4 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 10/ 



one which is probably safe enough in a rough and ready way, we 

 may judge the La Venta occupation to have been of moderate length. 

 The two stratitrenches appear on the basis of ware distributions and 

 trends to have been not contemporary but successive: the deposits 

 of stratitrench i, with an average depth of about 4 feet, succeed 

 those of stratitrench 3, which had a thickness of about 5 feet, with 

 little if any overlap. Ceramically speaking, there is no major 

 break between the two deposits, indicating that they represent a con- 

 tinuum. Nine feet of culture-bearing deposit, in a tropical zone where 

 so much of the organic refuse is destroyed or washed away com- 

 pletely, is really a fair amount. Fortunately, we are not completely 

 dependent on rough guesses as to deposition rates for a chrono- 

 logical placing of the materials, for typologically they may be related 

 to those of other sites at which ceramic columns have been established, 

 particularly the Tres Zapotes sequence. 



This is not the place for a detailed account of La Venta wares, 

 but their general characteristics may be summarized briefly. While 

 painted decoration occurs in simple, not to say crude, patterns, in 

 red or black on one or another of the common slips, it is so infre- 

 quent that we may call the pottery essentially monochrome. Several 

 of the major wares are very like certain Tres Zapotes monochrome 

 wares, heavy-walled, not too well fired, with abundant coarse aplastic 

 (which appears to be stream sand with a high proportion of quartz 

 particles), and with about the same range of slip colors within the 

 "brown" and "black" groups. White and red over-all slips occur in 

 small quantities. As at Tres Zapotes, there was in use a firing method 

 which produced dishes and bowls with dark gray and black bodies 

 and nearly white or grayish rims. However it was done, at La Venta 

 it was not so standardized as at the former site, but was practiced 

 with a variety of dififerent pastes. Even more like Tres Zapotes, there 

 occurs an important group of vessels made from a very finely divided 

 paste with no visible aplastic, which fired in some cases from orange 

 to bufif in color, and in others, to black and gray. 



This is the same kind of pottery which I designated the "Poly- 

 chrome Group of Wares" in the description of Tres Zapotes ceramics, 

 because they became the chief vehicle for the polychrome decora- 

 tion of the Upper Tres Zapotes period. However, it cannot be 

 demonstrated that they bore painted decoration throughout their 

 history, and I now prefer to call them Fine Paste wares and dififer- 

 entiate between their monochrome and painted varieties. The his- 

 tory of development of the Fine Paste wares will be of considerable 

 import when completely worked out — T believe them to be ancestral 



