Olmec Colossal Head from San Lorenzo
About 1200 to 900 BC
A human head the size of a small car, carved from a single boulder of basalt, looks out with heavy lids, a broad flat nose and full lips pressed slightly together. It wears a close fitting helmet with a strap under the chin and ornaments over the ears. There is no body; the head is the whole statement. This is one of the colossal heads of the Olmec, the earliest complex civilisation of Mesoamerica, and it comes from San Lorenzo in the state of Veracruz, the first great Olmec centre.
Each of the seventeen known heads has a different face and a different headdress, which is why most scholars believe they are portraits of individual rulers. Look at the individual quality of this one: the slight asymmetry of the mouth, the fold of skin under the eyes, the way the helmet sits low on the brow. The stone was quarried in the Tuxtla Mountains and moved sixty or more kilometres without wheels or draught animals, probably by raft and by dragging, an effort that tells you how much authority the rulers commanded. The surface was worked with harder stones and finished by abrasion; there is no metal in Olmec technology.
The heads were carved between about twelve hundred and nine hundred before Christ, and many were deliberately mutilated and buried when San Lorenzo declined, perhaps in a ritual of ending. This example came to the museum from excavations in the mid twentieth century. It stands at the entrance to the Gulf Coast hall as a reminder that Mexican civilisation is three thousand years old. Look also for the small jade figures and the seated wrestler nearby, which show the Olmec ability to work on any scale.
Did You Know? Some Olmec heads appear to have been recarved from earlier thrones, so the same boulder may have served two rulers in different forms.
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