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"Olmec-style" face mask in jade. The Olmec civilization developed in the lowlands of southeastern Mexico between 1500 and 400 BC. [3] The Olmec heartland lies on the Gulf Coast of Mexico within the states of Veracruz and Tabasco, an area measuring approximately 275 kilometres (171 mi) east to west and extending about 100 kilometres (62 mi) inland from the coast. [4]
San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán Colossal Head 6, a 3-meter-high Olmec sculpture with lips and nose said to resemble African facial features. Some writers suggest that the Olmecs were related to peoples of Africa, based primarily on their interpretation of facial features of Olmec statues.
The "Olmec-style" also very distinctly combines facial features of both humans and jaguars. [53] Olmec arts are strongly tied to the Olmec religion, which prominently featured jaguars. [ 53 ] The Olmec people believed that in the distant past a race of werejaguars was made between the union of a jaguar and a woman. [ 53 ]
Through subsequent research, it became apparent that not every cleft head nor every downturned mouth represented a werejaguar. [9] Some researchers have therefore refined the werejaguar supernatural, specifically equating it with the Olmec rain deity, [10] a proposition that artist, archaeologist, and ethnographer Miguel Covarrubias had made as early as 1946 in Mexico South.
San Lorenzo and the Olmec heartland.. Matthew Stirling was the first to begin excavations on the site after a visit in 1938. [12] Between 1946 and 1970, four archaeological projects were undertaken, including one Yale University study headed by Michael Coe and Richard Diehl conducted between 1966 and 1968, followed by a lull until 1990.
The spread of Olmec culture eventually led to cultural features found throughout all Mesoamerican societies. Rising from the sedentary agriculturalists of the Gulf Lowlands as early as 1600 BCE in the Early Formative period, the Olmecs held sway in the Olmec heartland , an area on the southern Gulf of Mexico coastal plain, in Veracruz and Tabasco .
The mask has Olmec facial features, particularly its upturned lip and broad nose, and is thirteen feet tall. Another carving had been covered by a stone wall on the left side; it was uncovered in the spring of 2011, revealing an identical mask.
Olmec Head, Number 8 is a 7-foot (2.1-meter) tall outdoor colossal head sculpture on the east side of the north entrance to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, that was created by Mexican sculptor Ignacio Pérez Solano (b. 1931) and installed in 2000.