Olmek: Perbezaan antara semakan

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The Olmec heartland is characterized by swampy lowlands punctuated by low hill ridges and volcanoes. The [[Sierra de los Tuxtlas|Tuxtla Mountains]] rise sharply in the north, along the [[Bay of Campeche]]. Here the Olmecs constructed permanent city-temple complexes at several locations, among them [[San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán]], [[La Venta]], [[Tres zapotes|Tres Zapotes]], Laguna de los Cerros, and La Mojarra. They also had great influence beyond the heartland: from [[Chalcatzingo]], far to the west in the highlands of Mexico, to [[Izapa]], on the [[Pacific Ocean|Pacific]] coast near what is now [[Guatemala]], Olmec goods have been found throughout Mesoamerica during this period.

 

[[Image:Olmec Heartland 1.png|right|thumb|300px|Olmec Heartland]]Their religion developed all the important themes (an obsession with mathematics and with calendars, and a spiritual focus on death expressed through human sacrifice) found in successor groups. Finally, their political arrangements of strongly hierarchical city-state kingdoms were repeated by nearly every other Mexican and Central American civilization that followed.

 

The name "Olmec" means "rubber people" in [[Nahuatl]], the language of the Mexica ("[[Aztec]]") people. It was the Aztec name for the people who lived in this area at the much later time of Aztec dominance. Ancient [[Mesoamerica]]ns, spanning from ancient Olmecs to Aztecs, extracted [[latex]] from ''Castilla elastica,'' a type of [[rubber tree]] in the area. The juice of a local vine, ''Ipomoea alba,'' was then mixed with this latex to create [[rubber]] as early as [[1600 BC]] <ref>[http://web.mit.edu/org/m/materialculture/www/rubberprocessing.html]</ref>. The word "Olmec" also refers to the [[rubber]] balls used for their ancient ball game. Early modern explorers applied the name "Olmec" to the rediscovered ruins and art from this area before it was understood that these had been already abandoned more than a thousand years before the time of the people the Aztecs knew as the "Olmec". It is not known what name the ancient Olmec used for themselves; some later Mesoamerican accounts seem to refer to the ancient Olmec as "Tamoanchan".