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Olmecs

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Michelle Sandberg
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« on: January 25, 2007, 03:00:50 am »

Overview

The Olmec Heartland is characterized by swampy lowlands punctuated by low hill ridges and volcanoes. The Tuxtlas Mountains rise sharply in the north, along the Gulf of Mexico's Bay of Campeche. Here the Olmecs constructed permanent city-temple complexes at several locations, among them San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, La Venta, Tres Zapotes, Laguna de los Cerros, and La Mojarra. They also had great influence beyond the heartland: from Chalcatzingo, far to the west in the highlands of Mexico, to Izapa, on the Pacific coast near what is now Guatemala, Olmec goods have been found throughout Mesoamerica during this period. In this heartland, the first Mesoamerican civilization would emerge and reign from 1200–400 BC.

The Olmec may have been the first civilization in the Western Hemisphere to develop a writing system. Symbols found in 2002 and 2006 date to 650 BC [1] and 900 [2] BC precede the oldest Zapotec writing, dated to about 500 BC. Many challenged the 2002 find, declaring that it was not writing. The 2006 finding is more intriguing, although there remains some skepticism because of the stone's singularity, the fact that it was found in a gravel pit out of any chronologic context, and because it bears no apparent resemblance to other MesoAmerican writing systems. There are other later hieroglyphs known as "Epi-Olmec", and while there are some who believe that Epi-Olmec may represent a transitional script between an earlier, unknown Olmec writing system and Maya writing, the matter remains unsettled.

The Olmec, whose name means "rubber people" (see below) in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, may have been the originators of the Mesoamerican ballgame so prevalent among later cultures of the region and used for recreational and religious purposes—certainly they were playing it before anyone else has been documented doing so.

 
Olmec HeartlandTheir religion developed all the important themes (an obsession with mathematics and with calendars, and a spiritual focus on death expressed through human sacrifice) found in successor groups. Finally, their political arrangements of strongly hierarchical city-state kingdoms were repeated by nearly every other Mexican and Central American civilization that followed.

While the actual ethnicity of the Olmec remains unknown, various hypotheses have been put forward. In 1976 Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman published a paper which argued that the existence of a number of loanwords from a semantically very fundamental domain for Mesoamerican cultures [3]which have apparently spread from a Mixe-Zoquean language into many other Mesoamerican languages, can be seen as an indicator that the first "highly civilized society" of Mesoamerica spoke a language which is an ancestor of the Mixe-Zoquean languages, and that they spread their own vocabulary of terms particular for their culture to other peoples of Mesoamerica. Since the Mixe-Zoquean languages still are, and historically are known to have been, spoken in an area corresponding roughly to the "Olmec heartland", and since the Olmec culture is now generally regarded as the first "high culture" of Mesoamerica, it has generally been regarded as probable that the Olmec spoke a Mixe-Zoquean language. [4]



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