Researcher finds evidence for shared governance in ancient Mexico

[Judi Lynn]

May 19, 2017 by Gail Hairston



Credit: University of Kentucky

For much of his career, University of Kentucky Professor of Anthropology Christopher Pool has been fascinated by Mexico's ancient Olmec culture, with its gargantuan heads sculpted in stone and more mundane relics its artisans etched in ceramic.

An expert in Mesoamerica, the evolution of complex societies, political economy and cultural ecology and armed with a voracious curiosity, Pool began his fieldwork at the Olmec site of Tres Zapotes, Mexico, in 1995, some 140 years after a farmworker's hoe first scraped the top of a buried stone head.

After numerous stone monuments were unearthed at Tres Zapotes, additional evidence of a highly sophisticated ancient culture was discovered. Archaeologists were lured away from Tres Zapotes by the discovery of the remains of several other ancient cities nearby and the tantalizing theory that the region was home to an early nation held together by a centralized monarchy.

"Tres Zapotes had been abandoned as an active site when I arrived; it had been nearly 20 years since the most recent archaeological excavation of the area," said Pool.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-evidence-ancient-mexico.html#jCp