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The Olmecs (/ ˈ ɒ l m ɛ k s, ˈ oʊ l-/) or Olmec were the earliest known major Mesoamerican civilization, flourishing in the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco from roughly 1200 to 400 BCE during Mesoamerica's formative period.
"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.
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]
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.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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.