Essays on Preclassic Chiapas and Mesoamerica

The purpose of this publication is to pull together Gareth Lowe's best essays on the Olmecs and their predecessors and present them in his voice.  The essays presented here, with one exception, were published in outside sources or are unpublished papers or unfinished drafts of papers presented at meetings. Some of the data in these essays are now out of date, but that is precisely their value in this work meant to document the history of some arguments. Lowe modified his views through time as better data came to his attention, largely unpublished information from ongoing excavations. It is important to know what data were available and when. Presenting his essays as historic documents allows readers to track the progress of Chiapas archaeology as well as the progression of Lowe’s thinking over the course of his career. This collection of Lowe’s observations and conjectures will hopefully generate future research to resolve questions he found intriguing.  In a very real sense, all treatments of the Chiapas Preclassic must deal with the ghost of Gareth Lowe.