What does Olmec mean? People from the land of rubber.

The name Olmec was actually invented by scholars. Derived from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word “Olmecatl”, which means “inhabitant of the rubber country”, Olmec is a reference to the rubber production in the area where many of the artifacts have been found.

The name ‘Olmec’ comes from the Nahuatl word for the Olmecs: “Ōlmēcatl” (singular) or “Ōlmēcah” (plural). This word is composed of the two words “ōlli” , meaning “rubber”, and “mēcatl” , meaning “people”, so the word means “rubber people”.

Gulf of Mexico

Andrzej Wiercinski claims that some of the Olmecs were of African origin. He supports this claim with cranial evidence from two Mesoamerican sites: Tlatilco and Cerro de las Mesas. Tlatilco is a site in the Valley of Mexico. Although outside the Olmec heartland, Olmec influences appear in the architectural record.

Appearing around 1600 BCE, the Olmec were among the first Mesoamerican complex societies, and their culture influenced many later civilizations, like the Maya. The Olmec are known for the immense stone heads they carved from a volcanic rock called basalt.

Matthew Stirling

At least five distinct times in world history, human beings created a unique writing system that allowed them to organize their thoughts and record and transmit information like never before: the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, People of the Indus Valley, and the Maya.

In addition to their influence with contemporaneous Mesoamerican cultures, as the first civilization in Mesoamerica, the Olmecs are credited, or speculatively credited, with many “firsts”, including the bloodletting and perhaps human sacrifice, writing and epigraphy, and the invention of popcorn, zero and the …

Mixe-Zoquean

The Olmec art style was the major prestige style of Ancient Mesoamerica between c. 1,500 BCE and 400 BCE, or much of the Mesoamerican Formative (Preclassic) period (or c. 1500–400 BCE calibrated). Olmec artists were interested mainly in the general human form and certain supernatural creatures.

Civilizations like the Olmec, Maya, Aztec and Inca all built pyramids to house their deities, as well as to bury their kings.

Monks Mound is the largest Pre-Columbian earthwork in the Americas and the largest pyramid north of Mesoamerica. This makes Monks Mound roughly the same size at its base as the Great Pyramid of Giza (13.1 acres / 5.3 hectares). The perimeter of its base is larger than the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

For reasons that are still unknown, most of the Maya centers went into decline during later centuries and were eventually abandoned leaving only the Mayan ruins. There are several possible reasons for their downfall including soil exhaustion, water loss and erosion.

The Maya have managed to maintain many of the old ways in agriculture and trade. Like their ancestors, most Maya households engage in corn farming and many produce crafts, such as woven textiles, for sale in markets.

The Maya lived there 4,000 years ago (about 2000 BC). At that date complex societies were living in the Maya region. The staple foods of the Maya diet were cultivated.

The Maya have lived in Central America for many centuries. They are one of the many Precolumbian native peoples of Mesoamerica. In the past and today they occupy Guatemala, adjacent portions of Chiapas and Tabasco, the whole of the Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, and the western edges of Honduras and Salvador.

The Maya are probably the best-known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica. Originating in the Yucatán around 2600 B.C., they rose to prominence around A.D. 250 in present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras.

They did not call themselves “Maya,” and did not have a sense of common identity or political unity. Today, their descendants, known collectively as the Maya, number well over 6 million individuals, speak more than twenty-eight surviving Mayan languages, and reside in nearly the same area as their ancestors.

Maya is a female name with multiple meanings: In Sanskrit Māyā means “illusion or magic”, and is also an alternate name of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi.

Where did the Maya live? Mayan civilization occupied much of the northwestern part of the isthmus of Central America, from Chiapas and Yucatán, now part of southern Mexico, through Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and El Salvador and into Nicaragua. Maya people still live in the same region today.

Several Spanish expeditions followed in 1517 and 1519, making landfall on various parts of the Yucatán coast. The Spanish conquest of the Maya was a prolonged affair; the Maya kingdoms resisted integration into the Spanish Empire with such tenacity that their defeat took almost two centuries.

Most Maya today observe a religion composed of ancient Maya ideas, animism and Catholicism. Some Maya still believe, for example, that their village is the ceremonial centre of a world supported at its four corners by gods. When one of these gods shifts his burden, they believe, it causes an earthquake.