Long before more famous empires such as the Maya, a civilisation called the Olmec were building an impressive legacy. Commonly referred to by experts as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica ...

To this point, expeditions throughout Mesoamerica had only found much smaller traces of liquid mercury at one Olmec and two Mayan sites. Excavations in the early 1900s uncovered mica all around ...

Historians consider the Olmec civilization the mother culture of Mesoamerica. The civilization thrived in the present-day ...

Mesoamerica: During the 5th and 6th centuries BC, the ancient Olmec civilization was coming to an end in Mexico. At the about same time, the Mayan civilization was rapidly expanding in Honduras ...

The Tuxtla statuette, discovered in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1902, now resides in the National Museum of Natural History. Donald E. Hurlbert / Dept. of Anthropology, NMNH In 1902, an Indigenous man ...