Olmec Origins and the Rise of San Lorenzo

Olmec civilization flourished roughly between 1600 and 400 BCE along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, in what are today the states of Veracruz and Tabasco, a landscape of humid tropical rainforest, powerful rivers — the Coatzacoalcos, the Tonalá, the Papaloapan — and fertile volcanic soils renewed by seasonal flooding. The name "Olmec" comes from the Nahuatl word olmecatl, meaning "inhabitant of the rubber region," a label applied retrospectively by twentieth-century scholars; the name this civilization used for itself remains unknown. Its foundations reach back further still: maize was domesticated from wild teosinte in the Balsas river valley around 9000–8700 BCE, and the resulting "Mesoamerican triad" of maize, beans, and squash supplied the agricultural base that allowed early farming villages to take root on the Gulf Coast by roughly 1750–1500 BCE, complete with ceramics and clay figurines whose flattened heads and facial conventions already anticipate later Olmec artistic style.