PLACES TO VISIT
To see the Olmec work, visit the open air anthropology museum in
Villahermosa,
the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico
City or in Xalapa,
Veracruz.
Santiago Tuxtla has one of the heads in its town square and another
in the Tuxteco Museum. Nearby is Llano del Jicaro, the source of
the basalt used for the heads.
San Lorenzo, where many of the pieces were recovered, has a museum
with Olmec art and one of the colossal heads.
Archaeology buffs will want to spend a half day or more at Parque
La Venta off Paseo Tabasco and Boulevard Grijalva in Villahermosa,
Tabasco. The museum is renowned for the massive Olmec heads that
were brought here from an Olmec site dating to around 2000 B.C.
Each of the three heads, carved from basalt rock, weighs 40 tons.
These artifacts were recovered in the Tonala Swamps in PEMEX's
explorations for oil in 1938. Before the region was flooded, the
artifacts were relocated from their original site at La Venta. All
that remains of the site is an a mound that rises above the surrounding
swamp.
MORE SITES
In the state of Guerrero,
Chalcatzingo has a volcanic mountain with inscribed boulders. According
to experts, the cleft mountain represents a place of emergence from
the underworld, and Chalcatzingo was considered a site of creation.
Iguala Teopantecuanitlan, a major Olmec center first
discovered in 1985 pushed the Olmec chronology back to 1500 BC.
The name means "the place of the temple of the jaguar-god."
Also in Guerrero
are Chipancingo and the Oxtotitlan Cave. Paintings are more than
2,700 years old. One of these huge murals depicts an Olmec ruler
wearing a bird helmet that also shows the human face underneath. |
