The Olmec Period

The Olmec Period, roughly 1200 to 400 BCE, refers to the era of the Olmec civilization along the Gulf Coast of what is now southern Mexico, widely regarded by archaeologists as Mesoamerica's foundational or "mother" civilization, whose religious symbolism, artistic conventions and political ideas influenced nearly every later Mesoamerican culture, including the Maya and Aztec. The Olmecs are best known for their colossal carved stone heads, some weighing over twenty tons and transported many miles from their source quarries without wheeled vehicles or draft animals, believed to be portraits of individual rulers, alongside sophisticated jade carving and early monumental ceremonial centers at sites including San Lorenzo and La Venta. Olmec culture likely originated or strongly influenced the Mesoamerican ballgame, played on stone-lined courts across the region for the following three thousand years, and may have developed an early precursor to the writing and calendar systems later Mesoamerican civilizations would elaborate. San Lorenzo and La Venta, the civilization's two principal centers in turn, were each ultimately abandoned amid still-debated causes, and Olmec influence gradually gave way to successor Mesoamerican cultures by the period's end.