The first Mesoamerican centres
Villages on the Gulf coast grow into the societies that become the Olmec.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 400 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Settled maize-farming villages spread across Mesoamerica through the second millennium BCE, and by around 1600 BCE centres on the Gulf coast of Mexico are developing the ceremonial architecture, jade working and iconography that become the Olmec tradition. San Lorenzo, with its colossal basalt heads brought from fifty kilometres away, follows shortly after this period. Much of what later Mesoamerican civilisation shares — ballgame, calendar, deity forms — appears to originate here.