Olmec Civilization

A study guide to the Olmec civilization, including timelines, important sites, immportant facts, subsistence and settlement, burning issues, and a bibliography

Puerto Escondido is a multicomponent archaeological site located on the Ulúa River near the Caribbean coast of northwestern Honduras.

The important Olmec capital of La Venta is located in the city of Huimanguillo, in the state of Tabasco, Mexico.

The Olmec civilization is the name given to a sophisticated central American culture between 1200 and 400 BC.

The Cascajal Block is a large serpentine block discovered in a gravel quarry in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, which is carved with 62 glyphic signs and appears to be the oldest form of a written language discovered yet in the Americas.

High resolution images of the Cascajal Block, an important artifact with examples of possibly Olmec writing from the Early Formative period.

Geoarchaeological research by Carl Wendt and Shan-Tan Lu has identified origin sources of bitumen used by the great Olmec civilization of the tropical lowlands of central America, 3000 years ago. The project, described by Olmec scholar David Grove as a “break-though in source analyzing bitumen in Mesoamerica”, may shed light on the vast trade...

What do you know about the sophisticated central American culture known as the Olmec? Give this quiz a spin and find out.

If you're going to Tlaxcala, you should visit Cacaxtla, an Olmec and Xicalanca culture site with one of the longest painted murals in Mesoamerica

Important Olmec culture site in the state of Tabasco, Mexico, La Venta was occupied between 1200-400 BC.

Mesoweb's page on the Olmec is excellent, including several pictures of the big snarling baby heads from San Lorenzo.

The Olmec heartland lies in the states of Veracruz and Tabasco, at the narrow part of Mexico west of the Yucatan peninsula and east of Oaxaca.

The archaeological site of San Lorenzo is an Olmec period site located in the state of Veracruz.

Information on the Xoque, and a few odds and ends from Maya and later Mesoamerican cultures, from Nova.

The New World Figurine Project is the brainchild of Terry Stocker, who in the mid-1980s began to collect articles--new and classic--on ceramic figurines of North, Central and South America.