Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Tres Zapotes
Summary
Tres Zapotes is a Mesoamerican archaeological site located in the south-central Gulf Lowlands of Mexico in the Papaloapan River plain. Tres Zapotes is sometimes referred to as the third major Olmec capital (after San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán and La Venta), but the Olmec phase is only a portion of the site's history, which continued through the Epi-Olmec and Classic Veracruz cultural periods.
The 2000-year existence of Tres Zapotes as a cultural center is unusual, if not unique, in Mesoamerica.
The site is located near the present-day village of Tres Zapotes, west of Santiago Tuxtla, Veracruz at the western edge of the Los Tuxtlas Mountains on the banks of the Rio Hueyapan (a small stream). The area is a transition point between the Los Tuxtlas Mountains and the Papaloapan River delta and allowed the inhabitants to take advantage of the forested uplands as well as the swamps and streams of the flatlands. Scarcely to the east stands Cerro el Vigía, an extinct volcano and important source of basalt and other volcanic stone, sandstone, and clay. The nearby small site of Rancho la Cobata, on the northern flank of Cerro El Vigía, may have functioned as a monument workshop – most of the basalt stonework at Tres Zapotes was crafted from the colossal, "spheroid", smooth-faced boulders found even today at the summit of Cerro El Vigía. Some of these boulders are more than 3 meters in diameter.
Founded some time in the centuries before 1000 BCE, Tres Zapotes emerged as a regional center early in the Middle Formative period, perhaps 900 - 800 BCE, roughly coinciding with the decline of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan. The earliest public architecture yet detected has been dated to the end of the Middle Formative, perhaps 500 BCE.
It is thought that the two colossal heads date from this period. It was near Tres Zapotes that the first colossal head was discovered in 1862 by José Melgar. To date, two have been found locally, labeled "Monument A" and Monument Q". Smaller than the colossal heads at San Lorenzo, they measure slightly less than high.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.