An archaeological evaluation of the Olmec 'royal tombs' at La Venta, Mexico

At La Venta, Mexico, the Middle Formative Olmec regional center, the existence of individual leaders is interpreted from the evidence of monumental stone portraiture and several tombs believed to house the bodies of a sequence of kings late in La Venta's history. The status of these latter features as graves, however, has been debated since soon after they were excavated in the 1940s, especially because they generally lacked osteological material. What remained was arrangements of costume items as if adorning a body, usually associated with a stone container. Most archaeologists have advanced the reasonable explanation that bones and teeth would not have survived in tropical environments and accepted both the tomb attribution and their function as individual funerary monuments. A detailed review of available information from the La Venta excavations reveals these assumptions are not warranted. Field data indicate the absence of expected taphonomic evidence of bodily decay. Analysis of the stratigraphy of Mound A-2, aided, by computer-enhanced imaging of field drawings, demonstrates its tomb-like features were erected in a single, short construction phase, not over a span of decades as individual kings died. These conclusions call for alternative explanations of these “surrogate burials,” absent bodies materially evoked by ritual officiants.