The earliest major civilization of Mesoamerica, centered on the hot, wet lowlands of the Gulf Coast of Mexico from roughly 1500 to 400 BCE. The Olmec built the first large ceremonial centers in the region, first at San Lorenzo and later at La Venta, and carved colossal basalt heads weighing many tons from stone hauled across long distances. They worked jade with great skill and left behind a recurring set of religious images, including a part-human, part-jaguar being. Whether they were the single "mother culture" that shaped everything that followed in Mesoamerica, or one of several early "sister cultures," is still debated.
We cannot read a word they wrote, and we do not even know what they called themselves — “Olmec” is a name a much later people gave them. Yet the society that carved twenty-ton basalt heads on Mexico’s Gulf Coast around 1200 BCE left behind gods, calendars, and a ballgame that the Maya and the Aztec seem to inherit. How much of Mesoamerican civilization began here is the one large question.