Olmec Iron-Ore Mirrors from San Lorenzo, Veracruz / Los Espejos Olmecas de Mineral de Hierro de San Lorenzo, Veracruz

Summary

This is an abstract from the "And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the heyday of the Olmec capital of San Lorenzo (1400–1000 cal BC), iron-ore mirrors from nonlocal sources were traded from distant regions. The Central Valleys of Oaxaca have been hypothesized as one of the possible sources, if not the main one. Iron ore was then used by the Olmec to create drill components such as bearing blocks and as personal adornments with shiny, light-reflecting surfaces known as mirrors. Kent Flannery’s proposal during the 1960s was that the Oaxacan site of San José Mogote was the polity in charge of mining the iron ore and manufacturing the mirrors. New evidence from excavations carried out by the San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán Archaeological Project from 1990 to 2013 and a thorough reanalysis of Flannery’s data shows that this assumption may be an overestimation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38071.0