Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  In 1927, mineralogist George Kunz, of Tiffany & Co., lamented, “Jade! Why must it always present the same mystery? Plenty of jade has been found in Mexico but none in the place God put it. None. Rather it is found in wells, in graves, in other places where man has secreted it, and none of it is newly mined. Thousands of years ago it was marked by primitive man, rubbed and polished, carved and graven, all the jade that’s ever been found in Mexico. No gem has ever caused the mineralogist or the archaeologist quite the heartache that jade has.”

  In the years after Kunz and Thompson, other spectacular carved jades were uncovered in pre-Hispanic cities in Mexico and Central America. Jade pebbles and deposits were rumored in the Mexican states of Guerrero, Coahuila, and Hidalgo, but these reports were not confirmed. And so, decades after Edward H. Thompson raised his spectacular hoard of jades from the Sacred Well at Chichen Itza, the location of the ancient mines remained one of the most tantalizing puzzles in the New World. To unravel the mystery, we need to start with the Olmecs, one of the first civilizations to prosper in the Americas.

  TWO

  Olmec Blue

  It was January 1939, thirty years after Edward H. Thompson made his first dive into the Sacred Well at Chichen Itza. Matthew Williams Stirling was standing in the sticky Mexican sun, wearing the clipped mustache of an accountant but the high boots and slouch hat of an explorer. He was peering into the pit that his workers had opened in the heavy black soil outside the Gulf Coast village of Tres Zapotes. Staring back at him was a colossal stone face.

  Rendered with boldness yet sensitivity, the huge head depicted a mature, helmeted man with oval eyes, a broad nose and mouth, and an imperious expression. The features were so lifelike that the lips seemed about to bark an order. Not the idealized image of a god, Stirling decided, but the portrait of a flesh-and-blood king who had once reigned here. The locals warned Stirling not to take a picture of the face, saying its spirit would turn away and only the back of its head would show.

  Resting on stone slabs, the monument was six feet high and eighteen feet around; Stirling figured it weighed ten tons. It was carved from a solid piece of basalt—though the nearest source of that stone lay more than ten miles away, through the enveloping swamps. Who had lugged the stone all that distance? And who had sculpted it with such consummate craftsmanship? “Like a great American Sphinx,” Stirling wrote in an article for National Geographic, “the Colossal Head, newly cleared of the imprisoning earth, still looks imperturbably toward the north across the abandoned plaza where once barbaric ceremonies were performed. Could his great mouth but speak, one of the most important chapters of American history would doubtless be revealed to us.”

  Stirling wasn’t the first outsider to gaze at the strange monument. The gigantic head of Tres Zapotes had been discovered nearly eighty years before, when a worker clearing land for sugar cane had exposed what he thought was the bottom of an enormous black kettle. He’d sent for the hacienda owner, who’d dispatched a crew to excavate it. But frustrated that the find wasn’t more transportable, or marketable, they’d left the sculpture sitting in the dirt. Though a few archaeologists and travelers had come to gawk during the next eight decades, the monument had attracted less curiosity than you might have expected for an enormous basalt head buried in the middle of nowhere. Over the years, the earth had swallowed it again, up to its enigmatic brow.

  Stirling was chief of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, where he’d gone to work seventeen years earlier, even before finishing his master’s degree at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Before that he’d done a stint in the Navy in the First World War, then had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where he’d studied geology and archaeology and competed in the pole vault and triple jump. He’d conducted some digs for the Smithsonian in Florida and South Dakota, but finding that work tame, he’d resigned from the BAE and done his own exploration of the Upper Amazon. Then the Smithsonian and the Dutch colonial government had chosen him to lead an eight-hundred-person expedition to New Guinea, the largest mission of its kind ever undertaken to that point, to investigate the island’s indigenous peoples, flora, and fauna. In 1928, he’d rejoined the BAE, this time as chief. He’d also met his wife, Marion, there, when she was hired as his secretary; they were married in 1933.

  Stirling had been curious about the colossal head of Tres Zapotes partly because of some smaller pre-Columbian pieces that had been turning up in that part of Mexico. Carved from an exquisite jade ranging from translucent blue-green to smoky blue-gray, the pieces were executed in a strange, unclassifiable style, depicting individuals with round faces and broad noses, downward-turning mouths, and grotesque features that seemed to combine elements of human infants and jaguars. Stirling had first come across the style around 1918, while still a student, in an old picture of a small blue jade mask; then, two years later, while traveling in Europe, he’d tracked down the original in a Berlin museum. Beginning in the late 1920s, a consensus had been building—promoted by the German archaeologist Hermann Beyer along with Marshall Saville of the Museum of the American Indian and George C. Vaillant of the American Museum of Natural History—that these pieces, so different from anything Maya, had been created by a previously unknown people living along Mexico’s Gulf Coast.

  Stirling wondered whether the great head and the mysterious blue jades might be related. So in 1938, he’d driven down from Laredo, Texas, with the pregnant Marion and her parents. While the family toured the ruins at Monte Alban and Mitla in nearby Oaxaca, he’d doubled back to the state of Veracruz, southwest of the Yucatan, where the Mexican isthmus sucks in its belly to its narrowest girth. Arriving at Tres Zapotes after an eight-hour trek on horseback, Stirling had no time to excavate the head on that first foray. But even then, he could see that it sat in a plaza surrounded by four overgrown, obviously manmade mounds. Close by were other clusters of platforms and mounds, including one nearly 450 feet long. Apparently, there had once been a city here—some 150 miles west of the nearest known Maya site. Enlisting the patronage of the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society, Stirling returned the following January, this time with Marion, fellow archaeologist Philip Drucker, and photographer Richard Stewart.

  On this second visit, Stirling and the others journeyed by launch up the mangrove-clotted Río Papaloapan, which had first been explored by the notoriously cruel conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, who had arrived in the Yucatan with Juan de Grijalva in 1518. As the coastal sand hills gave way to broad lowlands, Stirling and the others spied the snow-dusted volcano Orizaba. Then, he wrote, “our hearts beat a little faster when we first distinguished to the eastward the hazy volcanic peaks of the Tuxtla Mountains, at the base of which lay our goal.” He knew the head would still be where he’d left it, but he couldn’t help wondering, “Would we find it reposing in lonely grandeur, or would we discover the remains of a great city, worthy of such an ambitious work of art?”

  The next day, the launch navigated a flat, solitary landscape, streams choked with water hyacinths that clogged the propellers, channels so constricted that the passengers could touch both banks at the same time. Then, as they drew closer to the sierra, the vegetation became more lush, with parrots shrieking in the canopy and iguanas sunning themselves on shore. At dusk, the party entered Boca San Miguel, which consisted of three thatched houses. They mounted mules, and an hour and a half later, well after dark, they finally reached Tres Zapotes.

  The expedition members hurriedly settled into their huts two miles outside the village. The next day, they went to work. Stirling liked to say that archaeologists often made their best discoveries soon after arriving at a site, and Tres Zapotes didn’t disappoint: With local people guiding them to promising locations, the team uncovered nine other monuments in nearly as many days. Among them was a five-foot-long, broken stone box incised with mystical swirls and barely discernible, human-like figures that se
emed to be engaged in battle; Stirling judged the piece “one of the finest examples of stone carving ever found in Mexico.” There was also a squat, barrel-shaped basin that he believed had been used for extracting human hearts. And they uncovered a huge stela, or stone slab, more than seventeen feet long and nearly seven feet wide; broken in two and badly weathered, it was carved with the figures of three men, one of whom grasped in his hand a severed human head.

  But Stirling’s most exhilarating—and most controversial—discovery at Tres Zapotes was an unprepossessing fragment of another stela that he literally tripped over on the edge of a cornfield about two miles from camp. Named Stela C because it was the third they’d found, it had been broken and reused as a base for erecting another monument. On one side was the badly eroded profile of a man’s face. But the back wasn’t weathered at all, suggesting that the stone had rested on that side for many years before being recycled. Then, as the workers carefully cleared the mud with their hands, one called to Stirling in Spanish, “Boss, there are numbers!” And on the reverse, Stirling saw, was “the thing we had all secretly hoped might show up in the course of our work, but which not one of us had the temerity to expect,” a row of elegantly carved bars and dots—figures like the ones the Maya had used to record their calendar dates.

  The Maya civic calendar, or haab, consisted of 365 days divided into eighteen “months” of twenty days each, plus a five-day period at the end of the year, called the Wayeb, which was thought to be ruled by instability and peril. But for marking religious rituals and making prophecies, the Maya relied on a sacred almanac of 260 days, called the tzolk’in, which consisted of a series of twenty named days repeated thirteen times. (No one knows why the tzolk’in has this odd length; it may be derived from an astronomical cycle, such as that of the planet Venus, which appears as the morning star and the evening star for 263 days, respectively; or perhaps from the length of human gestation, which is about nine lunar months; or possibly from the multiplication of 20 by 13, the latter being a significant number to the Maya.)

  The haab and the tzolk’in ran concurrently, synchronizing every fifty-two haabs, which is called a Calendar Round; then the cycle would start all over again. To measure more lengthy periods, the Maya used the so-called Long Count, whose start is generally traced back to the equivalent of a day in August 3114 B.C. (perhaps the putative date of creation), just as the Christian calendar begins at the birth of Christ. Using base 20, the Maya could represent any day in the Long Count by combining only three symbols—a shell (0), a dot (1), and a horizontal bar (5, with two stacked bars for 10 and three for 15). Where numbers larger than 20 were needed, zeros were used to shift the position of a digit and multiply its value, just as we do with Arabic numbers in base 10 (though the Maya didn’t use decimals to record numbers smaller than 1). By comparison, it would be another fifteen hundred years before the concept of zero was used in Europe.

  To record a Long Count date, a scribe would use five numbers corresponding to various units of time—the k’in (1 day), the winal (20 days), the tun (360 days, or 18 winals), the k’atun (7,200 days, or 20 tuns), and the bak’tun (144,000 days, or 20 k’atuns). There was also a great cycle of 13 bak’tuns (1,872,000 days, or roughly 5,128 years). This is the period ending on December 21, 2012, but contrary to the predictions of modern doomsayers, the date wouldn’t have signaled apocalypse for the Maya, only the start of the next cycle in an incomprehensibly long series of cycles. As Linda Schele and David Freidel have written, for the Maya, history was not a linear progression but instead a series of “endless cycles repeating patterns already set into the fabric of time and space.”

  Stirling copied the date glyphs from the stela, then rushed back to camp, where Marion deciphered them using Sylvanus Morley’s An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphics, which the Smithsonian had published in 1915. The Maya generally wrote their dates vertically, with the bak’tuns on top and the k’ins on the bottom, but when written out in the conventional modern format, with the bak’tuns on the left and k’ins on the right, the bars and dots appeared to read 15. 6. 16. 18. (There was also a final 6, but that was assumed to designate a specific day and not to be part of the Long Count date.) The crucial first digit, counting the bak’tuns, was other, presumably to be found on the stela’s missing piece.

  Making what seemed a reasonable guess that the errant figure was a 9, Marion at first calculated the date as A.D. 478. But as Stirling examined the stone, he became convinced that he saw an additional dot above the three top bars, just at the stela’s break. It was the merest suggestion of a circle, requiring an act of imagination or will to see; but if Stirling were right, it would make the k’atuncount 16 instead of 15. More outrageously, he suggested, in light of the heavy weathering on the opposite side, that the missing number shouldn’t be a 9 but a 7, yielding a date of 32 B.C.—two centuries before Maya civilization attained its zenith. It was a startling claim, and if correct, would give Stela C the oldest Long Count date ever found in the Americas to that time. (Since then, a stone panel has turned up in Chiapas with a date four years earlier.)

  Before Stela C, the record holder had been a strange figurine unearthed some four decades before in a tobacco field at nearby San Andrés Tuxtla. About six inches high and carved from jade, the Tuxtla Statuette showed a fat, bald man with jolly eyes, wearing a feathered cape around his shoulders and, over his mouth, a mask in the shape of a bird’s bill. Inscribed on it were glyphs that seemed to be in a language all their own—but the date, carved in a style very similar to the one on Stirling’s Stela C, was also measured in the Long Count.

  Like Stela C, the Tuxtla Statuette had been found well outside the known Maya range. Stirling allowed that the figurine could have been carried there—but that was less likely for the heavy stela in Tres Zapotes with its even older date. The date could have been carved later than the slab itself, as an added historical reference, though from the severe erosion, Stirling was inclined to believe that the stela was as old as the inscription seemed to indicate. But then, how had the people of Tres Zapotes come to be using the Maya calendar hundreds of years before the Maya themselves? Stirling arrived at the same conclusion that George Vaillant had suggested a decade before: There had been a civilization even older than the Maya, “a people,” Stirling wrote, “whose origin is as yet very little known. Present archaeological evidence indicates that their culture, which in many respects reached a high level, is very early and may well be the basic civilization out of which developed such high art centers as those of the Maya, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and Totonacs.”

  The enigmatic but seemingly jovial Tuxtla Statuette, incised with hieroglyphs and one of the oldest Long Count dates ever discovered, corresponding to A.D. 162.

  Courtesy of Willard Culver/National Geographic Stock.

  The overwhelming majority of Stirling’s colleagues saw things differently, and the resulting feud would occupy scholars for the better part of the next two decades. Aligning with Stirling and Vaillant were two Mexicans, archaeologist Alfonso Caso and artist/anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias. The opposition was led by the most distinguished Mayanist of his time, the brilliant, erudite J. Eric Thompson, who pronounced a date no earlier than A.D. 1200 for these contentious people, who were being called the Olmecs.

  The name comes from the Nahuatl olli, for “rubber.” Since the sixteenth century, the term had been used for people living along the southern Gulf Coast, where latex had long been collected from the rubber trees native to the area. In 1927, Hermann Beyer had applied the name to the ancient people who had carved the colossal head at Tres Zapotes. Picked up by George Vaillant and others, the term had come into general use. But it was an anachronism, since the Olmec cities were abandoned nearly two millennia before the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs arrived in central Mexico. It seems unlikely that the Aztecs ever even heard of the Olmecs, since they didn’t mention them to the Spanish. Centuries later no one could say what these
people called themselves or how they named their cities. Although no complete Olmec skeletons had survived in the wet Gulf climate, the sculptures they left behind gave a tantalizing glimpse of a people who were squat and muscular, with short necks, flared noses, almond-shaped eyes, thick lips, and straight black hair. But it remained to be proven who the Olmecs were, or weren’t.

  In early 1942, the Japanese had American troops pinned down on Bataan, in the Philippines; in Europe, the first GIs had just landed in the United Kingdom. In Mexico, Matthew Stirling was again standing in the coastal humidity, peering into yet another hole that his workers had opened. Protruding from the pit was a bizarre, hut-like structure with rounded beams, not of wood but solid basalt. Ten feet long, a foot in diameter, and weighing two tons each, the beams had been artfully assembled like great stone Lincoln Logs. The columns forming the sides and back of the building had been set in the ground like a paleolithic palisade, then overlaid with more of the beams to form a flat roof. In front were five more of the basalt “logs,” angling up to the roofline like a steep stone ramp. So tightly fitted were the huge pillars that Stirling judged it would be difficult for even a rodent to slip through. He didn’t know what to make of the outlandish construction. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the Americas.

  This time Stirling was at the ancient city called La Venta, in the state of Tabasco, some hundred miles southeast of Tres Zapotes and a dozen miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. About 1925, Danish archaeologist Frans Blom and American author/anthropologist Oliver La Farge had discovered another colossal head at La Venta. But no one had come to excavate the city until now.