by Padre Art

Created on: February 09, 2009

The enigma of the Olmec, they left colossal stones, deeply carved in the form of helmeted heads, their Afro-Asian countenances serene and serious. The large thick lips characteristically down-turned at the corners and the broad flat nose separating eyes with a hint of epicanthic folds.

These seventeen monumental carvings have come to represent the mystery of a society that was in reality the "mother culture" for all the civilizations in meso-america that followed. And all cultures in that area did come after the Olmec, whose cities were cultural centers from at least 2000 BC to around 200 BC.

Their homeland was situated along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in the present day states of Veracruz and Tabasco, on the banks of the Coatzacoalcos River. The dated evidence indicates San Lorenzo Tenochititlan was the first center of Olmec society by as much as 1000 years before La Venta, which became the hub of activity after the decline of San Lorenzo, around 900 BC.

From the very first city built, the Olmec engineers included basalt lined underground aqueducts or drainage networks and the crop planting was organized and timed by precise astronomical calculations aided by their advanced mathematics.

The written language, also very advanced, consisted of two types of hieroglyphs, some were logograms representing things or ideas, and they had other glyphs to indicate syllables that together form a complete grammar. This writing system was the prototype for all written languages of meso-america that came after, Epi-Olmec, Zapotec, and most notably the Mayan hieroglyphic writing system.

The Olmec trading empire was vast at this time with influences as far west as Zazacatla, just 25 miles south of Mexico City and east into Guatemala and Honduras. There are even indications of contact with the Chavin society of northern Peru. The Olmec culture had spread so widely that they held sway over the area that, after their decline, would combine that of both the Aztec and Mayan civilizations at the peak of their power.

The evidence of their geographic range was sparse until 2005 when 1600 pieces of Olmec ceramics were subjected to neutron activation analysis that confirmed that these had all been produced by the Olmec and exported throughout Mexico and Central America. Recent finds in 2007, in the Mexican state of Guerrero are even now extending the record of Olmec influence.

Although the jade they were so fond of carving was imported from as far away as Guatemala, the basalt for

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