The Americas Blog Response

This week I looked at Chanel and Katie's blogs.

Chanel gave some information on the origin of the name Olmec that I found very interesting. She said "The name Olmec means 'rubber people' in Nahuatl. It was the Aztec name for the people who once lived in this area, and extracted latex from rubber trees. The word Olmec also refers to the rubber balls, used for the ancient ball game." I hadn't realized that rubber was so important to them before this.

I also really liked this modern Olmec-inspired interior picture that she found:

Katie had written some extra information on the giant stone heads that I didn't know. She said "The Olmec stone heads represented rulers of the time and surrounded the temple area. These 40-50 ton boulders were found in the jungle and the helmets they seem to be wearing are similar to the helmets worn in the ballgame invented by the Mesoamerican people." She also posted a video that talked about how these boulders were considered to be a throne initially and then reused once a new ruler came about to carve their face into the throne. That's really interesting because I hadn't realized that it looked like they were wearing helmets and I also had no idea that they used them as thrones or that they recarved them each time.

Here's the picture she posted that shows how the head looks like it's wearing a helmet.

You can also click here to go to her blog post that contains the video I mentioned above.