The Abandoned Megalithic City - The Last Refuge of the Olmecs - Megalithomania - YouTube

It's amazing to be here at the actual site of Tres Zapotes. This is well off the tourist trail. So this is the first Olmec head discovered originally in 1862. This was the beginning of the uncovering of the Olmec civilization. This is an incredible piece. This would have been like the ultimate mega stelae. Hey, megalithomaniacs. Here we are at the museum of Tres Zapotes in Veracruz, Mexico. Amazing pieces they have here, including a colossal Olmec head. The first one ever discovered first reported in 1862. The site is amazing. It's about a mile north of here. This will be moved here. Now they're actually reconstructing it at the moment in February, 2025. It's always a pleasure to come to the Olmec heartland and we're going to go inside and see what we can see. We're going to get some good footage for you. We're going to analyze some of the artifacts and statues and we're going to get some scans. So let's go in and take a look. So this is the first Olmec head discovered originally in 1862 by Joseph Maria Malgar. Now this was a discovery that was kind of mentioned. It wasn't really researched again until 1925 by Franz Bohm and Olivier Lafarge. He wrote a book about their travels through this whole part of the world. They actually found many different Olmec sites and different artifacts and statues, even other colossal heads at La Venta and other places. It wasn't until 1939 that the remarkable researcher, the archeologist Matthew Sterling and his team came here on a hunch on a kind of report from these early excavations, these early discoveries and actually found this just top of the head sticking out the ground. And this was the beginning of the uncovering of the Olmec civilization of ancient Mexico. And this was before the Maya. There has been some damage to this particular head. You can see the eye, the nose. There's a crack coming down this side and this was buried facing the way it is now. Well, many of the Olmec heads were like decommissioned. They were lying on their back. They had potholes carved out of them like we see at San Lorenzo. But this particular one, even though it's not one of the biggest ones is very impressive with the detail with the carving technique and the fact that it's a very hard type of Basalt conglomerate. It's hard to see clearly, but this has braids lines coming down the back of it. Hard to see it. Cause you need like kind of angled light really to see things clearly. This piece here is fascinating. This was discovered in 1925 and we'll have a close look at this in a second, but this is one of the pieces that you'd find at the base of the pyramids, the earth and pyramids kind of slotted in. So they would face you on either side of the steps as you climbed up. Now we've seen Tres de Potos site itself. We're also seeing El Negro the other one of these, but in fact, there's probably several more that have been discovered. This has got a very unusual kind of feature. It's got like a headdress. It's got like an open mouth, probably a weird Jaguar mouth with arms down the side and the kind of curved C feature here as well with the eight, almost like an H on the front. So this is fascinating. It's beautifully carved, but it's quite damaged. So you imagine this sticking out the side of the pyramid, probably a few feet up in the air, uh, as you approach and as you climb up for the ceremonies that would have taken place there. And it does remind me, there are actually things like this. You find in Egypt as well, the same kind of principle where they're like slotted in to the actual pyramids or the different temples themselves. Very unusual. The heads looking up, it's got like a headdress on it. And then you have this elongated part going along the back there. It makes me wonder if these, it's so smoothed off here. It makes me wonder if these were kind of like used for something as well. You know, maybe after they had been used in the pyramid itself, but just that you can see the eyes on here, you can see this kind of incredible headdress that kind of comes down the side. It could be hair, but the detail in this is incredible. And it's the same kind of stone, different type of basalt with the sort of speckles in it that we find on the second head that was found that's in Santiago Tuxtla museum. It's also the same type of stone as El Negro. So these could have been a pair. This one was probably at the base of a pyramid protruding out the bottom with some kind of channel kind of carved out of this piece of rock, more cylinders and other pieces that are difficult to put in context like this one here as well. So this is a very strange piece. This is actually a two part piece, which we'll have a look at the second part in a moment, but it's actually a kind of head. If you actually look carefully, we've got to, we just got described this by the manager here who let us in thankfully, even though they're kind of rebuilding the whole site, but there are a couple of eyes there and then thought to be some kind of nose, but they say if you turn it upside down, you have eyes again and you can actually see if you look on the bottom there, if you imagine that's upside down. So you've got a face on top of the face on bottom. Then it had this thing wrapped around it, which we'll go and have a look at now, uh, which has got acoustic properties. In fact, if you knock on this thing and they let us do this, you can hear acoustics, but much more so on the second piece that comes with it, you can almost see the arms on it there on the back. So it's kind of sort of semi-humanoid anthropomorphic figure. JJ is like, you see that they're working the site, they're reconstructing it, they're rebuilding everything. We actually go over here. There's a second part to it. So this would have been kind of almost wrapped around it. Now we've been here before. We've kind of talked about the acoustic properties of this on previous visits, but this would have been like part of that statue, like a second part attached to it. Then with acoustic properties is really interesting. This is the second part of the statue we just saw over there. It's almost like something you'd wrap around to get a kind of, uh, knocking effect. You can see the gap here. It's almost like they would knock together and create this acoustic effect. Now we were okay. They said we could knock on it. We have all different frequencies happening on this particular stone. Absolutely amazing. And it kind of has this acoustic property. This is a very dark basal, but it's a very unusual piece. I mean, it's so huge and it was attached to a second piece. It's kind of, it looks like it's broken off. So it would have been one really bizarre kind of large statue, but it had acoustics associated with it. So I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm not sure what it means, but I just find it incredibly fascinating that we have this here. So this is a really important stone in the Olmec world. This is the second part of a larger stone, which you can see here. The bottom part was found in 1939 by Matthew Sterling and it showed a date kind of going backwards in time, but the dot here and the rest of it were kind of missing. This was completely missing, but the dot was kind of carved out, but they predicted a date that could be much older than the Maya era. Originally just this is like four or 500 AD. But when they found the second part, 30 years later, this part here and put it together, they realized in 1969 that it actually showed a date going back to the 3rd of September, 32 BC, which was the oldest known date carved anywhere in Mexico at the time. Although there are dates now that are slightly older than that in some other straight and some other stones, other pieces, other artifacts that have been found. So this is a really important part of Olmec history. And even on the back, we have some amazing carvings as well. All carved around. You can kind of see the humanoid figure just about. It's hard to see. There's not, the light isn't great. You can actually see an image of it here. So the Olmecs really were the inventors of the long count calendar. The one that began in 3,114 BC and ended on December the 21st, 2012. So Stella A is huge and impressive. Now we'll look at that in a second, but look, let's look at this image first because this is the top of it. It's still like 25 feet tall. You've got like an Olmec head on the top. Then you have other features coming down. You have two figures, three figures in fact, standing there, like part of the Stella. Then at the bottom, you've got another what looks like an Olmec type of head with fangs and a kind of strange bullet shape on it. And then down the sides of it as well, we have other things which we'll have a look at, but look at this. I mean, look at the size of this. This is just seriously megalithic. So this is Stella A and it's massive. It is the biggest stone I think found at Tres Sapotes. You've got a human face kind of here, like a weird Jaguar face, perhaps with fangs coming down from it. You can see sort of shapes on it a little bit here. You've got three human figures, one of them in high 3D relief, perfect 3D, others low relief. You've got serpents and other animals coming down the side. As we saw in the image, you've got other features coming up here. Then it kind of turns into like a Olmec head on top here. And so there's so much going on here and there's, there's other, other things. I mean, imagine what this would have looked like when it was, when it was new, it would have been quite something, but it's been very badly weathered. It's been damaged kind of pretty much beyond repair. And you've got other features, arms, someone else coming down the side here. This is an incredible piece. This would have been like the ultimate mega stelae. Now we know there's some like this at La Venta as well, but this one is particularly impressive. So here's some other pieces from Tres Sapotes and some beautiful Jade. Look at these amazing, stunning pieces from have been discovered here. These are gorgeous. Lots of little ceramic heads, some with Olmec features, others not. So we have this kind of strange dumbbell and a plate and more pottery here, all discovered that and around Tres Sapotes and that's got an interesting face carved on it. We have some other fascinating pieces over here. This is a huge disc, which is that was actually found, I believe behind Stella C and this, I've seen the original photos of this and you find this with many of the large and most important Stella. You actually find these kind of behind it or in front of it as part of the sort of ceremonial area. We saw some of these at the San Lorenzo museum. There's been new ones discovered actually not far from here in Chiapas where they're about 1.4 meters wide, probably about the same width as this. They've got beautiful Olmec carvings on this kind of anthropomorphic piece like a mixture of different animals. We have this beautiful Stella here. So this is Monument D from Tres Sapotes. This is pretty amazing. It's not very big. I mean it's about my height. This is a Jaguars kind of head or mouth with three people emerging from it. You can see the figures here all up and down there. They're holding staffs and different things. It's got like a step at the base with the kind of weird Jaguar or Jaguar head kind of mouth open and around the back, not much on the back. So it probably would have been faced, faced against a wall or something. And then we have other features down here. We have kind of like a serpentine kind of spiral different features. It's quite remarkable. So we've got a few broken pieces from Tres Sapotes here on display. This one's interesting. Look at this. This is like green stone. It could be nephrite. I don't think it's jade, but it's got like a zigzag pattern coming all the way down the side there. Can you see that? Then you have a kind of worn basal one there or a rough basal one and several others. It's pretty, these have all been broken, but at least they've been preserved and saved from total destruction. So here we have a kind of gentleman looking up to the sky. This is actually a La Venta style thing. Really. We see these more at La Venta. Also this is not dissimilar to some of the artifacts that have been found at Gobekli Tepe. Very similar style. Now, just a coincidence, I'm sure this is like the Tiki style, which again, we find in the Pacific and other places. But yeah, this is thought to be a kind of sacred posture, like the quizzo position perhaps, or holding the navel. We're just down in the garden, the Tres Sapotes museum. And you can see some very beautiful pieces of natural basal here. This is probably what they were standing the basal columns up in. And you can see some nice examples here, very similar to what we saw at La Venta where there was some kind of ceremonial center where the basal columns were all placed upright or whether it was actually some, one of the megalithic tombs is unclear at this point. So it's amazing to be here at the actual site of Tres Sapotes. This is well off the tourist trail. Although we did come here with our Olmec Megalithomania group in 2016 over in the distance there, you can see the main Tuxla mountains where all pretty much the basal that constructed the Olmec sites came from. Just over here, we have a mound group here at Tres Sapotes. This is the most northerly area of the site and it looks like one of the plazas can't get the car up here because terrain won't allow it. So I'm taking a walk. I'll get this in the drone shot as well. You can see these raised areas are all part of a Northern mound group or plaza here at Tres Sapotes. You can just see the raised area there just over there, behind there, the brown sort of area. That's actually a mound. So this looks like one of the three plazas that was built here at Tres Sapotes. So we're just walking North through Tres Sapotes and there's another mound just here on the left. Here's another mound. It's got crops all over it. Another one just here. So this is, these are all part of the original Tres Sapotes ancient Olmec complex. So we have more mounds all around us here going in all directions. All part of the Tres Sapotes on one here, Tuxla mountains in the background. Down there in the distance, in all the bush, you can see further mounds. It looks like a very large cut stone just on the route heading North in Tres Sapotes with a big mound just behind this crop here. This whole area would have been cultivated by the Olmecs just down here. I think we're actually on a raised area here, like a platform. One of three supposedly at the site, which represented three different kind of ruling elite at three different times, apparently according to archeological research. So we have these stones here all around like the base of this particular platform. These could have been construction stones. You can see these huge ones here. This is like a massive, massive piece of basal and here as well. You kind of got an edge to it. You can see that and then that's the kind of platform going up behind it and around there you can kind of see a line of stones going off over to where that yellow carton is in the ground, which appears to be on the edge of some kind of platform. I wonder if this is part of the archeological excavation and you can see strangeness on that stone there carvings. So this route we're walking on is actually being cut through an earthwork. One of the efforts pulling the mate, one of the plazas, but so I wouldn't be surprised if we see little bits of stone or pottery here. All along there you've got a whole line of like a platform, like a megalithic platform here at Tres Sapotes. It looks like it was part of the construction and that continues where we just walked along in a straight line all the way down to near where the car is parked. And you can see the platform from here. You see, so this kind of looks like carvings on some of the stones there continues over in that direction. Someone's built a kind of well here to get their water from and to feed the cows. But that is really interesting that we have that just at the base of this particular earthwork. So just in front of us is one of the main mounds in the Southern end of Tres Sapotes and it's quite huge. It's probably 30 feet high. There are other ones in this area, but this is the main one. We climbed up here before when we were here in 2016 with our group, Brian Forrester and a whole bunch of other people. It's amazing. You can see it's even got terracing on it. This is like a pyramid mound here at Tres Sapotes. And last time I walked through the bush was at Laguna de los Cerros a couple of years ago and boy did I get bitten. So I'm hoping these same ticks and bugs aren't here this time kind of hoping for the best. But yeah, look at that. Isn't that amazing? So we just finished our trip looking around Tres Sapotes and in the museum here. Amazing artifacts. Let me know what you think in the comments and we're going to continue exploring Olmec land and we'll see you next time. Megalithomaniacs.