american-holocaust

AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTwas then forming in the lowlands off the southernmost point of the Gulfcoast in Mexico. Very little detail is known about Olmec culture or socialstructure, nor about everyday life in the other complex societies that hadbegun to emerge in northwest Central America at an even earlier time. Butthere is no doubt that in both regions, between 1500 B.C. and 2000 B.C.,there existed civilizations that provided rich cultural lives for their inhabitantsand that produced exquisite works of art. 48The core of the Olmec population was situated in a river-laced crescentof land that stretched out across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec on Mexico'ssouthern Gulf coast. At first glance this appears to be an inhospitable areafor the founding of a major population center and civilization, but periodicflooding of the region's rivers created a marshy environment and the richestagricultural lands in Mexico--land that often has been compared tothe Nile delta in Egypt. From about 1200 B.C. to 900 B.C. the center ofOlmec culture was located in what is now known as San Lorenzo, afterwhich it was moved to La Venta. Here, in the symbolic shadow of theirGreat Pyramid-about 3,500,000 cubic feet in volume, a construction projectthat is estimated to have taken the equivalent of more than 2000 workeryearsto complete-the Olmecs farmed extensively, worshiped their gods,enjoyed athletic contests involving ball games and other sports, and producedart works ranging from tiny, meticulously carved, jade figurines toenormous basalt sculpted heads more than ten feet tall.Neither the jade nor the basalt used for these carvings was indigenousto the areas immediately surrounding either of the Olmec capitals. Thejade apparently was brought in, along with other items, through a complicatedtrade network that spread out across the region at least as far asGuatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The basalt, on the otherhand, was available from quarries in the Tuxtla Mountains, a little morethan fifty miles away. From here in the mountains, writes archaeologistMichael Coe, in all probability the stones designated to become the hugecarvings "were dragged down to navigable streams and loaded on greatbalsa rafts, then floated first down to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, thenup the Coatzacoalcos River, from whence they would have to be dragged,probably with rollers, up the San Lorenzo plateau." Coe observes that"the amount of labor which must have been involved staggers the imagination,"as indeed it does, considering that the finished sculptures formedfrom these enormous boulders themselves often weighed in excess of twentytons. 49Before the dawn of the West's Christian era another great city wasforming well north of the Olmec region and to the east of the Lake of theMoon-Teotihuacan. Built atop an enormous underground lava tube thatthe people of the area had expanded into a giant cave with stairways andlarge multi-chambered rooms of worship, this metropolis reached its pinnacleby the end of the second century A.D., about the time that, half a