Introduction: Gulf Gothic

Summary

It was the third day of the seventeenth month; the long count was 8.5.3.3.5, and the day was 13 Snake. A sun-eating moon took place; piercingly the bludgeon star [Venus] had shone earlier, late in the day.

—from the La Mojarra stela in epi-Olmec script, dated 8.5.17.15.2 (157 AD) Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson, “Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing and Texts”

The Gulf, your gulf, is daily widening […]

—Derek Walcott, “The Gulf”

Along the Gulf of Mexico, over three thousand years ago, people were changed, domesticated by a species (Zea mays) they had been domesticating. Imagine a maize-matrix, on the coast and river basins of northern Tabasco and southern Veracruz, through which maize began to write itself and use its hosts to reproduce: trefoil signs like a fleur-de-lis, two leaves with a cob in the middle coming out of a man's head. Maize lost the ability to self-propagate, was dependent on humans for survival, but as Michael Blake makes clear, “by becoming habitual users,” humans became “both the cultivators and the cultivated” in a “biosocial entanglement” that brought them into hierarchical urban societies to nurture a plant that was changing in symbiosis with them (21–22). An elaborate set of Olmec ritual arts was organized around this botanical mother–father in whose service people became children of the corn. “Here we shall inscribe, / we shall implant the Ancient Word, / the potential,” the K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh tells us in a book of origins that opens—in Dennis Tedlock's translation—with the ritual language of laying out a cornfield (63), and moves through several creations and apocalypses until arriving at “the modeling of our first mother-father, / with yellow corn, white corn alone for the flesh” (146). Mesoamericans had long been bioengineering corn. The Gulf Olmec societies mark a moment of urban flowering when the Maize-god had refashioned humankind.

Sets of observations about seed and harvests, astronomical phenomena, time and space, had to be communicated across generations to set the conditions for city-states to emerge in the Olmec heartland between Tabasco and Veracruz—starting with San Lorenzo (1200–800 BC), La Venta (800–400 BC), and Tres Zapotes (400 BC–AD 100). Mesoamerican glyphic writing likely developed and proliferated in this Gulf culture, along with the long count of years (with its zero point of origin: August 11, 3114 BC) and additions to the calendar.