NO. 1 CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA 
33 
arrived via maritime trade from the south (Coe, 1960b). It is also 
possible that the concept of making female figurines, far more an- 
cient in Ecuador than in Mesoamerica, was diffused from the south 
at the same time. At any rate, from Ocos times these become typical 
of Formative Mesoamerica. 
While it is doubtless true that "all the facts are not yet in," the 
Maya area proper, highland as well as lowland, is curiously lacking 
thus far in any truly Early Formative sites, and it may be that much 
of it was at that time uninhabited by any other than simple hunting 
and collecting peoples ; the lowland soils are here extraordinarily poor 
and perhaps would have offered few inducements for clearing by 
our earliest Formative agriculturalists, while the highland valleys may 
just have been too remote. 
We have now become adjusted to the fact, proved from recent ra- 
diocarbon dates, that the great Olmec civilization of the Gulf coast 
lowlands is Middle Formative in date, probably spanning the period 
800-400 B.C., although its origins may extend even further back in 
time (Drucker, Heizer, and Squier, 1959, pp. 264-267). As such, the 
Gulf coast continued to be the center of innovation for much that 
went on at this time, even as far away as the simple villages of the 
Valleys of Mexico and Guatemala. It would be as meaningless to ig- 
nore this as it would be to attempt an understanding of the European 
Neolithic without taking into account the coeval civilizations of 
Bronze Age Mesopotamia. The Olmec area was nuclear, all else mar- 
ginal. Such Middle Formative Phases as Ponce (MacNeish, 1954), 
Chiapa II-III (Warren, 1961), and Conchas (Coe, 1961) all show 
derivation from one or more centers on the Gulf coast and bear the 
imprint of Olmec ceramic styles : Abundant white pottery, the heavy 
tecomate, and the dish with flat bottom and rim engraved with two 
parallel lines. It may also be that the most ancient pottery of which 
we know in the Maya area, Mamom, is derived from a Chiapa Il-like 
culture on the Gulf coast. Possibly part of the complex known as Las 
Charcas, said to be the earliest Formative culture in the Guatemalan 
highlands (Shook, 1951 ; cf. Delgado, 1961, p. 102), is another prod- 
uct of this diffusion, but the phase is not stratigraphically placed in a 
sequence, nor is it certain that some Las Charcas materials are not 
far later than the Middle Formative. 
Although the construction of temple mounds of clay or earth had 
in all likelihood begun in the Early Formative, with the Olmec civ- 
ilization there appear the first really large, planned elite centers, 
such as La Venta. Other new elements are monumental stone carv- 
ing, stelae, writing, and perhaps astronomy, as well as the manufac- 
