The Gupta and the Olmec Civilizations

Olmec pottery production and export in ancient Mexico determined through elemental analysis.

The first Mesoamerican civilization, the Gulf Coast Olmec, is associated with hierarchical society, monumental art, and an internally consistent ideology, expressed in a distinct style and salient iconography. Whether the Olmec style arose in just one area or emerged from interactions among scattered contemporaneous societies remains controversial. Using elemental analysis, we determined the re...

The Lazy-S: A Formative Period Iconographic Loan to Maya Hieroglyphic Writing

discovered Monument 31 from the highland site of Chalcatzingo demonstrates for the first time that at least by the Middle Formative Period (900-500 B.C.), the Lazy-S motif, like its Classic Maya counterpart, was associated with both clouds and bloodletting. Although the Lazy-S motif figures prominently in the iconographic corpus at Chalcatzingo, until the analysis of Monument 31 no context exis...

Oldest writing in the New World.

A block with a hitherto unknown system of writing has been found in the Olmec heartland of Veracruz, Mexico. Stylistic and other dating of the block places it in the early first millennium before the common era, the oldest writing in the New World, with features that firmly assign this pivotal development to the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica.

THE PERSIANS. LOST CIVILIZATIONS Geoffrey Parker and Brenda Parker, Reaktion Book, 2017, 208 pages

Olmec Bloodletting

and Middle Formative (ca. 1200-500 B.C.) Olmec symbol system is the focus of the present study.1 We have identified a series of symbols in largeand small-scale stone objects and ceramics representing perforators and a zoomorphic supernatural associated with bloodletting. While aspects of this iconography are comparable to later Classic Lowland Maya iconography of bloodletting, its deployment in...