Olmec World Author:Ignacio Bernal The Olmec World is recommended as highly interesting in content, written (and translated) in a felicitous literary style; abundantly and beautifully illustrated; full of broad-gauge reasoning on the processes of the origin of civilization; and as a masterful summary of the development of Olmec culture which provided the fundamental pattern for a... more »ll the later Mesoamerican civilizations and whose latest manifestations were to be snuffed out overnight b y the Spanish Conquest in the early 16th century.
According to Arnold Toynbee, a civilization arises in response to a challenge. In Central America -- the Mesopotamia of the New World -- the challenge was the jungle. The Olmecs were the first people to meet this challenge successfully.
The coastal plain of Veracruz and Tobasco, along with the southern cure of the Gulf of Mexico, is the birthplace of the first great civilization of the western hemisphere. Between the thirteenth and first centuries B.C. the Olmecs built ceremonial centers such as La Venta, with monumental pyramids, a spacious courtyard, a basalt-columned tomb, and offerings of stones, celts, and jaguar mosaics.
.. The Olmecs were not only artists but engineers and scientists as well. ... Over the centuries they penetrated into the Valley of Mexico, southward into Oaxaca and Chiapas and on into the the highlands and Pacific coast of Guatemala.
.. This people not only engendered Mesoamerican civilization but also brought forth what might be called the first Mesoamerican empire .. and appear to have established the pattern which, through the centuries, was to be followed by later expansionist Mesoamerican cultures.
... In an engrossing reconstruction, Ignacio Bernal examines Olmec art, society, and religious beliefs. He traces the efflorescence and decline of the Olmecs but insists on the basic unity of all Mesoamerican civilization. His book, translated from the Spanish, is the first full-length study of the Olmecs to appear in English. It has 150 illustrations -- maps, photographs, and drawings -- many of them reproduced here for the first time.« less