La Venta, of the Lost Kingdoms of Central America

     After watching BBC's "Lost Kingdoms of Central America," and reading an article titled "La Venta," by Rebecca Gonzalez, us as the audience have gotten lots of information on the Mesoamericans and their history and background. 

    The Youtube video is about Jacob Cooper, an archaeologist, who explores the rise and fall of the forgotten civilizations. He travels to where the Olmecs settlement used to be thousands of years ago. Cooper talks about the Olmecs and how "no other emerging mesoamerican civilization had an elite class as privileged as the Olmec rulers (Cooper 12:40 - 13:30). 

A map of Mesoamerica

An Olmec head (One of the 17 heads)

The Olmecs and the resources needed to survive

    Also on the topic of the Olmecs was the article, which stated that "the socio-political organization of the La Venta Olmec has not been clearly defined. It is apparent that this society comprised an elite sector, a wide range of specialists - farmers, fishermen, sculptors, architects, and engineers - and a large labor force." (Gonzalez 13).

    Both the video and the article bring up the topic of the Olmecs going from the outerland oceans to the inland swamps and rivers. The types of food they grew inland included maze, beans, and squash, which according to Cooper, "provided everything a human needs to live," when eaten together (Cooper 7:10-7:40). Gonzalez's article goes much more into detail about the different types food, explaining how there were remains of corn, beans, palm, nuts, deer, crocodile, turtle, dog, and a variety of fish bones and mollusks found at excavation sites (3).

    Cooper's video does not go into much detail about the types of animals the Olmecs had or lived around, but they did focus a lot on the Jaguar and what it meant to the Olmecs. Jacob Cooper described the statues of half man-half jaguar to represent a man turning into a beast, and to show dominance and power in the Olmec life.

Personal reflection

    I knew a lot of the information shown or written in the two pieces, as we've learned most about the heads and the jaguar statues in other videos during class. I personally really like how both the article and video were different in many ways, but both came together on the same topics to thoroughly describe each and every fact about the rise and the fall of the Olmecs in Mesoamerica.