The La Venta Buried Offering: Crossed Axes

They buried it where no one would ever find it.

Underneath the floors and platforms of La Venta, the Olmec ceremonial center on an island in the Tonalá River in coastal Tabasco, the excavators of the 1950s found layer after layer of buried offerings that had never been intended for human eyes. Massive deposits of serpentine blocks — thousands of tons of green stone brought from distant sources, placed in carefully arranged patterns under the ground, then covered with clay, then built over with more platform construction.

The serpentine mosaic floors are the most famous.

Three of them have been found at La Venta, each one a large rectangle of small fitted serpentine blocks arranged in a pattern that is, when viewed from above — which is the only possible way to see it, because it is underground — the stylized face of the were-jaguar. A great supernatural face, made of green stone, looking upward through the earth from a depth of several meters, visible to no one alive.

The people who made it covered it up as they finished it.

They sealed it with clay. They built on top of it. They made a room that the face could not see from below and that visitors to the room could not see from above, and then they left it there.

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The offerings sealed in specific locations across the La Venta complex include:

Offering Number 4 — a group of jade and serpentine figurines arranged in a scene: fifteen figures standing in a loose arc, four of them columnar jade axes rather than anthropomorphic figures, the whole arrangement suggesting some kind of ceremony or confrontation, placed in a shallow pit with sand over them and then sealed.

The mosaic offerings — the serpentine faces.

Jade celts — elongated jade axes — buried in groups in specific orientations, often in the four cardinal directions or in patterns that suggest astronomical alignment.

Jade figures of the were-jaguar, placed facing specific directions, sometimes facing each other as if in dialogue.

The common thread is that all of these objects were made with enormous labor and considerable craft — the jade and serpentine came from sources hundreds of kilometers away, the figurines required skilled carving — and all of them were placed where they would never be seen again.

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The theology this implies is not the theology of display.

Most sacred objects in most traditions are designed to be seen. The statue in the temple, the icon on the altar, the mural on the wall — these are made to be visible, to convey their meaning through the act of being observed. The buried offerings of La Venta work differently. They are made with the full skill and seriousness of objects intended for display, and then they are given to the earth.

The earth is the recipient.

This is a theology in which the primary audience for sacred action is not the human community but the earth itself — the ground, the underworld, the layered depths of soil and stone and water that underlie the human world. You make the best thing you can make, you arrange it with meaning, and you give it down, putting it in the ground the way you put a seed in the ground.

The earth receives it.

What grows from the exchange is not an object you can point to. It is the continued stability of the ground you stand on, the continued availability of the rain, the continued permission of the supernatural powers to inhabit the island where La Venta was built.

This is what the mosaic faces mean, looking upward through the earth: they are the counterpart to the living faces above, the face of the supernatural origin from which the human community descended, looking up from below the way the corn god looks up from the turtle’s back — receiving what is sent down, preparing what will be sent up.

La Venta was eventually abandoned.

The mosaic faces are still there, underground, looking up.