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Applicable to features both designed by natural selection and generated by cultural design forces, costly signaling theory predicts the evolution of signaling systems that reliably communicate information about some underlying quality. For instance, an individual's superior access to resources will not be obvious unless they advertise it, so advertising is necessary for the individual to gain the prestige benefits of superior access. To be believable, however, the advertisements must be impossible to fake unless the individual actually controls a disproportionate share of resources. Wasteful, resource-consuming advertisements (e.g., conspicuous consumption or conspicuous generosity) are the result. For Early Formative period Mesoamerica, this simple, though perhaps counterintuitive, formulation provides expectations about empirical patterning borne out by existing observations on the material record of cultural elaboration within the Gulf Coast Olmec heartland and by changes over time in patterns of inter-regional interaction.
Interest in the Olmec, arguably Mesoamerica's first civilization, has surged over the past decade, with two full-length books (Diehl 2004; Pool 2007), a recent Ancient Mesoamerica (Spring 2010, Vol. 21) special section titled "Rethinking the Olmecs and Early Formative Mesoamerica,â[euro] a major synthetic analysis and catalogue of Olmec art in the collection at Dumbarton Oaks (Taube 2004), and numerous journal articles. The Olmec even play a role in modern identity politics, setting claims of an African stimulus for the Olmec in contrast with enthusiasm for archaeological evidence of home-grown artistic and technological creativity.1
The Olmec emerged during the Early Formative period, roughly 1800-1100 b.c., a time when people throughout Mesoamerica were first congregating in permanent settlements and making pottery. Some additional innovations, such as carved monumental and portable stone sculpture, and long-distance movement of fine pottery and other goods, seem to have been introduced by people of the Gulf Olmec heartland, also called Olman (Clark 1997; Coe 1989; Diehl 2004, 2005; Diehl and Coe 1996; Lowe 1989; Pool 2007). Because the heritage of these Olmec innovations can be traced in later Mesoamerican art and material culture, Mesoamericanists have referred since the 1940s to the Olmec as Mesoamerica's "mother cultureâ[euro] (Bernal 1969; Covarrubias 1942, 1957).
A variety of archaeological evidence favors the view that some Gulf lowland individuals or factions were better able than their contemporaries elsewhere to harness energy...