An Olmec pottery vessel in the shape of a duck’s head, coloured with cinnabar
Duck head vessel, 1200–900 BCE
Marked San Lorenzo, Veracruz

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Olmecs

On the Gulf coast of Mexico, the Olmecs carved colossal stone heads, played with rubber balls and laid down ideas of rulership and religion that later Mesoamerican peoples shared.

Place
San Lorenzo, Veracruz · La Venta, Tabasco · El ManatíThe Americas
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe colossal heads
  2. IISan Lorenzo and La Venta
  3. IIIRubber and the ballgame
  4. IVJade and were-jaguars
  5. VA “mother culture”?

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Matthew Stirling
  • Marion Stirling

Objects

  • Colossal heads
  • Wooden busts and rubber balls from El Manatí

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1600 BC to 350 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?