The battered potsherds from the occupational areas at La Venta
represent the prosaic day-to-day life of the ancient inhabitants.
Household wares, made for, used, and discarded in the daily round,
give us little insight into the esthetic abilities of their makers. Yet
the ceramics were made by the same group from whom came the
artists who carved the massive monuments and the delicate jade
objects. It is fortunate that in addition to the fact that the pottery
and sculpture comes from the same one-horizon site, we have a few
more precise cross ties: the occurrence of a few fragments of small
jade and serpentine objects in the stratigraphic trenches (see p. 146 ),
and the finding of a number of pottery vessels of wares represented
in the tests and stratitrenches in the Ceremonial Court. The carv-
ings of jade and other special materials from Complex A make it
possible to round out the cultural picture on the esthetic side. The
present chapter deals with the products of the sculptors and lapidaries
of La Venta.

A glance suffices to assign a number of the jade objects to a Meso-
american art style which for some time has been recognized as unique.
This art has hitherto been known almost entirely from objects of
jade and similar materials, and a few pottery pieces, for the most
part of unknown provenience and never with clean-cut cultural asso-
ciations. The La Venta series is the first to have been found with
ceramic context. Nonetheless, a number of writers, including Beyer,
Saville, Lothrop, Vaillant, and Covarrubias, have assembled enough
of the stray pieces to enable them to define some of the outstanding
features of the art style, and to lead them to suggest both a probable
center for it in southern Veracruz, and a tentative ethnic association
with the legendary Olmec. ¹⁸ Thanks to these studies, the style has
become well known enough so that traces of its influence have been
recognized in materials from other cultures, as Lothrop has done,
for example, in the case of certain Naranjo stelae ( Lothrop, 1941).
Interest in the art style led to an archeological conference at Tuxtla
Gutiérrez in 1942 on the Olmec, that is, an appraisal of the refer-
ences to them in Mexican traditions, and what could be surmised of
their culture from a study of the jade figurines attributed to them. ¹⁹

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