The Rise and Legacy of the Olmecs

This cave in southern Mexico was once thought to lead to the underworld, where the spirits of the long dead resided. It's thought that this painting of a powerful figure dressed in Jaguar skins is inspired by a culture 3,000 years old who believed in the power of supernatural transformation and of human Jaguar beasts and who created some of the most astonishing artworks in the Americas. Arising out of the tropical wetlands of southern Mexico around 1200 BC, they were one of the first civilizations of the Americas. They built the first pyramid and the first planned city in this part of the Americas, devised one of the earliest known systems of writing, believed their rulers had supernatural powers, and played one of the world's oldest ball games. They are known as the Olmec. And they reached their height over a thousand years before the Maya and the Aztecs did. My name is Jago Cooper. I'm a specialist in the archaeology of the Americas. In this series, I will be exploring the rise and fall of forgotten civilizations. From the crystal clear seas of the Caribbean, to the New World's most impressive pyramids. Over the smoking volcanoes of Costa Rica. And deep underground in the caves of central Mexico. I'll travel in the footsteps of these peoples to reveal their secrets. To unearth the astonishing cultures that flourished among some of the most dramatic landscapes in the world. The Olmec were one of this continent's great civilizations. But two millennia ago, they vanished. This is a detective story. One where fragments of art and archaeology have to be pieced together to understand a people lost to time. To understand how the Olmecs arose, how they ruled 3,000 years ago, and why they created such astonishing art, is to understand the rise of civilization itself. In the 1940s, archaeologists investigated rumors of a giant stone eye staring up out of the ground in the jungles of southern Mexico. They were astonished by what they discovered. They unearthed evidence of a highly developed civilization, far older and more advanced than anyone had imagined. Somehow, in the unforgiving tropics of Mexico, an extraordinary culture arose and thrived. The story begins a few miles from where the giant stone heads were found on the Gulf Coast of Mexico Legends of a lost people a part of local folklore here There's an old poem in the indigenous Nahuatl language that tells of a legendary land of mist a place that is now forgotten Where once there was a civilization? But this environment of extremes obscured their story for centuries. This is a swelteringly hot and humid part of the world, prone to hurricanes and torrential downpours. Inland from here are endless expanses of swamps and jungles, and in the wet season half a metre of rain can fall in just a month. The terrain can be flooded for miles around, and so it's not the sort of place you might imagine a civilisation evolving, but this is where the story of the Olmec begins. Humans first arrived in Mesoamerica, the narrow strip of land connecting North and South America over 12,000 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers who fished and foraged along the coastline. But the network of rivers and lagoons drew them inland in search of more sustenance. into the swamps and wetlands, into an environment that would change the way they existed. As a result of the intense rainfall, the rivers and lakes here overflow. It provides an effect that's similar to the gift of the Nile. The annual floodwaters provide tons of fresh silt along these riverbanks, creating a fantastically fertile growing environment. 7,000 years ago the riverbanks here inland from the Gulf Coast were one of the first places in the Americas where maize was farmed. It was a crop that transformed the lives of those first hunter-gatherers they gave up their nomadic existence and started cultivating fields sustained by a crop that can be harvested three times a year in this region gradually between four and three thousand BC the population of the Gulf Coast grew but the early Mesoamericans started growing more than just maize crops that in combination did something quite remarkable These three plants of maize, beans and squash have an incredibly complementary effect when they're grown together. The maize is a hardy plant that can grow in tough conditions, providing a nice straight stalk. The beans are a vine which grow round it, fixing... nitrogen in the soil and the squash grows around both providing these broad leaves that keep down weeds but what's perhaps more important is what's inside because these plants when eaten together provide all of the sustenance that people need that diet of these which are called the three sisters has provided the foundation of mexican diets for thousands of years This agricultural breakthrough, an ability to grow all the sustenance needed to survive, allowed the early predecessors of the Olmec to produce a food surplus. The first building block in the rise of a civilization. It allowed villages and farmer communities to develop. And by 1500 BC, one settlement began to evolve that was different from anything Mesoamerica had seen before. And it's the first evidence we have of Olmec culture. I'm now 25 miles inland from the Gulf Coast to see if I can find traces of the first Olmec settlement. But this is a hugely challenging environment to investigate anything in. Low-lying land here floods during the rainy season, and the reed and mud wall structures the Olmec built have all rotted away. But archaeologists have discovered that in 1200 BC, this plateau, which rises 20 metres out of the wetlands, was at the centre of the earliest Olmec settlement. It's called San Lorenzo. What's different about San Lorenzo is its sheer scale. Archaeological surveys tell us that the site was over 700 hectares, that's more than three square miles, with a population of around 10,000 people. There would have been houses grouped together, split up by pools and streams, rafts and canoes navigating through these watercourses. And for as far as you can see, there would have been well-irrigated fields packed with crops. It was a boom town, and no one ever went hungry. And it wasn't just the scale of San Lorenzo that surprised archaeologists. On the heights of the plateau, they unearthed something that had never been seen before so early in Mesoamerican history. I've got a map of the plateau made during the excavations of the site that marks their discoveries. And beneath my feet are the remains of a structure that was very different to the mud and thatch houses that most Olmec lived in. This one had stone foundations and massive columns. Archaeologists think it's the first royal residence in Mesoamerica. The excavation has been backfilled to protect the structure. It was called the Red Palace and it occupied the very heart of San Lorenzo. Around this red palace are the lower status residences, and below them, further down the slopes, you find the labourers and the farmers. It's that classic realisation of a stratified society, with the elite people, literally higher, looking down on everyone else. San Lorenzo was controlled from here, and this kind of centralised social organisation is a hallmark of civilisation. No other emerging civilization in Mesoamerica had an elite class as privileged as the Olmec rulers. And they made their mark on society in a very striking way. These are the colossal Olmec heads and they're three-dimensional representations of individuals. Ten of them were found in a processional way leading up to the Red Palace at San Lorenzo. It's thought that they're rulers or heroes, but the way they're carved using stone tools displays an exquisite level of craftsmanship. There is no clue to their names or when they lived and died. But what makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up is the realisation that these could be the actual faces of the Olmec elite. To have had such impressive sculpture dedicated to them is a testimony to their status. And it begs the question, what was it that made these individuals so special? For people to accept a ruler to sit above them to control their lives, there has to be something really ingrained in their imagination, their psyche, to make it acceptable. So were the Olmec doing this willingly or were they forced to do so? Evidence for why the Olmec elite were so revered by their people can be seen in other sculptures unearthed near San Lorenzo that suggest the rulers occupied an almost supernatural role. Roberto Luna Gomez is an archaeologist based here at the Jalapa Museum in Veracruz. He has been studying the art of the Olmec and its meaning for over 20 years. This group of statues were all excavated together near San Lorenzo and form a tableau or scene. It shows two Olmec figures crouching before two jaguars. The jaguar is considered a sacred entity for the Olmecs. But in this sense, what we are appreciating precisely in this face is a feline, a jaguar, an entity that is roaring and that symbolizes precisely the power of the Olmecs. In principle, because the Olmecs lived in the jungle, in the tropical jungle, and the most emblematic, most powerful, most fierce animal It is the jaguar. So the jaguar became somehow in the nodule, in the most important part of his religion. And you know why it is the jaguar? Because it has those teeth, the face, the feline ears. And it has a similar, but similar to me a little anthropomorphic shape, right? Because there is something a little human about the figure. In fact, they are not precisely felines in the... The complete extension of the word. Rather, they are felines that are in a process of transformation. And we see that process of transformation in other Olmeca sculptures, precisely in this mimeticism between the jaguar man and the jaguar and the human. And that is precisely what the Olmeca rulers carried out. The rulers who had... the ability to transform into felines, that is, into mythological beings. There is a huge volume of Olmec art dedicated to illustrating their rulers'ability to assume the power of the jaguar, to become half-human, half-beast, or were-jagua. They would have been seen daily by the Olmec people at sites like San Lorenzo, a public display of power. This sculpture shows a ruler in mid-transformation turning into a jaguar before our very eyes. The infant in this green stone figure also hints at lineage, the passing down of power within the elite, inherited legitimacy. If the public art suggested that the leaders possessed supernatural powers, their rituals and ceremonies seem to have reinforced that impression yet further. This exquisite face is made of solid jadeite. Yes, it's interesting. And they present the symbols, the icons that are the corn. Oh, yes. One, two, three, four corn cartridges. Corn is a sacred plant by the Olmecs. And also with this corn on the cheeks, it has this link between water, fertility, fertility of culture and also of agriculture. Yes, this is the synonym of the importance of the agriculture of corn within the Olmec civilization. These masks directly linked their Wera to the successful harvest, a fundamental aspect of Olmec society. of their descendants and that was surely linked to the rulers, to the heroes of this enigmatic civilization. Key to deciphering Olmec belief systems and the status of their leaders is the understanding that the elite were viewed as different. They were thought to have a special relationship with powerful beasts and supernatural forces. Their power, the Olmec believed, created the conditions for fertile soils and an abundant food supply. This is an altar stone or throne found in one of San Lorenzo's public plazas. The elite would have stood or sat cross-legged on top during ceremonies. And here you can see what we think of footholds to let them climb up on top. At the front you see a figure, cross-legged, half in and half out of a cave or portal. Representing the transition between this world and another dimension. This object encapsulates the spectacle with which the elite could enthrall the public and demonstrate their ability to communicate with the spiritual world. public and ceremonial art the Olmec were expressing a shared belief system one that kept their social structure and order in place this is another defining element of civilization but the process of creating all this monumental stone sculpture tells us even more about them the craftsmanship required to carve it is one thing but acquiring the stone is quite another There is no source of rock or quarries in the Olmec marshland realm. The heads are made from a volcanic basalt rock and the nearest source lies 40 miles northwest of San Lorenzo at a place called Llano de Jicaro. We're just entering into the foothills of the Tushla Mountains and this is the first outcrop of basalt that you find near San Lorenzo. So somewhere around here is meant to be the quarry where we know lots of the stone monuments of the Olmec at San Lorenzo were made. Hidden in this dense bushland are hundreds of boulders of volcanic basalt rock. So here you can start to see some of the bigger basalt boulders. And like standing on this you can really feel like you could be standing on the top of one of those Olmec heads. Olmec labourers weren't just digging the boulders out of the ground here, they were beginning the process of shaping them. You can see how this boulder is starting to be shaped, where you get these corners which have been hacking out into this sort of, definitely a humanly created form. Three, four vertical edges creating this square shape, ready to be transformed into a piece of Olmec art. The boulders were being pre-formed here as part of an organized supply line of the raw material required for a huge volume of public art. This is a 3,000 year old quarrying site and the sheer extent of work that's going on here shows us how important stone working was to the Olmec. Between here and San Lorenzo is a swampy riverine landscape over which Olmec laborers would have had to transport 10 to 20 ton boulders using rafts, log rollers and sheer brute strength. It's been estimated that it would have taken 1,500 men three to four months to transport a preformed colossal head from here to San Lorenzo. The effort involved in immortalizing members of the elite tells us how strongly the Olmec must have believed in their leader's ability to influence nature and provide for the people. But the Olmec weren't just immortalizing themselves in stone. Stored in an air-conditioned facility in the Museum of Santiago in the Tushla Mountains is an astonishing and very rare set of artifacts that I'm getting extremely privileged access to examine. As far as Olmec artworks go they're one of a kind. And they offer another fragment of evidence to help us understand Olmec belief systems. These exquisite faces and heads have been carved from wood, a material that would normally have rotted away. But these were discovered preserved in the mud of a bog near San Lorenzo. These objects have been really beautifully made. You can see some of the cut marks from some of the tools, and then these faces have been polished down to a really fine level. But because they were waterlogged, some of them have been crushed during the time of being in the bog. So you get these quite distorted faces. It's incredibly rare to find wooden artefacts like this in the Olmec region, but in reality, these sort of wooden objects, these organic materials, would have made up a huge part of the everyday objects that the Olmec could have used. But unlike the colossal stone heads, these wooden representations of the Olmec weren't for public display. Instead, they were deliberately thrown into the waters of a bog. They were cast in as an offering to the spirit world. In the Olmec realm of swamps, lagoons and rivers that surrounded San Lorenzo, water was everywhere. Their sacred jaguars hunted in it. It made their crops grow, so had life-giving power. And so springs and pools were sacred places. This is an ancient volcanic crater lake, and locals believe this water to be bottomless. To the Olmec, bodies of water like this were entranceways to the underworld, and to break its surface is to enter into another dimension. This underworld was where the Olmec believed their ancestors resided. By casting objects like the wooden heads into a lake like this, or a watery bog, they were making offerings to them. This practice tells us that the Olmec worshipped their ancestors, and that by remembering them, they empowered and legitimised their civilisation. Other artifacts recovered from these Olmec underworlds have made it possible to see even more clearly how sophisticated their society was. Archaeologist David Morales Gomez is responsible for the care of thousands of artifacts found in this region. But at this storage... facility his team look after a set of unique items These spheres are made of solid rubber, and along with the wooden busts, were made as offerings to the underworld three and a half thousand years ago. So the hula between the Olmec culture, why do you think they are using it as an offering? Well, they are also called Mecas because they are in the region where there is a lot of hule. It is the biggest evidence of hule and then comes the trade of hule in Mesoamerica. Do you think that the material of Ule has a meaning in the culture? Because it comes as a liquid from the tree, it goes more solid in a way. Do you think that this material, the qualities of the material have some meaning in the culture? Of course, yes, because the trees are life. So, there is a meaning of Ule in association with life. And basically, it is in the region. The jaguar represents fertility. So it's a very important region where the hule comes from. This is the first time that these balls have ever been filmed or seen on television. And they represent something much more than just an offering. This is one of the earliest rubber balls in the world. It dates to 1600 BC. People were using rubber in the Americas over 3,000 years before it was introduced into Europe. And the Olmec were playing one of the world's first sports. This example is the start of an incredibly important tradition here in the region, the Mesoamerican ball game. The Mesoamerican ball game was still being played in Mexico in the 1970s when this footage was shot. The object was to keep the ball in play, moving it in the air at all times using your hips or arms. But for the Olmec, it's had a greater purpose than just sport. The ball is a ritual. The ball is very important in the ritual. There are two men on each side, facing the cardinal points, those who are in the association. the game of the ball and symbolizes the sun. And it's very interesting because they are probably the origin of the game of the ball in all of Mesoamerica. And in Mesoamerica there is no Ule more than in this region. Incredible. So this is one of the largest rubber balls and very, very difficult to conserve. But it gives you a sense of the scale of this sport. And so this would have been used as one of the balls played between two people in one of these ball courts, bouncing it from side to side. But the weight of the ball must have led to some serious bruising on the hips and shoulders, which it had been using to play with. But it's amazing. The legacy of the Olmec ball game can be seen today in modern Mexico where the ritual of ball sport remains just as much a part of society as it was 3,000 years ago. The rubber balls really represent the earliest sport in the Americas but sport is crucial I think to any society and within the Olmec we start to see the origins of that sport play out. Because as societies grow, as populations grow, we need other people to represent us, represent our communities. And that's what football teams do. They represent communities, regions, countries even. And so the Mesoamerican ball game is so much more than just a sport. It's a mechanism for playing out relationships between communities, between city-states. And in some ways it allows individuals to live vicariously through those who represent them. I've been invited to represent a local team. We don't know if the Olmec just played among themselves or against neighboring societies, but later Mesoamerican cultures used the ball game as a form of proxy warfare. As there's very little evidence that the Olmec were ever engaged in military conflict, It may have been that to them their ball game was a means of resolving disputes as well as a ritual spectacle. The development of organized sport within Olmec society has led to an even greater appreciation of how sophisticated their civilization was. When you take in the complexity of Olmec art, their spiritual beliefs and social organization, you really do have to remind yourself that this was happening 3,000 years ago. Yet in 900 BC, the Olmec raised their culture to even greater heights by planning and building a new city, one that put San Lorenzo in the shade. The Olmec chose a site 30 miles northeast of San Lorenzo for this city, at a place called La Venta. And they built it from scratch to a very specific design. Like at San Lorenzo, at Labenta we have these complexes of low earthen platforms and mounds. But what's different is that there's been careful urban planning at this site. The whole cityscape sits exactly eight degrees off a north-south axis. We don't know why it's on this line, but it tells us it was constructed this way deliberately. But what dominates this city is that. This is a man-made pyramid. Constructed from 100,000 cubic meters of clay, it was the first pyramid in ancient Mexico, starting a tradition that would last 2,000 years. Building it would have been a massive civic project requiring thousands of laborers, all of whom would have needed food and sustenance. So this pyramid demonstrates that the Olmec were still generating huge food surpluses from their rich floodplain farmlands. It can be seen from miles around. It's clear that by 900 BC, the Olmec had become a supremely confident society. Rebecca Gonzalez has been the lead archaeologist working at La Venta for the last 20 years. It's a huge site, the first urban planned city in Mesoamerica. It's a display of power basically. The whole architecture, the whole layout of the site, it's telling you we are here, we have the manpower. We have the ideas and the architects and everything to do this. One of the first things Rebecca did when she came here 20 years ago was to create a map of the city's layout. So this is the map. It gives you a sense of the scale of the site because if you look at the scale, it's 200 metres. I mean, this is running for almost, you know, more than a kilometre. More than a kilometre. We're standing on the Acropolis, facing a four-hectare plaza. which was probably used for public ceremonies. And we cannot see the rest of the site because it's covered with vegetation, but it has been mapped. So that gives you an idea that it would be hundreds, maybe thousands of people who could fit into that plaza in front of the pyramid, looking at this spectacle. So there must have been a big population here. There are estimates that there might have been 10,000 people here. But no, you can absolutely see it. It really gives a sense of the urban environment and the creation of an urban landscape. You see so many things here that have continued on within wider Mesoamerican cultures for thousands of years to come. What percentage of this site do you think has been excavated scientifically? Not even 1%. Not even 1%. We have excavated very, very, very little. Rebecca's map of the site not only gives a sense of scale, but shows us how it was built to hold huge ceremonial gatherings. Dozens of pieces of art have been found here, some relating to or depicting Olmec rituals and ceremonies. And one set of vines tells us that at La Benta the Olmec were making more extravagant ritual offerings than ever before. Tons and tons of serpentine rock, much of it shaped into beautiful axe heads, was buried in a massive offering pit at the... foot of the pyramid. This huge pit that was dug for between four and seven meters deep and then rows of serpentine blocks were deposited and these were placed in in the fill as they were filling it up to cover it up these were placed there and the massive offerings with these underground offerings of a thousand tons of serpentine it's huge amounts of stone that were they were brought in. Why do you think these offerings were taking place? Well they're obviously Probably one of the most important tools that they used, they were stone working people. They were set up standing up like this or some were placed pointing to north, south, east, west like this. Do you think they're making offerings to the rulers of the site or do you think it's the rulers making the offerings in order to show off their own wealth and their ability to make these offerings? It's again a show of power and a show of wealth. and I like the idea that the massive offerings are offerings to Mother Earth. But serpentine rock isn't found anywhere near the Gulf Coast. Just as the Olmec sought out basalt rock for their colossal heads, from La Venta they were reaching out even further to source serpentine. Where is this stone coming from? We think it comes from Oaxaca, which is on the western coast of Mexico. How or when, we don't know, but that they were brought in, yes. That's a colossal amount of trade coming across hundreds of miles. Yeah. And it really said something. about the importance of the site if you're getting this extent of interaction across you know the whole of mesoamerica from here at la venta the olmec were using the wealth they were generating from their rich farm lands to trade across the length and breadth of mexico but the cultures they encountered weren't as advanced as they were Archaeologists never like to use the term first because you're always going to be proved wrong eventually. But this is the first pyramid in Mesoamerica, the first planned layout of a town. But what's so special about this site is just the way that it pulls in wealth from hundreds of miles away. You find stone resources from Guatemala, the central highlands of Mexico and Oaxaca. But what I want to know is how does this site, how does this culture influence those regions hundreds of miles away? I'm traveling 400 miles west of La Venta on a journey that would have taken the Olmec the best part of a month on foot to a gap in the mountains that allows access between East and West Mexico called Chalcatzingo. Situated in Mexico's central highlands, Chalcatzingo was a trading post community that controlled the flow of goods between east and west. The Olmec came to this area to acquire serpentine. They may have traded for it with agricultural produce, perhaps with Jaguar pelts and with rubber, which could only have been harvested from their Gulf Coast environment. And certainly, there's evidence that the rubber ball game they seem to have originated found its way here. So this is a classic example of a Mesoamerican ball court. Here in the middle is where the game would actually have been played, with maybe two to four players on each side of the team, and the rubber ball would have been bounced up and down this channel. What's quite interesting about this particular ball court is it has these raised ramps up the side. So from up here, you can get a picture of what this game would have looked like. An audience perhaps up on this hill, looking down on the players. Playing within this channel, the rubber ball bouncing up and down. But it's more than just the relationship between the players and the spectators. It's about the positioning of this court itself. Because it's located in the heart of the ceremonial centre, just metres from this stepped pyramid. So it gives us a sense of how important the ball game is within Mesoamerican society. And if we think back to the rubber balls we saw from Manatee 1,600 years before Christ. This game is something that lasts within Mesoamerica and Mesoamerican culture for thousands of years. Tellingly, it seems the Olmec came here as influential traders rather than military conquerors. Yet it seems they had a profound impact here. And the evidence can be found carved into the mountainside. Here you have these three feline figures, maybe pumas or jaguars, but if you look at the mouth they're almost fantastical in the way that they're represented. And things like these cats, these feline figures, they're not indigenous to this area, so we're getting this sense of iconography and art and ideas being brought into this region. There are over 30 elaborate carvings in the rock here at Chalcatzingo. But did the Olmec who came here create them? Or were they carved by the people of Chalcatzingo themselves, having been inspired by Olmec iconography? Archaeologists have spent years trying to find clues in the details of the two and a half thousand year old carvings, in an attempt to understand more about them. So there's El Rey for the king. It's thought to be a cave entrance. The cave is an entrance to the underworld where the ancestors and the deities are. Travis Dering and Laurie Collins are currently conducting a two-year study to document the monuments at Chalcatzingo. And this monument in particular shows a ruler who seems to be wielding the same power over the elements that the Olmec elite claimed they had. There's all kinds of iconography on here. These are rain clouds up here. And these are raindrops signifying that they can control the rain in there spread out across the whole panel. They have control of the underworld where the ancestors and deities live and also the natural world. But the evidence of Olmec iconography is disappearing before their eyes. You can really see how much rock loss is happening and the cracking and the crazing and the defoliation of the stone. We have air pollution, acid rain, we've got tectonic activity. This site is on the 100 most imperiled archaeological sites on the World Monuments Fund list. Luckily, Travis and Laurie have a 21st century tool to help them. This piece of kit is the latest in 3D laser scanning technology. In the past, archaeologists might have photographed or taken a plaster cast of the carving. But now we can record it in a far more accurate way. It shoots out a beam, the beam returns to the machine and it has an accuracy level of 2 mm or less. We're capturing 360 degrees, so we're really taking in a lot of data all around us. And then from here, you know, if we kind of zoom in on this, and there's El Rey right in front of us. What I've done is I've gone in and I've highlighted all of the carved areas. The detail on the carved figure suddenly pop out. Those three clouds and the raindrops coming down, you can really, it just completely pulls it out. You know, we're seeing new things, basically. It makes it almost look like it's like a piece of art rather than being part of a landscape. The resolution you're getting on these images is just exceptional. To what extent does that pull out different iconography and help you sort of interpret it and understand some of the cultural links? We can actually computationally examine how similar or dissimilar things are. So we can say, yes, this site is like this site because it's got this shared iconographic representation on the carving, and it just speaks to the interrelationships that were going on at this time period. Because stylistically, you can see... The connections between this rock art and all across the Gulf Coast and the Olmec art land. These scans not only preserve a visual record of the carvings, but help us see them much more vividly. They must have been a truly awe-inspiring sight to people here 2,500 years ago. But the Olmec weren't in control at Chalcatzingo. This isn't an Olmec ruler, it's a local one. Detailed studies of these carvings have shown them to be inspired by the Olmec, but distinct to this region. It appears that the rulers of the developing culture in this region were, between 800 and 500 BC, adopting the elite iconography of the Gulf Coast Olmec to justify their own claims to power and prestige. And that spread of Olmec iconography doesn't just end here. Across Mesoamerica, archaeologists have found examples of local... ...communities and emerging civilizations imitating Olmec style imagery, as far west as the Pacific coast and south into modern-day Guatemala. But one of the most extraordinary can be found in Xuxtlahuaca, near the Pacific coast of Mexico. In a place that two and a half thousand years ago would have been desperately hard to get to. And even today, it's not easy. These caves are sacred places that chime with the Olmec view that water pools and fissures in the earth are entranceways into the underworld, a portal into another dimension. By the looks of it, this cave was being used by people centuries ago. Down here you can see a skeleton that has been fossilised over time. Now it's turned into this sort of mineral remnant of what was once there. But here you can see the femur, the leg bone coming up into the pelvis. There's a vertebrae going right up to the cranium at the top. And over time you can see the bones have become mineralized, covered in this calcified deposit that's come down from the water dripping down from the ceiling. So we know that it's old, but it's impossible to date. So it gives us a sense that people have been coming here for a very long time, right here into the heart of the cave. This is not what I came here to find. I have to go further, nearly a mile down into this cave network. And the deeper I go, the less oxygen there is. And this can make you feel light-headed, euphoric and nauseous at the same time. Okay, so here it is. This cave painting or pictograph has always been associated with the Olmec. It's of this powerful figure that you can see with this cape standing up with this red and yellow tunic. What I really like though is the details. on the cape, the legs and the hands. These spotted yellow and black coverings which are clearly jaguar pelts. In the hands holding some sort of rope, looking towards a figure just down there, either cowed or bent down, sitting down. And this has been interpreted either as an evidence of power, of this powerful elite figure subjugating this poor little person next to them, or it's a lineage of someone coming here to accept the power of their ancestry. This is not a piece of public art. It feels like this is an exclusive, sacred place. Were future leaders brought down into this underworld as part of an initiation ceremony? Perhaps to be taught about their lineage, that they were descended from the Jaguar, and that this was justification for their status as a ruler. You know, it's a bloody long way to get down to this cave. Why are these people coming down here to see these paintings on the walls? It has a real sense of people coming to tap in with their ancestors and understand the power of their culture. MUSIC PLAYS A thousand years after the Olmec first began immortalizing and empowering their rulers as half-man, half-jaguar beings, their ideas and iconography had filtered right across Mexico. And by 500 BC, Olmec art, sport and beliefs were spreading to the furthest corners of Mesoamerica to influence the development of other civilizations. But back on the Gulf Coast, the environment that had provided the Olmec with a stable foundation for their complex society was beginning to change. Risen up thanks to their ability to ability to produce a food surplus. It had sustained a growing population and fed large workforces as they undertook civic projects and created colossal stone artworks. Their elite claimed their supernatural power made this possible. But either gradually or quite suddenly, we simply don't know, the vast farmlands of the Olmec ceased being productive. There's an almost industrial scale of production clearing away all the vegetation creating these huge fields reliant on irrigation channels but that process of clearance leads to soil erosion that silts up those irrigation channels and creates huge problems with production. So in some ways the reasons for the rise of La Venta also sows the seeds of its destruction. By 400 BC, Labenta had been abandoned. And the demise of the city meant the demise of the Olmec elite themselves. It was their claimed ability to influence natural forces that had maintained them in positions of privilege and prestige. But in the face of failing crops, even famine, the Olmec elite at La Venta may well have been overthrown. This idea about la venta tells us a fundamental truth about civilization. I think that the Olmec allowed themselves to be ruled. It's the people who keep their rulers in place. And if those rulers fail, they can be overthrown. But this wasn't the case. the end of the Olmec civilization they rebuilt and entered a new phase 400 BC to 100 ad marked a period of adaptation for the Olmec they reverted back to living in smaller spread-out settlements And although they stopped creating colossal heads in honor of their elite, the Olmecs still produced works of art. They also developed a new way of communicating. I've returned to the Jalapa Museum to see one last truly fascinating Olmec artifact that dates to the final phase of Olmec civilization in the 1st century AD. This is the Mojarras de la... The stone not only features a carving of a remarkable figure in a headdress, it's also covered in hundreds of symbols. Archaeologist Lourdes Boudard believes these represent another first for the Olmec. These are the most incipient representations in all of Mesoamerica of writing with structure. Yes. We can see that they have numbers that are being recorded, possibly names that have that line outside. So this is a chronicle of a story with dates, with people. The way in which the text and the character are presented is completely new. Although the leaders aren't being immortalized by colossal heads or depicted as supernatural beings, the Olmecs still clearly maintained a ruling elite. The character has been given a name, it's not something official, but it's the Lord of the Hill of Harvest. And then he narrates with astronomical events and he narrates some of the historical events. Attempts at translating what the symbols actually say has provoked heated debate. But the carvings represent a hugely significant feature of cultural development. The power of the written word as a mechanism of order and as a device for recording a version of history is immense and symbolic. If it's carved in stone, it's permanent, indisputable. And perhaps the Olmec were trying to ensure that they weren't forgotten. These Olmec must have known that they were forgotten. They were a shadow of what they had once been. But whilst the Olmec civilization faded from history, their influence outlasted them. When archaeologists discovered the colossal heads, sculptures and carvings in the jungles of the Gulf Coast of Mexico, it was assumed they were Mayan. But over the decades, archaeologists have begun to discover and celebrate the uniqueness of Olmec culture and its antiquity. And this has led to a series of startling discoveries about the nature of the relationship between the Olmec and the Maya. This is the Maya city of Comalcolco, just inland from the Gulf Coast, and it lies only 50 miles east of the old Olmec center of La Benta. But this settlement was built in 500 AD, a thousand years after La Benta had collapsed. And here the Maya constructed their monumental architecture using clay brick. There are carvings on display depicting shared beliefs and it has large ceremonial plazas. Walking through this plaza I can't help but be reminded of the Olmec site of La Venta because this plaza has the same earthen mounds on either side, the same demonstrations of public art, and at the end this imposing, dominating pyramid. There are dozens of pyramids in Mexico built by different Mesoamerican cultures, but the Olmec are credited for building the first. The cultural innovations of the Olmec didn't disappear with them. They weren't reinvented by the Maya. City planning, the centralization of economic and agricultural resources, the creations of elite power and divine religion, and the affirmation of these through public art and ceremony. These social institutions of the Olmec remained with the people of this region, morphing through time to become ever more sophisticated and complex. Civilization is a word that archaeologists have used to differentiate between different stages of social development. It certainly doesn't mean that the people who live in civilizations are any more civilized than they are. than hunter-gatherer societies but rather that they have undergone a set of key social transformations they can produce a food surplus they have a hierarchical social structure cities in an economic system are in place they express shared beliefs and ideas through art writing and ceremonial events These are all traits that we recognize today, perhaps even take for granted. But here in the Americas, the Olmec developed these traits for the first time over 3,000 years ago. For too long, the Olmec have lain dormant. And it's only now that the true power of their culture can be fully understood. The Olmec represent a turning point in human development of the Americas. And their legacy of urban planning, sport, public art, complex social relationships have lasted thousands of years, down through the generations, and right up to the 21st century. Away from an unknown future, we meet the teens seeking solace online, and the parents trying desperately to cure them of their obsession. Web Junkies, China's Addicted Teens, is brand new from Storyville, next.

And they reached their height over a thousand years before the Maya and the Aztecs did. My name is Jago Cooper. I'm a specialist in the archaeology of the Americas. In this series, I will be exploring the rise and fall of forgotten civilizations.

From the crystal clear seas of the Caribbean, to the New World's most impressive pyramids. Over the smoking volcanoes of Costa Rica. And deep underground in the caves of central Mexico.

I'll travel in the footsteps of these peoples to reveal their secrets. To unearth the astonishing cultures that flourished among some of the most dramatic landscapes in the world. The Olmec were one of this continent's great civilizations.

But two millennia ago, they vanished. This is a detective story. One where fragments of art and archaeology have to be pieced together to understand a people lost to time.

To understand how the Olmecs arose, how they ruled 3,000 years ago, and why they created such astonishing art, is to understand the rise of civilization itself. In the 1940s, archaeologists investigated rumors of a giant stone eye staring up out of the ground in the jungles of southern Mexico. They were astonished by what they discovered.

They unearthed evidence of a highly developed civilization, far older and more advanced than anyone had imagined. Somehow, in the unforgiving tropics of Mexico, an extraordinary culture arose and thrived. The story begins a few miles from where the giant stone heads were found on the Gulf Coast of Mexico Legends of a lost people a part of local folklore here There's an old poem in the indigenous Nahuatl language that tells of a legendary land of mist a place that is now forgotten Where once there was a civilization? But this environment of extremes obscured their story for centuries. This is a swelteringly hot and humid part of the world, prone to hurricanes and torrential downpours.

Inland from here are endless expanses of swamps and jungles, and in the wet season half a metre of rain can fall in just a month. The terrain can be flooded for miles around, and so it's not the sort of place you might imagine a civilisation evolving, but this is where the story of the Olmec begins. Humans first arrived in Mesoamerica, the narrow strip of land connecting North and South America over 12,000 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers who fished and foraged along the coastline. But the network of rivers and lagoons drew them inland in search of more sustenance.

into the swamps and wetlands, into an environment that would change the way they existed. As a result of the intense rainfall, the rivers and lakes here overflow. It provides an effect that's similar to the gift of the Nile. The annual floodwaters provide tons of fresh silt along these riverbanks, creating a fantastically fertile growing environment.

7,000 years ago the riverbanks here inland from the Gulf Coast were one of the first places in the Americas where maize was farmed. It was a crop that transformed the lives of those first hunter-gatherers they gave up their nomadic existence and started cultivating fields sustained by a crop that can be harvested three times a year in this region gradually between four and three thousand BC the population of the Gulf Coast grew but the early Mesoamericans started growing more than just maize crops that in combination did something quite remarkable These three plants of maize, beans and squash have an incredibly complementary effect when they're grown together. The maize is a hardy plant that can grow in tough conditions, providing a nice straight stalk. The beans are a vine which grow round it, fixing... nitrogen in the soil and the squash grows around both providing these broad leaves that keep down weeds but what's perhaps more important is what's inside because these plants when eaten together provide all of the sustenance that people need that diet of these which are called the three sisters has provided the foundation of mexican diets for thousands of years This agricultural breakthrough, an ability to grow all the sustenance needed to survive, allowed the early predecessors of the Olmec to produce a food surplus.

The first building block in the rise of a civilization. It allowed villages and farmer communities to develop. And by 1500 BC, one settlement began to evolve that was different from anything Mesoamerica had seen before. And it's the first evidence we have of Olmec culture. I'm now 25 miles inland from the Gulf Coast to see if I can find traces of the first Olmec settlement.

But this is a hugely challenging environment to investigate anything in. Low-lying land here floods during the rainy season, and the reed and mud wall structures the Olmec built have all rotted away. But archaeologists have discovered that in 1200 BC, this plateau, which rises 20 metres out of the wetlands, was at the centre of the earliest Olmec settlement.

It's called San Lorenzo. What's different about San Lorenzo is its sheer scale. Archaeological surveys tell us that the site was over 700 hectares, that's more than three square miles, with a population of around 10,000 people. There would have been houses grouped together, split up by pools and streams, rafts and canoes navigating through these watercourses. And for as far as you can see, there would have been well-irrigated fields packed with crops.

It was a boom town, and no one ever went hungry. And it wasn't just the scale of San Lorenzo that surprised archaeologists. On the heights of the plateau, they unearthed something that had never been seen before so early in Mesoamerican history. I've got a map of the plateau made during the excavations of the site that marks their discoveries.

And beneath my feet are the remains of a structure that was very different to the mud and thatch houses that most Olmec lived in. This one had stone foundations and massive columns. Archaeologists think it's the first royal residence in Mesoamerica. The excavation has been backfilled to protect the structure. It was called the Red Palace and it occupied the very heart of San Lorenzo.

Around this red palace are the lower status residences, and below them, further down the slopes, you find the labourers and the farmers. It's that classic realisation of a stratified society, with the elite people, literally higher, looking down on everyone else. San Lorenzo was controlled from here, and this kind of centralised social organisation is a hallmark of civilisation. No other emerging civilization in Mesoamerica had an elite class as privileged as the Olmec rulers.

And they made their mark on society in a very striking way. These are the colossal Olmec heads and they're three-dimensional representations of individuals. Ten of them were found in a processional way leading up to the Red Palace at San Lorenzo.

It's thought that they're rulers or heroes, but the way they're carved using stone tools displays an exquisite level of craftsmanship. There is no clue to their names or when they lived and died. But what makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up is the realisation that these could be the actual faces of the Olmec elite. To have had such impressive sculpture dedicated to them is a testimony to their status. And it begs the question, what was it that made these individuals so special?

For people to accept a ruler to sit above them to control their lives, there has to be something really ingrained in their imagination, their psyche, to make it acceptable. So were the Olmec doing this willingly or were they forced to do so? Evidence for why the Olmec elite were so revered by their people can be seen in other sculptures unearthed near San Lorenzo that suggest the rulers occupied an almost supernatural role. Roberto Luna Gomez is an archaeologist based here at the Jalapa Museum in Veracruz. He has been studying the art of the Olmec and its meaning for over 20 years.

This group of statues were all excavated together near San Lorenzo and form a tableau or scene. It shows two Olmec figures crouching before two jaguars. The jaguar is considered a sacred entity for the Olmecs.

But in this sense, what we are appreciating precisely in this face is a feline, a jaguar, an entity that is roaring and that symbolizes precisely the power of the Olmecs. In principle, because the Olmecs lived in the jungle, in the tropical jungle, and the most emblematic, most powerful, most fierce animal It is the jaguar. So the jaguar became somehow in the nodule, in the most important part of his religion. And you know why it is the jaguar?

Because it has those teeth, the face, the feline ears. And it has a similar, but similar to me a little anthropomorphic shape, right? Because there is something a little human about the figure.

In fact, they are not precisely felines in the... The complete extension of the word. Rather, they are felines that are in a process of transformation.

And we see that process of transformation in other Olmeca sculptures, precisely in this mimeticism between the jaguar man and the jaguar and the human. And that is precisely what the Olmeca rulers carried out. The rulers who had...

the ability to transform into felines, that is, into mythological beings. There is a huge volume of Olmec art dedicated to illustrating their rulers'ability to assume the power of the jaguar, to become half-human, half-beast, or were-jagua. They would have been seen daily by the Olmec people at sites like San Lorenzo, a public display of power.

This sculpture shows a ruler in mid-transformation turning into a jaguar before our very eyes. The infant in this green stone figure also hints at lineage, the passing down of power within the elite, inherited legitimacy. If the public art suggested that the leaders possessed supernatural powers, their rituals and ceremonies seem to have reinforced that impression yet further. This exquisite face is made of solid jadeite. Yes, it's interesting.

And they present the symbols, the icons that are the corn. Oh, yes. One, two, three, four corn cartridges. Corn is a sacred plant by the Olmecs. And also with this corn on the cheeks, it has this link between water, fertility, fertility of culture and also of agriculture.

Yes, this is the synonym of the importance of the agriculture of corn within the Olmec civilization. These masks directly linked their Wera to the successful harvest, a fundamental aspect of Olmec society. of their descendants and that was surely linked to the rulers, to the heroes of this enigmatic civilization.

Key to deciphering Olmec belief systems and the status of their leaders is the understanding that the elite were viewed as different. They were thought to have a special relationship with powerful beasts and supernatural forces. Their power, the Olmec believed, created the conditions for fertile soils and an abundant food supply.

This is an altar stone or throne found in one of San Lorenzo's public plazas. The elite would have stood or sat cross-legged on top during ceremonies. And here you can see what we think of footholds to let them climb up on top.

At the front you see a figure, cross-legged, half in and half out of a cave or portal. Representing the transition between this world and another dimension. This object encapsulates the spectacle with which the elite could enthrall the public and demonstrate their ability to communicate with the spiritual world.

public and ceremonial art the Olmec were expressing a shared belief system one that kept their social structure and order in place this is another defining element of civilization but the process of creating all this monumental stone sculpture tells us even more about them the craftsmanship required to carve it is one thing but acquiring the stone is quite another There is no source of rock or quarries in the Olmec marshland realm. The heads are made from a volcanic basalt rock and the nearest source lies 40 miles northwest of San Lorenzo at a place called Llano de Jicaro. We're just entering into the foothills of the Tushla Mountains and this is the first outcrop of basalt that you find near San Lorenzo. So somewhere around here is meant to be the quarry where we know lots of the stone monuments of the Olmec at San Lorenzo were made. Hidden in this dense bushland are hundreds of boulders of volcanic basalt rock.

So here you can start to see some of the bigger basalt boulders. And like standing on this you can really feel like you could be standing on the top of one of those Olmec heads. Olmec labourers weren't just digging the boulders out of the ground here, they were beginning the process of shaping them. You can see how this boulder is starting to be shaped, where you get these corners which have been hacking out into this sort of, definitely a humanly created form.

Three, four vertical edges creating this square shape, ready to be transformed into a piece of Olmec art. The boulders were being pre-formed here as part of an organized supply line of the raw material required for a huge volume of public art. This is a 3,000 year old quarrying site and the sheer extent of work that's going on here shows us how important stone working was to the Olmec.

Between here and San Lorenzo is a swampy riverine landscape over which Olmec laborers would have had to transport 10 to 20 ton boulders using rafts, log rollers and sheer brute strength. It's been estimated that it would have taken 1,500 men three to four months to transport a preformed colossal head from here to San Lorenzo. The effort involved in immortalizing members of the elite tells us how strongly the Olmec must have believed in their leader's ability to influence nature and provide for the people.

But the Olmec weren't just immortalizing themselves in stone. Stored in an air-conditioned facility in the Museum of Santiago in the Tushla Mountains is an astonishing and very rare set of artifacts that I'm getting extremely privileged access to examine. As far as Olmec artworks go they're one of a kind. And they offer another fragment of evidence to help us understand Olmec belief systems. These exquisite faces and heads have been carved from wood, a material that would normally have rotted away.

But these were discovered preserved in the mud of a bog near San Lorenzo. These objects have been really beautifully made. You can see some of the cut marks from some of the tools, and then these faces have been polished down to a really fine level.

But because they were waterlogged, some of them have been crushed during the time of being in the bog. So you get these quite distorted faces. It's incredibly rare to find wooden artefacts like this in the Olmec region, but in reality, these sort of wooden objects, these organic materials, would have made up a huge part of the everyday objects that the Olmec could have used.

But unlike the colossal stone heads, these wooden representations of the Olmec weren't for public display. Instead, they were deliberately thrown into the waters of a bog. They were cast in as an offering to the spirit world. In the Olmec realm of swamps, lagoons and rivers that surrounded San Lorenzo, water was everywhere. Their sacred jaguars hunted in it.

It made their crops grow, so had life-giving power. And so springs and pools were sacred places. This is an ancient volcanic crater lake, and locals believe this water to be bottomless.

To the Olmec, bodies of water like this were entranceways to the underworld, and to break its surface is to enter into another dimension. This underworld was where the Olmec believed their ancestors resided. By casting objects like the wooden heads into a lake like this, or a watery bog, they were making offerings to them. This practice tells us that the Olmec worshipped their ancestors, and that by remembering them, they empowered and legitimised their civilisation. Other artifacts recovered from these Olmec underworlds have made it possible to see even more clearly how sophisticated their society was.

Archaeologist David Morales Gomez is responsible for the care of thousands of artifacts found in this region. But at this storage... facility his team look after a set of unique items These spheres are made of solid rubber, and along with the wooden busts, were made as offerings to the underworld three and a half thousand years ago.

So the hula between the Olmec culture, why do you think they are using it as an offering? Well, they are also called Mecas because they are in the region where there is a lot of hule. It is the biggest evidence of hule and then comes the trade of hule in Mesoamerica. Do you think that the material of Ule has a meaning in the culture?

Because it comes as a liquid from the tree, it goes more solid in a way. Do you think that this material, the qualities of the material have some meaning in the culture? Of course, yes, because the trees are life.

So, there is a meaning of Ule in association with life. And basically, it is in the region. The jaguar represents fertility. So it's a very important region where the hule comes from. This is the first time that these balls have ever been filmed or seen on television.

And they represent something much more than just an offering. This is one of the earliest rubber balls in the world. It dates to 1600 BC.

People were using rubber in the Americas over 3,000 years before it was introduced into Europe. And the Olmec were playing one of the world's first sports. This example is the start of an incredibly important tradition here in the region, the Mesoamerican ball game. The Mesoamerican ball game was still being played in Mexico in the 1970s when this footage was shot.

The object was to keep the ball in play, moving it in the air at all times using your hips or arms. But for the Olmec, it's had a greater purpose than just sport. The ball is a ritual.

The ball is very important in the ritual. There are two men on each side, facing the cardinal points, those who are in the association. the game of the ball and symbolizes the sun.

And it's very interesting because they are probably the origin of the game of the ball in all of Mesoamerica. And in Mesoamerica there is no Ule more than in this region. Incredible.

So this is one of the largest rubber balls and very, very difficult to conserve. But it gives you a sense of the scale of this sport. And so this would have been used as one of the balls played between two people in one of these ball courts, bouncing it from side to side. But the weight of the ball must have led to some serious bruising on the hips and shoulders, which it had been using to play with. But it's amazing.

The legacy of the Olmec ball game can be seen today in modern Mexico where the ritual of ball sport remains just as much a part of society as it was 3,000 years ago. The rubber balls really represent the earliest sport in the Americas but sport is crucial I think to any society and within the Olmec we start to see the origins of that sport play out. Because as societies grow, as populations grow, we need other people to represent us, represent our communities. And that's what football teams do. They represent communities, regions, countries even.

And so the Mesoamerican ball game is so much more than just a sport. It's a mechanism for playing out relationships between communities, between city-states. And in some ways it allows individuals to live vicariously through those who represent them. I've been invited to represent a local team.

We don't know if the Olmec just played among themselves or against neighboring societies, but later Mesoamerican cultures used the ball game as a form of proxy warfare. As there's very little evidence that the Olmec were ever engaged in military conflict, It may have been that to them their ball game was a means of resolving disputes as well as a ritual spectacle. The development of organized sport within Olmec society has led to an even greater appreciation of how sophisticated their civilization was.

When you take in the complexity of Olmec art, their spiritual beliefs and social organization, you really do have to remind yourself that this was happening 3,000 years ago. Yet in 900 BC, the Olmec raised their culture to even greater heights by planning and building a new city, one that put San Lorenzo in the shade. The Olmec chose a site 30 miles northeast of San Lorenzo for this city, at a place called La Venta.

And they built it from scratch to a very specific design. Like at San Lorenzo, at Labenta we have these complexes of low earthen platforms and mounds. But what's different is that there's been careful urban planning at this site. The whole cityscape sits exactly eight degrees off a north-south axis.

We don't know why it's on this line, but it tells us it was constructed this way deliberately. But what dominates this city is that. This is a man-made pyramid.

Constructed from 100,000 cubic meters of clay, it was the first pyramid in ancient Mexico, starting a tradition that would last 2,000 years. Building it would have been a massive civic project requiring thousands of laborers, all of whom would have needed food and sustenance. So this pyramid demonstrates that the Olmec were still generating huge food surpluses from their rich floodplain farmlands. It can be seen from miles around. It's clear that by 900 BC, the Olmec had become a supremely confident society.

Rebecca Gonzalez has been the lead archaeologist working at La Venta for the last 20 years. It's a huge site, the first urban planned city in Mesoamerica. It's a display of power basically. The whole architecture, the whole layout of the site, it's telling you we are here, we have the manpower. We have the ideas and the architects and everything to do this.

One of the first things Rebecca did when she came here 20 years ago was to create a map of the city's layout. So this is the map. It gives you a sense of the scale of the site because if you look at the scale, it's 200 metres.

I mean, this is running for almost, you know, more than a kilometre. More than a kilometre. We're standing on the Acropolis, facing a four-hectare plaza.

which was probably used for public ceremonies. And we cannot see the rest of the site because it's covered with vegetation, but it has been mapped. So that gives you an idea that it would be hundreds, maybe thousands of people who could fit into that plaza in front of the pyramid, looking at this spectacle.

So there must have been a big population here. There are estimates that there might have been 10,000 people here. But no, you can absolutely see it.

It really gives a sense of the urban environment and the creation of an urban landscape. You see so many things here that have continued on within wider Mesoamerican cultures for thousands of years to come. What percentage of this site do you think has been excavated scientifically? Not even 1%.

Not even 1%. We have excavated very, very, very little. Rebecca's map of the site not only gives a sense of scale, but shows us how it was built to hold huge ceremonial gatherings.

Dozens of pieces of art have been found here, some relating to or depicting Olmec rituals and ceremonies. And one set of vines tells us that at La Benta the Olmec were making more extravagant ritual offerings than ever before. Tons and tons of serpentine rock, much of it shaped into beautiful axe heads, was buried in a massive offering pit at the... foot of the pyramid. This huge pit that was dug for between four and seven meters deep and then rows of serpentine blocks were deposited and these were placed in in the fill as they were filling it up to cover it up these were placed there and the massive offerings with these underground offerings of a thousand tons of serpentine it's huge amounts of stone that were they were brought in.

Why do you think these offerings were taking place? Well they're obviously Probably one of the most important tools that they used, they were stone working people. They were set up standing up like this or some were placed pointing to north, south, east, west like this. Do you think they're making offerings to the rulers of the site or do you think it's the rulers making the offerings in order to show off their own wealth and their ability to make these offerings?

It's again a show of power and a show of wealth. and I like the idea that the massive offerings are offerings to Mother Earth. But serpentine rock isn't found anywhere near the Gulf Coast. Just as the Olmec sought out basalt rock for their colossal heads, from La Venta they were reaching out even further to source serpentine. Where is this stone coming from?

We think it comes from Oaxaca, which is on the western coast of Mexico. How or when, we don't know, but that they were brought in, yes. That's a colossal amount of trade coming across hundreds of miles.

Yeah. And it really said something. about the importance of the site if you're getting this extent of interaction across you know the whole of mesoamerica from here at la venta the olmec were using the wealth they were generating from their rich farm lands to trade across the length and breadth of mexico but the cultures they encountered weren't as advanced as they were Archaeologists never like to use the term first because you're always going to be proved wrong eventually.

But this is the first pyramid in Mesoamerica, the first planned layout of a town. But what's so special about this site is just the way that it pulls in wealth from hundreds of miles away. You find stone resources from Guatemala, the central highlands of Mexico and Oaxaca.

But what I want to know is how does this site, how does this culture influence those regions hundreds of miles away? I'm traveling 400 miles west of La Venta on a journey that would have taken the Olmec the best part of a month on foot to a gap in the mountains that allows access between East and West Mexico called Chalcatzingo. Situated in Mexico's central highlands, Chalcatzingo was a trading post community that controlled the flow of goods between east and west. The Olmec came to this area to acquire serpentine. They may have traded for it with agricultural produce, perhaps with Jaguar pelts and with rubber, which could only have been harvested from their Gulf Coast environment.

And certainly, there's evidence that the rubber ball game they seem to have originated found its way here. So this is a classic example of a Mesoamerican ball court. Here in the middle is where the game would actually have been played, with maybe two to four players on each side of the team, and the rubber ball would have been bounced up and down this channel. What's quite interesting about this particular ball court is it has these raised ramps up the side. So from up here, you can get a picture of what this game would have looked like.

An audience perhaps up on this hill, looking down on the players. Playing within this channel, the rubber ball bouncing up and down. But it's more than just the relationship between the players and the spectators.

It's about the positioning of this court itself. Because it's located in the heart of the ceremonial centre, just metres from this stepped pyramid. So it gives us a sense of how important the ball game is within Mesoamerican society.

And if we think back to the rubber balls we saw from Manatee 1,600 years before Christ. This game is something that lasts within Mesoamerica and Mesoamerican culture for thousands of years. Tellingly, it seems the Olmec came here as influential traders rather than military conquerors.

Yet it seems they had a profound impact here. And the evidence can be found carved into the mountainside. Here you have these three feline figures, maybe pumas or jaguars, but if you look at the mouth they're almost fantastical in the way that they're represented.

And things like these cats, these feline figures, they're not indigenous to this area, so we're getting this sense of iconography and art and ideas being brought into this region. There are over 30 elaborate carvings in the rock here at Chalcatzingo. But did the Olmec who came here create them?

Or were they carved by the people of Chalcatzingo themselves, having been inspired by Olmec iconography? Archaeologists have spent years trying to find clues in the details of the two and a half thousand year old carvings, in an attempt to understand more about them. So there's El Rey for the king. It's thought to be a cave entrance. The cave is an entrance to the underworld where the ancestors and the deities are.

Travis Dering and Laurie Collins are currently conducting a two-year study to document the monuments at Chalcatzingo. And this monument in particular shows a ruler who seems to be wielding the same power over the elements that the Olmec elite claimed they had. There's all kinds of iconography on here.

These are rain clouds up here. And these are raindrops signifying that they can control the rain in there spread out across the whole panel. They have control of the underworld where the ancestors and deities live and also the natural world.

But the evidence of Olmec iconography is disappearing before their eyes. You can really see how much rock loss is happening and the cracking and the crazing and the defoliation of the stone. We have air pollution, acid rain, we've got tectonic activity. This site is on the 100 most imperiled archaeological sites on the World Monuments Fund list. Luckily, Travis and Laurie have a 21st century tool to help them.

This piece of kit is the latest in 3D laser scanning technology. In the past, archaeologists might have photographed or taken a plaster cast of the carving. But now we can record it in a far more accurate way.

It shoots out a beam, the beam returns to the machine and it has an accuracy level of 2 mm or less. We're capturing 360 degrees, so we're really taking in a lot of data all around us. And then from here, you know, if we kind of zoom in on this, and there's El Rey right in front of us. What I've done is I've gone in and I've highlighted all of the carved areas.

The detail on the carved figure suddenly pop out. Those three clouds and the raindrops coming down, you can really, it just completely pulls it out. You know, we're seeing new things, basically. It makes it almost look like it's like a piece of art rather than being part of a landscape.

The resolution you're getting on these images is just exceptional. To what extent does that pull out different iconography and help you sort of interpret it and understand some of the cultural links? We can actually computationally examine how similar or dissimilar things are. So we can say, yes, this site is like this site because it's got this shared iconographic representation on the carving, and it just speaks to the interrelationships that were going on at this time period.

Because stylistically, you can see... The connections between this rock art and all across the Gulf Coast and the Olmec art land. These scans not only preserve a visual record of the carvings, but help us see them much more vividly.

They must have been a truly awe-inspiring sight to people here 2,500 years ago. But the Olmec weren't in control at Chalcatzingo. This isn't an Olmec ruler, it's a local one.

Detailed studies of these carvings have shown them to be inspired by the Olmec, but distinct to this region. It appears that the rulers of the developing culture in this region were, between 800 and 500 BC, adopting the elite iconography of the Gulf Coast Olmec to justify their own claims to power and prestige. And that spread of Olmec iconography doesn't just end here.

Across Mesoamerica, archaeologists have found examples of local... ...communities and emerging civilizations imitating Olmec style imagery, as far west as the Pacific coast and south into modern-day Guatemala. But one of the most extraordinary can be found in Xuxtlahuaca, near the Pacific coast of Mexico.

In a place that two and a half thousand years ago would have been desperately hard to get to. And even today, it's not easy. These caves are sacred places that chime with the Olmec view that water pools and fissures in the earth are entranceways into the underworld, a portal into another dimension.

By the looks of it, this cave was being used by people centuries ago. Down here you can see a skeleton that has been fossilised over time. Now it's turned into this sort of mineral remnant of what was once there. But here you can see the femur, the leg bone coming up into the pelvis. There's a vertebrae going right up to the cranium at the top.

And over time you can see the bones have become mineralized, covered in this calcified deposit that's come down from the water dripping down from the ceiling. So we know that it's old, but it's impossible to date. So it gives us a sense that people have been coming here for a very long time, right here into the heart of the cave.

This is not what I came here to find. I have to go further, nearly a mile down into this cave network. And the deeper I go, the less oxygen there is.

And this can make you feel light-headed, euphoric and nauseous at the same time. Okay, so here it is. This cave painting or pictograph has always been associated with the Olmec.

It's of this powerful figure that you can see with this cape standing up with this red and yellow tunic. What I really like though is the details. on the cape, the legs and the hands.

These spotted yellow and black coverings which are clearly jaguar pelts. In the hands holding some sort of rope, looking towards a figure just down there, either cowed or bent down, sitting down. And this has been interpreted either as an evidence of power, of this powerful elite figure subjugating this poor little person next to them, or it's a lineage of someone coming here to accept the power of their ancestry. This is not a piece of public art. It feels like this is an exclusive, sacred place.

Were future leaders brought down into this underworld as part of an initiation ceremony? Perhaps to be taught about their lineage, that they were descended from the Jaguar, and that this was justification for their status as a ruler. You know, it's a bloody long way to get down to this cave. Why are these people coming down here to see these paintings on the walls? It has a real sense of people coming to tap in with their ancestors and understand the power of their culture.

MUSIC PLAYS A thousand years after the Olmec first began immortalizing and empowering their rulers as half-man, half-jaguar beings, their ideas and iconography had filtered right across Mexico. And by 500 BC, Olmec art, sport and beliefs were spreading to the furthest corners of Mesoamerica to influence the development of other civilizations. But back on the Gulf Coast, the environment that had provided the Olmec with a stable foundation for their complex society was beginning to change. Risen up thanks to their ability to ability to produce a food surplus. It had sustained a growing population and fed large workforces as they undertook civic projects and created colossal stone artworks.

Their elite claimed their supernatural power made this possible. But either gradually or quite suddenly, we simply don't know, the vast farmlands of the Olmec ceased being productive. There's an almost industrial scale of production clearing away all the vegetation creating these huge fields reliant on irrigation channels but that process of clearance leads to soil erosion that silts up those irrigation channels and creates huge problems with production.

So in some ways the reasons for the rise of La Venta also sows the seeds of its destruction. By 400 BC, Labenta had been abandoned. And the demise of the city meant the demise of the Olmec elite themselves. It was their claimed ability to influence natural forces that had maintained them in positions of privilege and prestige. But in the face of failing crops, even famine, the Olmec elite at La Venta may well have been overthrown.

This idea about la venta tells us a fundamental truth about civilization. I think that the Olmec allowed themselves to be ruled. It's the people who keep their rulers in place.

And if those rulers fail, they can be overthrown. But this wasn't the case. the end of the Olmec civilization they rebuilt and entered a new phase 400 BC to 100 ad marked a period of adaptation for the Olmec they reverted back to living in smaller spread-out settlements And although they stopped creating colossal heads in honor of their elite, the Olmecs still produced works of art. They also developed a new way of communicating. I've returned to the Jalapa Museum to see one last truly fascinating Olmec artifact that dates to the final phase of Olmec civilization in the 1st century AD.

This is the Mojarras de la... The stone not only features a carving of a remarkable figure in a headdress, it's also covered in hundreds of symbols. Archaeologist Lourdes Boudard believes these represent another first for the Olmec.

These are the most incipient representations in all of Mesoamerica of writing with structure. Yes. We can see that they have numbers that are being recorded, possibly names that have that line outside.

So this is a chronicle of a story with dates, with people. The way in which the text and the character are presented is completely new. Although the leaders aren't being immortalized by colossal heads or depicted as supernatural beings, the Olmecs still clearly maintained a ruling elite.

The character has been given a name, it's not something official, but it's the Lord of the Hill of Harvest. And then he narrates with astronomical events and he narrates some of the historical events. Attempts at translating what the symbols actually say has provoked heated debate. But the carvings represent a hugely significant feature of cultural development.

The power of the written word as a mechanism of order and as a device for recording a version of history is immense and symbolic. If it's carved in stone, it's permanent, indisputable. And perhaps the Olmec were trying to ensure that they weren't forgotten. These Olmec must have known that they were forgotten.

They were a shadow of what they had once been. But whilst the Olmec civilization faded from history, their influence outlasted them. When archaeologists discovered the colossal heads, sculptures and carvings in the jungles of the Gulf Coast of Mexico, it was assumed they were Mayan.

But over the decades, archaeologists have begun to discover and celebrate the uniqueness of Olmec culture and its antiquity. And this has led to a series of startling discoveries about the nature of the relationship between the Olmec and the Maya. This is the Maya city of Comalcolco, just inland from the Gulf Coast, and it lies only 50 miles east of the old Olmec center of La Benta.

But this settlement was built in 500 AD, a thousand years after La Benta had collapsed. And here the Maya constructed their monumental architecture using clay brick. There are carvings on display depicting shared beliefs and it has large ceremonial plazas. Walking through this plaza I can't help but be reminded of the Olmec site of La Venta because this plaza has the same earthen mounds on either side, the same demonstrations of public art, and at the end this imposing, dominating pyramid.

There are dozens of pyramids in Mexico built by different Mesoamerican cultures, but the Olmec are credited for building the first. The cultural innovations of the Olmec didn't disappear with them. They weren't reinvented by the Maya.

City planning, the centralization of economic and agricultural resources, the creations of elite power and divine religion, and the affirmation of these through public art and ceremony. These social institutions of the Olmec remained with the people of this region, morphing through time to become ever more sophisticated and complex. Civilization is a word that archaeologists have used to differentiate between different stages of social development. It certainly doesn't mean that the people who live in civilizations are any more civilized than they are. than hunter-gatherer societies but rather that they have undergone a set of key social transformations they can produce a food surplus they have a hierarchical social structure cities in an economic system are in place they express shared beliefs and ideas through art writing and ceremonial events These are all traits that we recognize today, perhaps even take for granted.

But here in the Americas, the Olmec developed these traits for the first time over 3,000 years ago. For too long, the Olmec have lain dormant. And it's only now that the true power of their culture can be fully understood.

The Olmec represent a turning point in human development of the Americas. And their legacy of urban planning, sport, public art, complex social relationships have lasted thousands of years, down through the generations, and right up to the 21st century. Away from an unknown future, we meet the teens seeking solace online, and the parents trying desperately to cure them of their obsession. Web Junkies, China's Addicted Teens, is brand new from Storyville, next.

Transcript for:The Rise and Legacy of the Olmecs

Transcript for:
The Rise and Legacy of the Olmecs