On Choco

In the study of culture, a fundamental question can be simply stated: Where did villages and towns come from?  How did civilization arise?  These questions are central to modern processual archaeology  – why are there cities?  how did people come to live together in the vast network of interdependencies that we call a civilization?  Many ancient peoples ascribed their culture to a mythical founder.  Rome was founded by Aeneas.  An enigmatic ruler named something like “Snake Spine” built the first Mayan cities, at least, according to chronicles at Palenque, founding that Reich on an auspicious date about 2600 B.C.   Huang di, the Yellow Thearch, lived to be 113 years old and founded China around 4500 years before this present moment.  King Harald Fairhair united the Norwegians around the end of the First Millenium after Christ.  Brutus the Trojan emigrated to England and founded that culture at the time (as the poet of Gawain and the Green Knight tells us) “the sege and the assaut watz sesed at Troye” (when “the siege and assault had ended at Troy”).  Some people assert that there was no real beginning to their culture – they are autochthonous, that is, have simply always been on the land in which they reside.  The original inhabitants of Australia can maintain this truthfully – so far as we know, the people who first wandered the Australian continent have been there for 40,000 years of more.  Other groups subscribe to this view notwithstanding the archaeological record.  I have spoken with Lakota Indians who maintain that their ancestors crawled out of the blowholes of Wind Cave many thousand years ago – in fact, so far as we can ascertain the Lakota were woodland Indians in the west Appalachian mountains until a few decades before the Revolutionary War when they first migrated to the Great Plains.

The question of origins is central to recent archaeological developments exploring the horizon between village-dwelling farmers (and keepers of domestic animals) and the hunter-gatherer people that preceded them.  How did nomads come to settle in villages?  This is the question of sedentism – that is, the development of a “sedentary” life organized around the planting, harvesting and storage of crops from precursor hunter-gatherer clans, that is, dispersed and migratory family groups.  Models for this transition developed on the basis of fertile crescent civilizations posit economic processes for this development: cultivation of crops created sedentary settlements resulting in food surpluses; management of food surpluses created elites; the elites, in turn, engineered systems for creating even greater surpluses (for instance, irrigation projects and other sorts of water husbandry); these elites rationalized religious practices to consolidate their power and as a matter of self-aggrandizement; and from these villages, there arose trading networks that required specialization of labor and systems of laws and, ultimately, something like city-states controlling peripheral agricultural territory.  This is the story that archaeologists have told one another and their students for the past hundred years.  But, in fact, this story may be just as mythological as the idea that Brutus founded London after he fled the burning towers of Ilium.  Perhaps, something else happened to encourage wandering clans of nomads to cluster together in cities.  Discoveries at Poverty Point in Louisiana, the Cerro Juanqeana in the Sonoran desert, and Goebekli Tepe in Turkey have raised another possibility – perhaps, human beings first congregated in large numbers to work cooperatively on religious or ritual monuments.  The first monumental edifices in human history are not necessarily or, even, primarily mercantile.  Rather, there is increasing evidence that these sites where nomads congregated into temporary and, then, permanent cities were essentially places of pilgrimage.

Aguada Fenix is proto-Mayan site discovered by LIDAR technology beginning in the summer of 2017.  The earthworks at Aguada Fenix are located near the Usumacinata River where the lowland jungles of the Yucatan give way to savanna and, then, mountain ranges comprising the central highlands in the Mexican State of Tabasco.  The terrain is swampy, defined by big, turbid rivers and great lagoons occupying shallow basins.  The tropical savanna is crisscrossed with stands of jahuete and cocoyal trees, stately palms with basketball-sized fruit – grasslands and smaller palm trees abound as well.  Cacao is grown on plantations.  The land is mostly flat.  A few idiosyncratic classic-era Mayan ruins, outliers to the great cities in the Yucatan and the Chiapas highlands, dot the terrain.  Around Aguada Fenix, the present economy is cattle-based.  

LIDAR involves mapping features below an aircraft by scanning them with a laser beam.  The beam transmits data points in a digital cloud to the plane so that they can be plotted to map elevations in a landscape.  The efficacy of this technology is that the laser “sees through”, that is, penetrates, foliage.  The result is that structures previously hidden by trees and brush are revealed by the laser beam and can be visualized in three-dimensions.  (In the last five years, LIDAR has shown us that Mayan cities, mostly hidden in rain forest, are immensely larger in scope than was previously believed.)  The archaeological site at Aguada Fenix is not concealed under thick forest but the contours of the earthworks are subtle and difficult to appreciate from ground level.  This is because of their sheer size: the earthwork are so immense that in historic times they have always been deemed to be natural features. 

As plotted by the laser beam, Aguada Fenix appears as a vast, elongated rectangle 1413 meters long and 399 meters wide.  The rectangle is delineated by sharp boundaries as an artificially constructed plateau that is ten to fifteen meters high.  This enormous mound is flanked by several low flat-topped square mounds, various ramparts and embankments, and a number of plazas.  Wide and carefully graded causeways radiate away from the central plateau, some of them extending for several miles.  Nine roads of this sort, actually broad ceremonial ways, are visible extending like spread fingers from the central complex.  The great northwest causeway can be traced across the land for 6.3 kilometers beyond the raised platform. Viewed from high above the site, the elongated plateau and its flanking earthwork extensions looks like a cross with its cross-member beam pushed into the central rampart, that is, this beam truncated to an extension on both sides of the rectangular plateau about one-fifth of the length of the upright post.  The LIDAR image is intricate with many nearby earthworks and plazas and some ramparts raised as far as two or three kilometers from the main plateau-shaped embankment.  In fact, there is a smaller version of the immense central feature about a couple of kilometers to the east The flat site, looking a bit like an airport runway, is well-suited for aviation – there is a modern landing strip a bit to the south and encroaching on some of the prehistoric features.

The LIDAR terrain map of Aguada Fenix was made by the University of Calgary’s National Center for Laser Mapping.  After the site was discovered, it was investigated by ground teams led by Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, both from the department of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Arizona. (See Science, May 2020, “Monumental Architecture at Aguada Fenix and the rise of Mayan Civilization”). This field work was accomplished in the Spring dry season at Aguada Fenix in 2018 (February to April) and 2019 (February to March) with some additional excavations undertaken in 2020.  Several locations were selected for excavation, pits augured into the mounds and ramps using Deep Rock 20 well-drilling (hydraulic) equipment.  The vast central plateau is man-made although erected on a natural raised foundation of marl bedrock, possibly an outcrop before it was buried in 40 to 45 feet of fill.  The fill used in layers seems to have been selected for its color.  Each stratum is a different color.  Some of the layers are made from local cobbles and, on occasion, ceramics are encountered in the fill.  Amounts of ceramic discovered are not consistent with people living on top of the artificial platforms, flat raised structures that presumably had some kind of religious or ritual significance.  The work required to make the structures at Aguada Fenix was prodigious – somewhere between 10 and 13 million “person days” would have been required to haul dirt, as well as to distribute and flatten it into layers to create the embankments.  Most likely, the earth and clay was transported from pits in wicker baskets at a rate estimated at about 2.6 cubic meters of fill moved per day.  The source pits for the fill are about 50 meters from the structures and became inundated in the wet climate so as to appear as water features, that is, man-made lagoons and lakes in the landscape.

Ceramic sequences at the site and carbon-14 dating together with calculations of projected rate of weathering and erosion of the earthworks may be analyzed by Bayesian statistical modeling to provide dates for the construction work.  The oldest ceramics on-site date to around 1200 BC; the last earth-moving at Aguada Fenix occurred about 800 BC.  The majority of the earthworks were made between 1050 BC to 850 BC, that is, across a period of only 200 years.  During this time, the proto-Mayans moved 4 million cubic meters of earth – the mounds represent the second largest prehistoric earthmoving project in the world.  (The largest known earthworks are located at the Olmec site, San Lorenzo, about 400 kilometers away).  The volume of earth moved at Aguada Fenix is far greater than the volume of the pyramids at Giza and larger, as well, than the huge structures at Teotihuacan near Mexico City.  

Newspaper and internet articles about Aguada Fenix tend to emphasize its unusual characteristics.  But, in fact, the site is similar to about twenty smaller monumental constructions in the area.  In fact, these places have a generic name – they are Middle Formation Usmacinta earthworks (abbreviated MFU).  Most of these locations show similar ceramic sequences and are built in the same way: a broad cross-shaped central embankment is flanked by shorter steep-sided plateaus amidst a landscape of berms and causeways.  (A smaller but similarly designed group of embankments at nearby Ceibal was built around 950 BC and was previously thought to be the earliest of these locations.) The great, flat-topped plateaus are similar to the enormous earthworks at San Lorenzo built between 1400 and 1000 BC by the people archaeologists call the Olmecs.  Therefore, the phase of monumental earth moving at San Lorenzo in Vera Cruz province, more or less, precedes the work at Aguada Fenix by about 200 years.  The artificial plateau at San Lorenzo, which is slightly larger, looks very much like the features at Aguada Fenix.  But we know the Aguada Fenix earthworks were made by people different from the Olmecs.  Olmec pottery is diagnostic of that culture and the ceramics at Aguada Fenix aren’t Olmec and are made according to proto-Mayan paradigms.  Everything at Aguada Fenix, accordingly, points toward Mayan-speaking people building this site.  The idea for the huge plateau and its flanking members may have come from San Lorenzo but the people who built Aguada Fenix were proto-Mayans. 

One of the excavations at Aguada Fenix uncovered a cache of greenstone celts (that is blunt, polished ceremonial axes).  Six celts were unearthed with a greenstone perforator with its tip broken off.  The perforator is evidence that the proto-Mayans had already developed ritual practices involving blood-letting.  (We know that classic-era Mayan rulers were responsible maintaining cosmic equilibrium by piercing their tongues, lips, and penises to produce streams of blood that soaked bark-paper that was, then, burned to make an incense fragrant to the gods – some of the most beautiful and ornate Mayan carvings depict this rite which seems to have been accompanied by hallucinations involving feathered serpents, centipede monsters, and deceased ancestors.)  The Aguada Fenix cache is similar to one of the most spectacular finds in the Western hemisphere, the Olmec relics intentionally buried at La Venta.  Those artifacts include many beautiful celts but also an array of small jadestone figurines, sculpted into flat, scowling jaguar-faced babies.  The conclave of bald jaguar babies was arranged around a forest of upright celts.  No one has any idea what this cache was meant to signify but it was obviously important to the Olmec priests who buried it – more than seventy years later, they seem to have excavated a pit down to the congregation of hairless, stylized jaguar infants, apparently to see how they were doing.  Only one figurine has been found at Aguada Fenix, although, of course, only a tiny percentage of the site has been excavated.  The figurine at Aguada Fenix is a 40 centimeter high image of an animal.  The figure is sculpted from limestone and has been sanded and polished to represent a pig-shaped creature, fore- quarters crossed over its chest and hind quarters curled, tailor-sitting-style, under the animals rump.  The little creature has almond-shaped eyes on either side of his snout and little cupped ears like a piglet.  Archaeologists think the figure represents a white-lipped peccary.  These kinds of animals are indigenous to the region, although now endangered.  Peccaries are omnivorous day-feeding animals the height and length of a mid-size dog.  Although they eat insects and small reptiles, peccaries are primarily consumers of fruit and will wander in family groups for hundreds of miles to find their favorite food of this sort.  (Peccaries look like pigs, but genetically they are closer in their DNA-profile to elephants.)  Archaeologists who discovered this well-preserved artifact have named the peccary “Choco”.  “Choco” means “chocolate” as well as “swarthy” in Mexican Spanish as well as “one-legged” or “partially and asymmetrically broken.”  

Choco is an important artifact that figuratively, as it were, defines the distinction between the Olmecs and the proto-Mayans.  Olmec figurines tend to be weird jaguar-babies, part human and part feline, as well as other dwarfish humanoid-shaped ceramics, often displaying a dazzling, if unsettling grin.  Of course, at San Lorenzo there are enormous globe-shaped boulders that have been carved in the round into human faces.  The faces are distinctive and seem to be portraits of the mighty Olmec lords.  Thus, Olmec imagery to the extent that it can be deciphered – and much of this stuff is very, very strange – show predatory animals and warrior-leaders.  Nothing of this sort has been found at any of the proto-Mayan Usamacinta-style sites.  Furthermore, after a phase of building great flat-topped plateaus, the Olmecs began to erect steep-sided pyramids.  This transition suggests the intention to limit access to the monumental sacred spaces to only those authorized to climb the steps of the pyramids – that is, powerful priests, warriors, and sacrificial victims.  By contrast, the huge flat-topped plateau at Aguada Fenix is served by no fewer than nine causeways – apparently, everyone was invited to participate in some kind of rituals, probably dancing and feasting, atop the mound.  The distinction between the enormous, readily accessed plateau-mound and the steep, aloof and ominous pyramids later built at San Lorenzo (and, then, throughout the Olmec world) implies the difference between a society that is egalitarian and one that is intensely and brutally hierarchical.  A hallmark of Olmec society was the use of theobromines (that is, mildly psychedelic chocolate drinks) that were subject to sumptuary regulation – only the elite were allowed to quaff chocolates.  Nothing like the famous, ceramic mugs for chocolate consumption used by Olmec elites have been found at any of MFU sites.  

These findings suggest that the people who built Aguada Fenix’s monumental earthworks were not yet organized into a hierarchical society.  There’s not enough evidence to support this assertion but I will make it anyway: the Olmecs imagined themselves as the children of a ferocious apex predator, the jaguar; the proto-Mayans at Aguada Fenix thought of themselves as related to peccaries, humble mostly fruit-eating animals that roamed as hunter-gatherers across the vast and fertile terrain, rooting in the earth with their snouts to move dirt and find roots and grubs to eat.