By Pamela Hilliard Owens
OK. I admit it. Not only do I watch a lot of shows on the History Channel and on the Discovery Channel, but one of my favorite series is “Ancient Aliens.” Don’t laugh.
But recently, on one of those shows, the subject was the Olmecs, and that reminded me that the Olmecs was the oldest civilization in Mesoamerica. Really old. Really REALLY old.
It is estimated that the Olmecs lived from roughly 1500 BCE (Before the Common Era) to 400 BCE. The Olmecs were the first Mesoamerican civilization and the foundation and the ”mother culture” for all of the civilizations that followed, including the Maya, the Zapotec, the Totonac, and the Teotihuacán civilizations.
The Olmec civilization is considered an archaeological culture because the knowledge of the Olmecs was learned from artifacts rather than texts. Olmec artifacts have been found primarily in central and western Mexico, but also as far south as Guatemala.
The name Olmec is derived from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word Olmecatl, which means “inhabitant of the rubber country.” The area around where many of the Olmec artifacts were found is known for its rubber production, and rubber was an important part of an ancient Mesoamerican ballgame similar to racketball thought to be invented by the Olmecs. The rubber ball used in the game weighed as much as 9 lbs.
In about 1200 BCE, the Olmecs established a city on a river island; the modern name of the city is San Lorenzo and it was the largest and most magnificent city in Mesoamerica at that time.
5 Facts about the Olmec
The Olmecs were extremely talented sculptors and artists. The Olmecs worked in stone, jade, wood, and other materials. They crafted statues, masks, figurines, and more. They are best known for their colossal heads, which many people feel have distinctly African features. However, most Mesoamerican scholars dispute that theory and contend that recovered DNA samples prove that the Olmec share mitochondrial characteristics of the American indigenous populations.
The Olmecs were also highly-skilled architects and engineers. Not only did the Olmecs build entities like aqueducts, but they also built pyramids, some of which rival in size among the largest pyramids in the world.
The Olmecs had a complex religious system and set of gods. They had a class of shamans, and “Ancient Alien Theorists believe” that they communicated with the cosmos and had explanations about the heavens. They identified gods were also believed to be some kind of supernatural beings.
The Olmecs traded with other cultures all over Mesoamerica. Objects found in other regions of present-day Mexico and Central America have been found at Olmec archaeological sites.
The Olmec may have been the first to invent writing, a calendar, and the concept of zero in the Western Hemisphere. Although the area around Mesopotamia is considered to be “the cradle of civilization,” and responsible for the concept of “zero,” it is also widely admitted that many global cultures developed art, architecture, calendars, and mathematics relatively simultaneously BCE. The concept of zero did not reach western Europe until the 12th century CE (in the Common Era).
The history of the Olmec was unknown until the mid-19th century.
Mexican travelers documented the first colossal Olmec heads initially found by farmers. It wasn’t until the 1940s that the Olmecs were recognized as the first civilization in Mesoamerica.
The point is that many of us were taught that “civilization” started in ancient Greece, although there is massive documentation that many civilizations and relatively highly developed cultures existed in Africa, Asia, and Mesoamerica many centuries before Europeans finally exited their caves.
What do you know about the Olmecs and other very ancient civilizations? Did you learn about them in school? Let us know in the comments.
The Olmecs: The First Civilization in Mesoamerica