Painting the Olmecs

After visiting the exhibit on African art at the Anthropology Museum, I noticed that there was another small, temporary exhibit in an adjoining gallery.  It consisted of watercolors that depict monuments of the Olmecs, Mexico's oldest pre-Hispanic civilization.

The paintings all portray objects on display in the outdoor La Venta Museum in Villahermosa, the capital of the state of Tabasco.  

La Venta was an important center of the Olmec civilization around 900 BC.  It was excavated by archaeologists in 1925.  They thought at first that it was a Mayan site, but then realized that it belonged to a culture that pre-dated the Mayas by centuries.  In the 1950s, PEMEX, the Mexican petroleum monopoly, built a refinery nearby, threatening the archaeological site.  In 1951, poet Carlos Pellicer spearheaded a project to save the monuments of La Venta by moving thirty-six of them to an outdoor, jungle setting outside of Villahermosa.  Pellicer invited a friend of his, Miguel Angel Gómez Ventura, a doctor and talented painter, to do a series of watercolors of the Olmec objects as they were brought to the new museum.  Those paintings are now held by the Juárez University of Tabasco, but they are currently on display here in Mexico City for a limited time.

I visited the museum in Villahermosa many years ago, and I recognized the monuments depicted in some of the paintings.

The Olmecs are best known for their enormous stone heads.

Several steles, (an archaeological term for stone slabs erected as a monument) were moved to the museum.

A mosaic pavement

A number of monuments were thought to be altars, but now the consensus is that they served as thrones.

 This stone statue is know as "Juchimán".

I had no idea what that name meant.  I searched on the internet.  According to one story, an Englishman looked at the carving and said that it looked like a "watchman".  That got distorted into "juchimán".  I suppose that explanation is as good as any.