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The name "Olmec" means "rubber people" in Nahuatl, the language of the Nahuas, and was the Aztec term for the people who lived in the Gulf Lowlands in the 15th and 16th centuries, some 2,000 years after the Olmec culture died out.
This is the more traditional encyclopedia map. The components of this map should be large enough to be read without opening a separate window. This was the goal of my map above - something that the reader could refer to while trying to understand the Olmec milieu. Promoted Image:Olmec Heartland Overview 4.svg MER-C 05:03, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
The Olmec civilization ended in 400 BC, with the defacing and destruction of San Lorenzo and La Venta, two of the major cities. It nevertheless spawned many other states, most notably the Mayan civilization, whose first cities began appearing around 700–600 BC. Olmec influences continued to appear in many later Mesoamerican civilizations.
[4] [5] Prehistoric groups in this area are characterized by agricultural villages and large ceremonial and politico-religious capitals [6] This culture area included some of the most complex and advanced cultures of the Americas, including the Olmec, Teotihuacan, the Maya, and the Aztec, the most powerful tribe of Mesoamerica in their time.
Others were contemporary with this period, and are also known from historical accounts of the time. A few, such as the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, and Nahua had their own written records. However, most Europeans of the time viewed such texts as heretical and burned most of them. Only a few documents were hidden and thus remain today, leaving modern ...
Map of Pre-Columbian states of Mexico just before the Spanish conquest. The pre-Columbian (or prehispanic) history of the territory now making up the country of Mexico is known through the work of archaeologists and epigraphers, and through the accounts of Spanish conquistadores, settlers and clergymen as well as the indigenous chroniclers of the immediate post-conquest period.
The sub-areas generally correlate with known cultural groups, such as the areas where the Maya, Huastec, and Olmec were found, for example. This is not to say that all the peoples in an area share a common ethnicity (indeed, in many cases they do not even share the same language) or lived within or under a single polity. At the same time, based ...
Writing system – many indigenous American cultures, such as the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Zapotec, and Toltec, developed Mesoamerican writing systemss. Other native peoples to the north—mainly Algonquians—had organized pictographing, a common precursor of writing. (See Massachusett writing systems, Ojibwe writing systems.)