial profiles represented by Olmec artifacts; and the display of these arti- facts in large-scale exhibitions on both sides of the US-Mexico border. As such, this essay aims to position what has been traditionally con- ceived of as a purely intellectual debate about Olmec art and culture as part of an analysis of the geopolitical and institutional contexts within which it unfolded. By the late 1930s, the historically neglected Olmec heartland had 6 Letter, Matthew Stirling to George Kubler, Oct. 22, 1959, GAKP-YUL, Accession 1988-M- 004, Box 5. 7 See Kathleen Berrin and Virginia M. Fields, “Introduction,” in Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico, ed. Berrin and Fields (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 18–23; Richard Diehl, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, eda | kubler’s sarcophagus 2004), 15–18; Christopher A. Pool, Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica (New York: Ñ Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Carolyn E. Tate, Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture: The Unborn, Women, and Creation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). c a s ta 5 become the primary terrain for state-sponsored oil exploration in Mexico. This endeavor jeopardized the physical integrity of Olmec arti- facts and entire archaeological sites. However, a select few spectacular examples of Olmec art were included in some of the most ambitious art exhibitions sponsored by Mexican state agencies during the 1950s and 1960s, several of which were intended to foster US-Mexico diplomatic exchange. Despite receiving this degree of official attention, during its era of rediscovery Olmec art still remained peripheral to the nationalist Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/4/1/3/720689/artm_a_00103.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 construction of Mexican culture. The formal sophistication and ancient origins of Olmec art—especially the culture’s colossal sculptural heads, monoliths of basaltic rock probably carved to represent natural- istic portraits of ancient leaders—shook the foundations of established histories of Mesoamerican art, such as those authored by Salvador Toscano, calling into question the position that other Mesoamerican artistic traditions occupied in the official understanding of national identity.8 The radiocarbon dates gathered by Heizer, Philip Drucker, and Robert Squier at La Venta in 1955 suggested that the Olmec objects found at this site could date as far back as 1000–400 BCE, in Mesoamerica’s formative period, then known as the pre-Classic period. Their findings seemed to confirm the controversial thesis, first pro- posed at a 1942 meeting of the Mexican Anthropological Society by Stirling, Covarrubias, and Mexican scholar Alfonso Caso, that Olmec art was Mesoamerica’s oldest formative “mother culture.”9 The mother-culture argument, which claimed that Olmec art pro- vided the stylistic germ for all subsequent Mesoamerican artistic tradi- tions, has long since been discredited.10 Nonetheless, the currency of 8 E.g., Salvador Toscano, Arte precolombino de México y de la América Central (Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1944). 9 Miguel Covarrubias, “Origen y desarrollo del estilo artístico ‘Olmeca,’ ” in Mayas y Olmecas: Segunda Reunión de Mesa Redonda sobre Problemas Antropológicos de México y Centro América (Mexico City: Talleres de la Editorial Stylo, 1942), 46–49; Alfonso Caso, “Definición y exten- sión del complejo ‘Olmeca,’ ” in Mayas y Olmecas, 43–46. Scholars like Caso and archae- ologist Román Piña Chan expanded the thesis in subsequent decades. Caso examined the expansive, possibly imperial geographical extension of Olmec culture, which he argued could be identified not only in Mexico’s Gulf Coast, but also in central Mexico, an argument that Piña Chan subsequently expanded. See Román Piña Chan, The Olmec: Mother Culture of Mesoamerica (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1989). 10 See Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus, “Formative Mexican Chiefdoms and the Myth of the ‘Mother Culture,’ ” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19 (2000): 1–37. For an overview of these debates, see Julia Guernsey, Sculpture and Social Dynamics in Preclassic Mesoamerica artmargins 4:1 6 this thesis during the time of Olmec rediscovery is significant because it proved troubling for critics and historians who had characterized