A ceremonial platform built at Ceibal around 1000 B.C. appears to precede the pyramid and plazas built in the Olmec city of La Venta around 800 B.C., his team reports in the journal Science.

The city of San Lorenzo was the Olmec cultural center before La Venta, and this transition — and its resultant power vacuum — may have triggered larger shifts throughout the region.

An Olmec site forged a building plan more than 3,000 years ago for widespread Olmec and Maya ritual centers across ... colossal head sculptures at San Lorenzo and another Olmec center, La Venta, ...

The Olmec civilization was centered on the Gulf Coast in what is now the Mexican state of Tabasco. The largest city was La Venta, which sits on a salt dome that rises from the coastal plain.

Along with the sites of San Lorenzo and La Venta, Tres Zapotes was one of the great capitals of the Olmec culture, which emerged by 1200 B.C. as one of the first societies in Mesoamerica organized ...

And although some Olmec cities are indeed older than both La Venta and Ceibal, they likely did not interact with the Maya. "This does not mean that the Maya developed independently," Inomata says.

Brien Foerster. Virtual Guide To La Venta: The Ancient Olmec Culture Of Mexico. Posted: July 1, 2025 | Last updated: July 1, 2025. Ancient Lost Worlds and Hidden History.

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Scholars believe that some of these boulders were originally made into monumental thrones, like the one from La Venta (900-400 B.C.) that merges human features with the fangs and ears of the ...

For example, in the Olmec city of La Venta, ... Around 900 B.C., some of the heads in La Venta were buried, possibly as a ritual to move forward into the future. However, ...

And one of the most extraordinary and spectacular feats of the ancient Olmec was their monumental sculptures. The inhabitants of the site of La Venta erected huge sculptures, some of which weighed ...