Old Piles of Words Because the word is mightier than the stone.

OLMECS! Visit to La Venta

After completing our Mayan Marathon, we decided to go back to the roots, and take a look at the Olmec site of La Venta, in the State of Tabasco. My generation, at least in the French-speaking world, probably remembers the Olmecs as one of the great civilizations encountered in the Mysterious Cities of Gold... their gigantic carved heads, with spooky eyes and strange helmets, were something we did not want to miss !

La Venta, which rose as one of the most important cities in Meso-America between 400 BC and 900 CE, is now a relatively insignificant small town 120 km away from Villahermosa, near the Gulf of Mexico.  The site itself was threatened by oil-drilling in the area in the 1950s, and most of the artifacts were moved to an open-air museum in the city of Villahermosa. We thus started our Olmec day by admiring the original carvings at Villahermosa, then hopped on a bus La Venta itself, where copies of the sculptures were placed in their (more or less) original locations on the site, and where you can see a few "smaller" finds inside a museum.

The massive carved heads are of course the highlight of the sites. Olmec sculpture is astonishing for the sheer size of the rocks that it was carved on, and, as some stones were even left uncarved, some speculate that the show of power did not come from the magnificence of the sculpture (as in many Mayan sites that we went to) but from the imposing presence of the stone itself, which had to be carried for miles and miles from quarries in the distant mountains, bearing in mind that the Olmecs apparently did not have the wheel and did not use beasts of burden.

The Olmecs are considered to be a mother to later Meso-American civilizations, and we did see a lot of familiar elements in the art, such as the ubiquitous jaguar (signs in museums always say that everything is a depiction of a jaguar, even if it looks like three lines and a dot), people emerging from caves/the underworld,  or the first feathered serpent encountered in America. But we were also impressed by several features of the sculptures that we had not seen anywhere else, such as figures carrying babies or small children, and stelae depicting rulers surrounded by flying deities reminiscent of angels in medieval European art.

In La Venta itself, we climbed what a sign said was the first pyramid known in Mesoamerica AND also the biggest during its time (kind of logical)... We don't know; we've seen too many of the "biggest pyramids" on this trip! Still, we were very impressed by our encounter with the Olmecs.

We finished off the day with a delicious meal at a small restaurant in the town of La Venta. As we were in Tabasco, we didn't forget to sample the salsa picante. I must confess though, that I could only make it through 'poco picante' and 'picante': my mouth, tongue and tastebuds had been completely burnt before I could get to 'muy picante' and 'extra picante'. And as you'll see in the pictures, Mexicans have their Chimay too!

Oh, and in case you didn't notice, if you thought the end of the Maya Marathon meant the end of the ruins, you were WRONG!

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