Continuity Hypothesis
Marshall Saville first suggested, in 1929, that Olmec deities were forerunners of later Mesoamerican gods, linking were-jaguar votive axes with the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca. This proposal was amplified by Miguel Covarrubias in his 1957 work Indian Art of Mexico and Central America where he famously drew a family tree showing 19 later Mesoamerican rain deities as descendents of a "jaguar masked" deity portrayed on a votive axe. The Continuity Hypothesis has since been generally accepted by scholars, although the extent of Olmec influence on later cultures is still debated.
Read more about this topic: Olmec Religion
Famous quotes containing the words continuity and/or hypothesis:
“Only the family, society’s smallest unit, can change and yet maintain enough continuity to rear children who will not be “strangers in a strange land,” who will be rooted firmly enough to grow and adapt.”
—Salvador Minuchin (20th century)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)