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Olmec Language
The Olmecs () or Olmec were an early known major Mesoamerican civilization, flourishing in the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco from roughly 1200 to 400 BCE during Mesoamerica's formative period. They were initially centered at the site of their development in San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, but moved to La Venta in the 10th century BCE following the decline of San Lorenzo. The Olmecs disappeared mysteriously in the 4th century BCE, leaving the region sparsely populated until the 19th century. Among other "firsts", the Olmec appeared to practice Bloodletting in Mesoamerica, ritual bloodletting and played the Mesoamerican ballgame, hallmarks of nearly all subsequent Mesoamerican societies. The aspect of the Olmecs most familiar now is their artwork, particularly the Olmec colossal heads, colossal heads. The Olmec civilization was first defined through artifacts which collectors purchased on the pre-Columbian art market in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Olmec Heartland
The Olmec heartland is the southern portion of Mexico's Gulf Coast of Mexico, Gulf Coast region between the Tuxtla mountains and the Olmec archaeological site of La Venta, extending roughly 80 km (50 mi) inland from the Gulf of Mexico coastline at its deepest. It is today, as it was during the height of the Olmec civilization, a tropical lowland forest environment, crossed by meandering rivers. Most researchers consider the Olmec heartland to be the home of the Olmec culture which became widespread over Mesoamerica from 1400 Common Era, BCE until roughly 400 BCE. The area is also referred to as Olman or the Olmec Metropolitan Zone.See Diehl. The major heartland sites are: *San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán *La Venta *Tres Zapotes *Laguna de los Cerros - the least researched and least important of the major sites. Smaller sites include: *El Manatí, an Olmec sacrificial bog. *El Azuzul, on the southern edge of the San Lorenzo area. *San Andrés (Mesoamerican site), San Andrés, near ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tabasco
Tabasco, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Tabasco, is one of the Political divisions of Mexico, 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into Municipalities of Tabasco, 17 municipalities and its capital city is Villahermosa. It is located in southeast Mexico and is bordered by the states of Campeche to the northeast, Veracruz to the west, and Chiapas to the south and the Petén Department, Petén department of Guatemala to the southeast. It has a coastline to the north with the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the state is covered in rainforest as, unlike most other areas of Mexico, it has plentiful rainfall year-round. The state is also home to La Venta, the major site of the Olmecs, Olmec civilization, considered to be the origin of later Mesoamerican cultures. It produces significant quantities of petroleum and natural gas. Geography The state is located in the southeast of Mexico, bordering the states of Campeche, Chiapas, and Veracruz, with the Gulf of Mexico to the n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Castilla Elastica
''Castilla elastica'', the Panama rubber tree, is a tree native to the tropical areas of Mexico, Central America, and northern South America. It was the principal source of latex among the Mesoamerican peoples in pre-Columbian times. The latex gathered from ''Castilla elastica'' was converted into usable rubber by mixing the latex with the juice of the morning glory species ''Ipomoea alba'' which, conveniently, is typically found in the wild as a vine climbing ''Castilla elastica''. The rubber produced by this method found several uses, including most notably, the manufacture of balls for the Mesoamerican ballgame '' ōllamaliztli''. The Nahuatl word for rubber was ''ulli / olli'', from which their word for the ballgame derived), and also their name for the ancient people they associated with the origin of the ballgame, the Olmecs (''olmeca'': "rubber people"). The Nahuatl word for the tree of ''Castilla elastica'' is ''olicuáhuitl''; in Spanish it is known as palo de hule. Sub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rubber Tree
''Hevea brasiliensis'', the Pará rubber tree, ''sharinga'' tree, seringueira, or most commonly, rubber tree or rubber plant, is a flowering plant belonging to the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae, originally native to the Amazon basin, but is now pantropical in distribution due to introductions. It is the most economically important member of the genus '' Hevea'' because the milky latex extracted from the tree is the primary source of natural rubber. Description ''Hevea brasiliensis'' is a tall deciduous tree growing to a height of up to in the wild. Cultivated trees are usually much smaller because drawing off the latex restricts their growth. The trunk is cylindrical and may have a swollen, bottle-shaped base. The bark is some shade of brown, and the inner bark oozes latex when damaged. The leaves have three leaflets and are spirally arranged. The inflorescences include separate male and female flowers. The flowers are pungent, creamy-yellow and have no petals. The fruit is a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latex
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms) and in some Mushroom, mushrooms (especially species of ''Lactarius''). It is a complex emulsion that coagulation, coagulates on exposure to air, consisting of proteins, alkaloids, starches, sugars, Vegetable oil, oils, tannins, resins, and Natural gum, gums. It is usually exuded after tissue injury. In most plants, latex is white, but some have yellow, orange, or scarlet latex. Since the 17th century, latex has been used as a term for the fluid substance in plants, deriving from the Latin word for "liquid". It serves mainly as Antipredator adaptation, defense against Herbivore, herbivores and Fungivore, fungivores.Taskirawati, I. and Tuno, N., 2016Fungal defense against mycophagy in milk caps ''Science Report Kanazaw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural Rubber
Rubber, also called India rubber, latex, Amazonian rubber, ''caucho'', or ''caoutchouc'', as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds. Types of polyisoprene that are used as natural rubbers are classified as elastomers. Currently, rubber is harvested mainly in the form of the latex from the Hevea brasiliensis, Pará rubber tree (''Hevea brasiliensis'') or others. The latex is a sticky, milky and white colloid drawn off by making incisions in the bark and collecting the fluid in vessels in a process called "tapping". Manufacturers refine this latex into the rubber that is ready for commercial processing. Natural rubber is used extensively in many applications and products, either alone or in combination with other materials. In most of its useful forms, it has a large stretch ratio and high resilience and also is buoyant and water-proof. Industrial demand for rubber-like materials began to out ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nahuatl
Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller populations Nahuatl language in the United States, in the United States. Nahuatl has been spoken in central Mexico since at least the seventh century CE. It was the language of the Mexica, who dominated what is now central Mexico during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerican chronology, Mesoamerican history. During the centuries preceding the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, the Aztecs had expanded to incorporate a large part of central Mexico. Their influence caused the variety of Nahuatl spoken by the residents of Tenochtitlan to become a prestige language in Mesoamerica. Following the Spanish conquest, Spanish colonists and missionaries introduced the Latin script, and Nahuatl became a literary language. Many chronicles, gram ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Miguel Covarrubias
Miguel Covarrubias, also known as José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud (22 November 1904 — 4 February 1957) was a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist and art historian. Along with his American colleague Matthew W. Stirling, he was the co-discoverer of the Olmec civilization. Early life José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud was born on 22 November 1904 in Mexico City. After graduating from the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria at the age of 14, he started producing caricatures and illustrations for texts and training materials published by the Mexican Ministry of Public Education. He also worked for the Ministry of Communications. In 1923, at the age of 19, he moved to New York City armed with a grant from the Mexican government, tremendous talent, but very little English. In her book ''Covarrubias'', author Adriana Williams writes that Mexican poet José Juan Tablada and New York Times critic/photographer Carl Van Vechten introduced him to New York's literary/cultu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pre-Columbian Art
Pre-Columbian art refers to the Visual arts of indigenous peoples of the Americas, visual arts of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, North America, North, Central America, Central, and South Americas from at least 13,000 BCE to the European conquests starting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The Pre-Columbian era, pre-Columbian era continued for a time after these in many places, or had a transitional phase afterwards. Many types of perishable artifacts that were once very common, such as woven textiles, typically have not been preserved, but Precolumbian monumental sculpture, metalwork in gold, pottery, and painting on ceramics, walls, and rocks have survived more frequently. The first pre-Columbian art to be widely known in modern times was that of the empires flourishing at the time of European conquest, the Inca and Aztec, some of which was taken back to Europe intact. Gradually art of earlier civilizations that had already collapsed, especially Maya art and Olmec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Olmec Colossal Heads
The Olmec colossal heads are stone representations of human heads sculpted from large basalt boulders. They range in height from . The heads date from at least 900 BCE and are a distinctive feature of the Olmec civilization of ancient Mesoamerica.Diehl 2004, p. 111. All portray mature individuals with fleshy cheeks, flat noses, and slightly-crossed eyes; their physical characteristics correspond to a type that is still common among the inhabitants of Tabasco and Veracruz. The backs of the monuments are often flat. The boulders were brought from the Sierra de Los Tuxtlas mountains of Veracruz. Given that the extremely large slabs of stone used in their production were transported more than , requiring a great deal of human effort and resources, it is thought that the monuments represent portraits of powerful individual Olmec rulers. Each of the known examples has a distinctive headdress. The heads were variously arranged in lines or groups at major Olmec centres, but the method a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mesoamerican Ballgame
The Mesoamerican ballgame (, , ) was a sport with ritual associations played since at least 1650 BC by the pre-Columbian people of Ancient Mesoamerica. The sport had different versions in different places during the millennia, and a modernized version of the game, ''ulama'', is still played by the indigenous populations in some places.Fox, John (2012)''The ball: discovering the object of the game"'' 1st ed., New York: Harper. . Cf. Chapter 4: "Sudden Death in the New World" about the Ulama game. The rules of the Mesoamerican ballgame are not known, but judging from its descendant, ulama, they were probably similar to racquetball, where the aim is to keep the ball in play. The stone ballcourt goals are a late addition to the game. In the most common theory of the game, the players struck the ball with their hips, although some versions allowed the use of forearms, rackets, bats, or handstones. The ball was made of solid rubber and weighed as much as 9 lbs (4 kg), a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bloodletting In Mesoamerica
Bloodletting was the ritualized practice of self-cutting or piercing of an individual's body that served a number of ideological and cultural functions within ancient Mesoamerican societies, in particular the Maya. When performed by ruling elites, the act of bloodletting was crucial to the maintenance of sociocultural and political structure. Bound within the Mesoamerican belief systems, bloodletting was used as a tool to legitimize the ruling lineage's socio-political position and, when enacted, was important to the perceived well-being of a given society or settlement. Description Bloodletting was performed by piercing a soft body part, generally the tongue, and scattering the blood or collecting it on amate, which was subsequently burned. The act of burning the sacrificed blood symbolized the transferral of the offering to the gods via its transformation into the rising smoke. Piercing was accomplished using obsidian prismatic blades, stingray spines, or shark's teeth. Unde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
