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But an argument against an Olmec origin is the fact that the Olmec civilization had ended by the 4th century BCE, several centuries before the earliest known Long Count date artifact. [ 76 ] The Long Count calendar required the use of zero as a place-holder within its vigesimal (base-20) positional numeral system.
Chronologically, the history of the Olmecs can be divided into the Early Formative (1800-900 BCE), Middle Formative (900-400 BCE) and Late Formative (400 BCE-200AD). The Olmecs are known as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica, meaning that the Olmec civilization was the first culture that spread and influenced Mesoamerica.
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 ...
Michael Coe finds it "one of the supreme examples of Olmec art". [2] 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.
San Lorenzo and the Olmec heartland.. Matthew Stirling was the first to begin excavations on the site after a visit in 1938. [12] Between 1946 and 1970, four archaeological projects were undertaken, including one Yale University study headed by Michael Coe and Richard Diehl conducted between 1966 and 1968, followed by a lull until 1990.
What we today call Olmec first appears within the city of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, where distinctive Olmec features appear around 1400 BCE. Although Olmec civilization traces have been found all around Mesoamerica and it is considered that the Olmecs were a main influence on all regional civilizations.
The Olmec civilization was first defined as a distinctive art style at the turn of the nineteenth century. The various sculpture, figurines, and celts from what now is recognized as the Olmec heartland on the southern Gulf Coast, reveal that these people knew their jungle companions well and incorporated them into their mythology.
Laguna de los Cerros is a little-excavated Olmec and Classical era archaeological site, located in the vicinity of Corral Nuevo, within the municipality of Acayucan, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, in the southern foothills of the Tuxtla Mountains, some 30 kilometres (19 mi) south of the Laguna Catemaco.