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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 culture lasted until roughly 400 BCE, at which time their center of La Venta lay abandoned. The Olmec culture is often considered a "mother culture" to later Mesoamerican cultures. There is no surviving direct account of the Olmec's religious beliefs, unlike the Mayan Popol Vuh, or the Aztecs with their many codices and conquistador accounts
A major 1965 Olmec-oriented exhibition was entitled "The Jaguar's Children" and referred to the werejaguar as "the divine power of the Olmec civilization". [ 8 ] This paradigm was undermined, however, by the discovery that same year of Las Limas Monument 1 , a greenstone sculpture that displayed not only a werejaguar baby, but four other ...
Stirling is sometimes credited with identifying the Olmec civilization; although some Olmec sites and monuments had been known earlier, it was Stirling's work that put the Olmec culture into context. This first excavation was funded by the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution and focused on collecting samples using ...
Epi-Olmec was a successor culture to the Olmec, hence the prefix "epi-" or "post-". Although Epi-Olmec did not attain the far-reaching achievements of that earlier culture, it did realize, with its sophisticated calendrics and writing system , a level of cultural complexity unknown to the Olmecs.
The Olmec heartland is the southern portion of Mexico's Gulf Coast region between the Tuxtla mountains and the Olmec archaeological site of La Venta, extending roughly 80 km (50 mi) inland from the Gulf of Mexico coastline at its deepest.
Olmec hieroglyphs are a set of glyphs developed within the Olmec culture. The Olmecs were the earliest known major Mesoamerican civilization, flourishing during the formative period (1500–400 BCE) in the tropical lowlands of the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco . [ 1 ]
The earliest evidence for Olmec culture is found at nearby El Manatí, a sacrificial bog with artifacts dating to 1600 BCE or earlier. Sedentary agriculturalists had lived in the area for centuries before San Lorenzo developed into a regional center. [2] San Lorenzo was the first Olmec site that demonstrates state level complexity.