![]() In the major Olmec centers, which rose and fell in importance during the civilization's existence, religious ceremonies were observed, elaborate monuments and temples constructed and the elite ruled. Rather, "the landscape was a patchwork of loosely integrated chiefdoms, political units composed of a capital town where the elite and their relatives resided and numerous smaller satellite villages and farms in the surrounding hinterland." Olmec art and religion, Diehl writes, was what integrated the many Olmec societies into one distinctive culture. Diehl notes that the Olmec never comprised a single ethnic group, nation or empire. Diehl, an anthropologist at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, is the quintessential characteristic of the civilization. A small elite enjoyed political and religious power, while the vast majority did not. Anthropologists say Olmec civilization, like that of others in the ancient world, was divided into two social classes. While historians have speculated that the facial features of some monumental carved heads indicate an African origin of these people, most scholars believe that the Olmec, like other native Americans, descended from Asian ancestors who entered North America during the Great Ice Age. Olmec civilization arose along the Gulf Coast of southern Mexico about 1200 B.C., in an area that the Aztecs later called Olman, "The Rubber Country." There, quick streams flowed into large rivers, with easily cultivated soil and bountiful forests providing sustenance. ![]() Now on display at the National Gallery of Art's East Wing, these artworks offer a tantalizing glimpse of the Olmec world that archeologists and other scholars continue to probe for clues to its decline. Instead, strange and extraordinary works of art are the chief legacy of this vanished society - colossal heads carved in stone, monster gods and images of men morphing into jaguars. ![]() Little is known of the culture now known as Olmec except that it appears to have given rise to the Maya, Aztec and other great pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico. About 2,500 years ago, when ancient Olympians were running around naked during the Golden Age of Greece, a mysterious, complex civilization in this hemisphere - the first in the Americas - was approaching its decline.
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