Correct me if i am wrong, but, when Cortez landed in Tobasco, which was the heart of the Olmec land, he found a flourishing town, a hierarchical social structure, and agriculture.Indeed, wherever Cortez went, including a few years later when he attacked the Mayans, he found towns, hierarchical military organizations and the agriculture to support them.
From my understanding, once the Olmecs destablized the region with an civilized organization of violence through a hierarchical military structure, that Meso-American region remained destablized with a chain-reaction of continuous civilizing pressure.
I don’t know much about the Olmecs other than that they seemed to influence a lot of the cultures in that region. But the Aztec empire had not gone by the time Cortez arrived. I think it stood in serious decline, and the conquest and diseases of the Spanish hastened its collapse, but the empire had not gotten to the point of crumble.
I was referring to the so-called “Anasazi” peoples of Chaco Canyon that left their civilization and never looked back–to the point where the knowledge of what happened to the Anasazi does not remain in the histories of any of the tribes that descended from those people.
It may be that the Olmec started a series of jump-start civilization movements within the tribes of the area that culminated in the “glory” of the Aztecs. But just because the Olmec people did not retain their glory doesn’t mean that they had truly hit bottom with their civilization movement, so the area had never fully known collapse. I think even after the oil “runs out” that we will have city states that try to hang on and maintain the way of life they knew, but that doesn’t have to stop the rest of us from walking away, and when we get away and leave the old mentalities behind and are forced by circumstances to re-evaluate all our ways of thinking in order to survive–and then see that we can even thrive outside of civilization–then the memes of civilization can fall away.