Olmec Face (c. 1200–400 BCE) - The Virtual Museum

A calm human face looks out from a small piece of pale, speckled stone. Its almond-shaped eyes, broad nose and softly parted lips were carved in the style of the Olmec, Mesoamerica’s earliest known great civilization. Small enough to rest in the palm of a hand, it belongs to a family of portable stone faces that archaeologists still debate. Today it is in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, and through 3D scanning it can be studied from every angle.

Mexico’s First Great Civilization

The museum attributes this face to the Olmec culture of Mexico. The Olmec flourished in the hot, wet lowlands of the Gulf Coast, in today’s states of Veracruz and Tabasco, from roughly 1200 to 400 BCE.

Their first great centre, San Lorenzo, rose around 1200 BCE on a raised plateau above the Coatzacoalcos River. After its decline, La Venta in Tabasco became the leading centre from about 900 to 400 BCE, with an earthen pyramid, plazas, and carefully planned buried offerings.

The name “Olmec” is modern. It comes from the Aztec Nahuatl word Olman, “land of rubber”, and the people who made these works left no record of what they called themselves.

Olmec art spread far beyond the Gulf Coast. Objects and images in Olmec style appear in the highlands of central Mexico, in Guerrero and Oaxaca, and as far as Central America.

This wide reach led the Mexican artist and scholar Miguel Covarrubias and others to call the Olmec the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica. Many archaeologists today prefer to see them as one of several “sister cultures” that grew up at the same time and traded ideas and goods.

The museum record gives no exact date, find-place or maker for this face. Its date can therefore only be estimated from the Olmec period as a whole.

Faces of Rulers, Ancestors and Spirits

The human face stands at the heart of Olmec art. It appears on colossal heads several metres tall and on carvings no larger than a thumb.

Many Olmec faces follow fixed conventions: a heavy upper lip, a downturned, open mouth, puffy eyelids and sometimes a cleft in the head. Scholars have linked these features to a so-called “were-jaguar”, a being that mixes human and feline traits and may relate to rain, maize and power.

This face is quieter and more human. Its mouth is straight rather than snarling, and it shows no fangs or cleft. Faces like this may portray rulers, ancestors or idealized people rather than supernatural beings, but without a known context its exact meaning remains uncertain.

Small stone faces are often called “maskettes”. They are too small to cover a living face. Many have drilled holes at the sides or top, which suggest they were sewn to clothing, tied to belts or headdresses, or worn as pendants on the chest.

Greenstone carvings like these were also placed in tombs and in buried offerings, as at La Venta. They were among the most precious things an Olmec ruler could own or give away.

Pale Stone in the Palm of a Hand

The face is carved from a pale grey-green stone with dark speckles. The museum record does not identify the stone or publish its dimensions. Photographs with a scale bar show that it is small enough to hold in one hand.

The Olmec valued green stones above all others. Their colour was linked to water, growing maize and life itself. Prized jadeite came from the Motagua River valley in present-day Guatemala, while serpentine and other greenstones were found closer to hand.

Olmec lapidaries worked these hard stones without metal tools. They cut blocks with string saws – cords pulled back and forth with wet sand as an abrasive – and drilled holes with bone or cane drills and abrasive sand.

Surfaces were ground down and then polished for many hours with ever finer abrasives. A single small mask could represent weeks of skilled labour.

On this face the features are cut in shallow relief: hollowed eyes, a wide nose and thin, slightly open lips. The front is smoothly shaped, while the back is flat and only roughly worked. Small holes are drilled through the sides, probably for attachment.

From Mexico to Stockholm

The face is part of the collection of Wolmar and Astrid Silfversparre, which entered the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm in 1996. How and when it left Mexico, and where it was found, are not recorded.

That is common for pre-Columbian objects in European collections. Many were bought on the art market during the 20th century, when interest in “primitive” and ancient American art grew among artists and collectors.

Popularity also attracted forgers. Olmec-style greenstone carvings are among the most copied of all pre-Columbian objects, and scholars stress that pieces without an excavated context must be judged with care.

Credits & Sources

Original 3D model: Olmec face by National Museums of World Culture (Sweden), licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Photographs: Johan Jeppsson (front and back views; photographer of the older catalogue photo not recorded), National Museums of World Culture / Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Museum upload: Olmec Face by The Virtual Museum, based on the original model (CC BY 4.0).

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