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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.
"The Olmec Football Player" [30] is a 1980 short story by Katherine MacLean. In it, at least one of the Olmec colossal heads depicts an African-American college student who traveled back in time while wearing his football helmet. In The Mysterious Cities of Gold, the few remaining Olmecs are described as being descendants of Atlanteans.
Specifics concerning Olmec religion are a matter of some conjecture. Early researchers found religious beliefs to be centered upon a jaguar god. [4] This view was challenged in the 1970s by Peter David Joralemon, whose Ph.D. paper [citation needed] and subsequent article posited what are now considered to be 8 different supernaturals.
Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge made the first detailed descriptions of La Venta during their 1925 expedition, sponsored by Tulane University. Originally La Venta was thought to be a Mayan site. It wasn't until more sophisticated radiocarbon techniques were developed in the 1950s that Olmec sites were irrefutably dated as preceding the Maya. [13]
The consensus among most, but by no means all, archaeologists and researchers is that Olmecs weren't purely a mother nor a sister to other Mesoamerican cultures, but the hallmarks of the Olmec iconography were developed within the Olmec heartland and that this iconography became, in the words of Michael Coe, an "all-pervading art style ...
The Ship Sarcophagus: a Phoenician ship carved on a sarcophagus, 2nd century AD.. The theory of Phoenician discovery of the Americas suggests that the earliest Old World contact with the Americas was not with Columbus or Norse settlers, but with the Phoenicians (or, alternatively, other Semitic peoples) in the first millennium BC.
Through subsequent research, it became apparent that not every cleft head nor every downturned mouth represented a werejaguar. [9] Some researchers have therefore refined the werejaguar supernatural, specifically equating it with the Olmec rain deity, [10] a proposition that artist, archaeologist, and ethnographer Miguel Covarrubias had made as early as 1946 in Mexico South.
Matthew Stirling posing with the primary figure from Altar 5, La Venta.This is a still from the Smithsonian Institution's Exploring Hidden Mexico (1943).. Matthew Williams Stirling (August 28, 1896 – January 23, 1975) [1] was an American ethnologist, archaeologist and later an administrator at several scientific institutions in the field.