The Olmec Colossal Heads and La Venta

The Olmec colossal heads are monumental basalt sculptures, between 1.47 and 3.4 meters tall and weighing as much as 40 tons, representing individualized human faces wearing distinctive helmets or headdresses. Seventeen confirmed heads have been discovered to date, distributed among San Lorenzo (ten), La Venta (four), Tres Zapotes (two), and Rancho La Cobata (one); the most widely accepted hypothesis identifies them as commemorative portraits of individual rulers, carved with hammerstones harder than the basalt itself, since the Olmecs had no metal tools at all. The first colossal head to be scientifically documented was found at Tres Zapotes in 1862 by local landowner José María Melgar y Serrano, though its true age and significance were not understood until Matthew Stirling's National Geographic Society-sponsored expeditions excavated Tres Zapotes, San Lorenzo, and La Venta between 1938 and 1946. Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century observers read the heads' facial features as "African" in appearance, generating diffusionist theories of foreign origin that modern archaeology has thoroughly discredited, attributing these features instead to conventions specific to the Olmec artistic canon.