Kingdom of the Jaguar Lost Kingdoms of Central America

This cave in southern Mexico was once thought to lead to

the underworld, where the spirits of the long-dead resided.

It's thought that this painting of a powerful figure

dressed in jaguar skins is inspired by a culture 3,000 years old

who believed in the power of supernatural transformation

and of human-jaguar beasts, and who created some of the most

astonishing artworks in the Americas.

Arising out of the tropical wetlands of southern Mexico,

around 1,200 BC, they were one of

the first civilisations of the Americas.

They built the first pyramid

and the first planned city in this part of the Americas.

Devised one of the earliest known systems of writing.

Believed their rulers had supernatural powers.

And played one of the world's oldest ball games.

They are known as the Olmec, and they reached their height

over 1,000 years before the Maya and the Aztecs did.

My name is Jago Cooper.

I'm a specialist in the archaeology of the Americas.

In this series I will be exploring

the rise and fall of forgotten civilisations.

From the crystal-clear seas of the Caribbean

to the New World's most impressive pyramids.

Over the smoking volcanoes of Costa Rica

and deep underground in the caves of central Mexico.

I'll travel in the footsteps of these peoples

to reveal their secrets, to unearth the astonishing cultures that

flourished among some of the most dramatic landscapes in the world.

The Olmec were one of this continent's great civilisations.

But two millennia ago, they vanished.

This is a detective story.

One where fragments of art and archaeology have to be

pieced together to understand a people lost to time.

To understand how the Olmecs arose, how they ruled 3,000 years ago,

and why they created this astonishing art

is to understand the rise of civilisation itself.

In the 1940s,

archaeologists investigated rumours of a giant stone eye,

staring up out of the ground in the jungles of southern Mexico.

They were astonished by what they discovered.

They unearthed evidence of a highly-developed civilisation,

far older and more advanced than anyone had imagined.

Somehow, in the unforgiving tropics of Mexico,

an extraordinary culture arose and thrived.

The story begins a few miles from where the giant stone heads

were found, on the Gulf Coast of Mexico.

Legends of a lost people are part of local folklore here.

There's an old poem in the indigenous Nahuatl language

that tells of a legendary land of mist,

a place that is now forgotten, where once there was a civilisation.

But this environment of extremes obscured their story for centuries.

This is a swelteringly hot and humid part of the world,

prone to hurricanes and potential downpours.

Inland from here are endless expanses of swamps and jungles

and, in the wet season, half a metre of rain can fall in just a month.

The terrain can be flooded for miles around.

And so, it's not the sort of place you might imagine a civilisation

evolving, but this is where the story of the Olmec begins.

Humans first arrived in Mesoamerica, the narrow strip of land

connecting North and South America, over 12,000 years ago.

They were hunter-gatherers who fished

and foraged along the coastline.

But the network of rivers and lagoons drew them inland

in search of more sustenance.

Into the swamps and wetlands.

Into an environment that would change the way they existed.

As a result of the intense rainfall, the rivers and lakes here overflow.

It provides an effect that's similar to the Gift of the Nile.

The annual flood waters provide tonnes of fresh

silt along these river banks,

creating a fantastically fertile growing environment.

7,000 years ago, the river banks here, inland from the Gulf Coast,

were one of the first places in the Americas where maize was farmed.

It was a crop that transformed the lives of those first

hunter-gatherers, who gave up their nomadic existence

and started cultivating fields.

Sustained by a crop that could be harvested three times a year

in this region, gradually, between 4,000 BC and 3,000 BC,

the population of the Gulf Coast grew.

But the early Mesoamericans started growing more than just maize.

Crops that, in combination, did something quite remarkable.

These three plants of maize, beans and squash

have an incredibly complimentary effect

when they're grown together.

The maize is a hardy plant that can grow in tough conditions,

providing a nice, straight stalk.

The beans are a vine which grow around it,

fixing nitrogen in the soil.

And the squash grows around both,

providing these broad leaves that keep down weeds.

But what's perhaps more important is what's inside,

because these plants, when eaten together,

provide all of the sustenance that people need.

That diet of these, which are called the three sisters,

has provided the foundation

of Mexican diets for thousands of years.

This agricultural breakthrough,

an ability to grow all the sustenance needed to survive,

allowed the early predecessors of the Olmec to produce a food surplus.

The first building block in the rise of a civilisation.

It allowed villages and farming communities to develop.

And, by 1,500 BC, one settlement began to evolve

that was different from anything Mesoamerica had seen before.

And it's the first evidence we have of Olmec culture.

I'm now 25 miles inland from the Gulf Coast

to see if I can find traces of the first Olmec settlement.

But, this is a hugely challenging environment

to investigate anything in.

Low-lying land here floods during the rainy season

and the reed and mud-walled structures the Olmec built

have all rotted away.

But archaeologists have discovered that, in 1,200 BC,

this plateau, which rises 20 metres out of the wetlands,

was at the centre of the earliest Olmec settlement.

It's called San Lorenzo.

What's different about San Lorenzo is its sheer scale.

Archaeological surveys tell us that the site was over 700 hectares.

That's more than three square miles,

with a population of around 10,000 people.

There would have been houses grouped together,

split up by pools and streams.

Rafts and canoes navigating through these watercourses.

And, for as far as you can see,

there would have been well-irrigated fields packed with crops.

It was a boom town and no-one ever went hungry.

And it wasn't just the scale of San Lorenzo

that surprised archaeologists.

On the heights of the plateau, they unearthed something

that had never been seen before so early in Mesoamerican history.

I got a map of the plateau, made during the excavations of the site.

It marks their discoveries.

And beneath my feet are the remains of a structure

that was very different to the mud and thatched houses

that most Olmec lived in.

This one had stone foundations and massive columns.

Archaeologists think it's the first royal residence in Mesoamerica.

The excavation has been backfilled to protect the structure.

It was called the Red Palace,

and it occupied the very heart of San Lorenzo.

Around this Red Palace were the lower status residences

and, below them, further down the slopes,

you found the labourers and the farmers.

It's that classic realisation of a stratified society with

the elite people literally higher, looking down on everyone else.

San Lorenzo was controlled from here.

And this kind of centralised social organisation

is a hallmark of civilisation.

No other emerging civilisation in Mesoamerica

had an elite class as privileged as the Olmec rulers.

And they made their mark on society in a very striking way.

These are the colossal Olmec heads,

and they're three-dimensional representations of individuals.

Ten of them were found on a processional way leading

up to the Red Palace at San Lorenzo.

It's thought that they're rulers or heroes.

But the way they're carved, using stone tools,

displays an exquisite level of craftsmanship.

There is no clue to their names, or when they lived and died,

but what makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up is

the realisation that these could be the actual faces of the Olmec elite.

To have had such impressive sculpture dedicated to them

is testimony to their status.

And it begs the question,

what was it that made these individuals so special?

For people to accept a ruler to sit above them,

to control their lives, there has to be something really

ingrained in their imagination, their psyche, to make it acceptable.

So, were the Olmec doing this willingly or were

they forced to do so?

Evidence for why the Olmec elite were so revered by their people

can be seen in other sculptures unearthed near San Lorenzo.

It suggests that the rulers occupied an almost supernatural role.

Roberto Nuno Gomes is an archaeologist

based here at the Xalapa Museum in Veracruz.

He has been studying the art of the Olmec

and its meaning for over 20 years.

This group of statues were all excavated

together near San Lorenzo and form a tableau, or scene.

It shows two Olmec figures crouching before two jaguars.

There is a huge volume of Olmec art dedicated to illustrating

their rulers' ability to assume the power of the jaguar.

To become half human, half beast, or were-jaguar.

They would have been seen daily by the Olmec people

at sites like San Lorenzo. A public display of power.

This sculpture shows a ruler in mid-transformation,

turning into a jaguar before our very eyes.

The infant in this greenstone figure also hints at lineage,

the passing down of power within the elite. Inherited legitimacy.

The public art suggested that the leaders possessed

supernatural powers, their rituals and ceremonies

seemed to have reinforced that impression yet further.

This exquisite face is made of solid jadeite, a rare greenstone,

and was worn as a mask.

These masks directly link their wearer to the successful harvest,

a fundamental aspect of Olmec society.

Key to deciphering Olmec belief systems and the status of their

leaders is the understanding that the elite were viewed as different.

They were thought to have a special relationship

with powerful beasts and supernatural forces.

Their power, the Olmec believed,

created the conditions for fertile soils and an abundant food supply.

This is an altar stone or throne found in one of

San Lorenzo's public plazas.

The elite would have stood or sat cross-legged on top

during ceremonies, and here you can see what we think

are footholds to let them climb up on top.

At the front, we see a figure, cross-legged,

half in and half out of a cave or portal,

representing the transition between this world and another dimension.

This object encapsulates the spectacle with which the elite

could enthrall the public and demonstrate their ability

to communicate with the spiritual world.

Through public and ceremonial art, the Olmec were expressing a shared

belief system, one that kept their social structure and order in place.

This is another defining element of civilisation.

The process of creating all this monumental stone sculpture

tells us even more about them.

The craftsmanship required to carve it is one thing,

but acquiring the stone is quite another.

There is no source of rock or quarries

in the Olmec marshland around.

The heads are made of volcanic basalt rock

and the nearest source lies 40 miles northwest of San Lorenzo

at a place called Llano Del Jicaro.

We're just entering into the foothills

of the Tuxtla Mountains, and this is the first outcrop of basalt

that you find near San Lorenzo.

So somewhere around here is meant to be the quarry where we know

lots of stone monuments of the Olmec at San Lorenzo were made.

Hidden in this dense bushland,

are hundreds of boulders of volcanic basalt rock.

So, here, you can start to see some of the bigger basalt boulders

and, standing on this, you feel like you could be

standing on the top of one of those Olmec heads.

Olmec labourers weren't just digging the boulders out of the ground

here, they were beginning the process of shaping them.

You can see how this boulder is starting to be shaped.

You get these corners which have been hacked out

into a humanly created form.

Three, four vertical edges creating a square shape.

Ready to be transformed into a piece of Olmec art.

The boulders were being preformed here,

and part of an organised supply line of the raw material required

for a huge volume of public art.

This is a 3,000 year-old quarrying site, and the sheer extent of work

going on here shows how important stone working was to the Olmec.

Between here and San Lorenzo is a swampy, riverine landscape

over which Olmec labourers would have had to transport

10-20 tonne boulders using rafts, log rollers

and sheer brute strength.

It's been estimated that it would have taken 1,500 men

three to four months to transport

a preformed colossal head from here to San Lorenzo.

The effort involved in immortalising members of the elite tells us

how strongly the Olmec must have believed in their leaders' ability

to influence nature and provide for the people.

But the Olmec weren't just immortalising themselves in stone.

Stored in an air-conditioned facility

in the Museum of Santiago in the Tuxtla Mountains

is an astonishing and very rare set of artefacts

that I'm getting extremely privileged access to examine.

As far as Olmec artworks go, they're one of a kind.

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

And they offer another fragment of evidence to help us

understand Olmec belief systems.

These exquisite faces and heads have been carved from wood,

a material that would normally have rotted away.

But these were discovered, preserved,

in the mud of a bog near San Lorenzo.

These objects have been really beautifully made.

You can see some of the cut marks from some of the tools and then

these faces have been polished down to a really fine level.

But because they were waterlogged, some of them

have been crushed during the time of being in the bog,

so you get these quite distorted faces.

It's incredibly rare to find wooden artefacts like this

in the Olmec region but, in reality, these wooden objects,

these organic materials, would have made up a huge part of

the everyday objects that the Olmec would have used.

But, unlike the colossal stone heads,

these wooden representations of the Olmec weren't for public display.

Instead, they were deliberately thrown into the waters of the bog.

They were cast in as an offering to the spirit world.

In the Olmec realm of swamps, lagoons

and rivers that surrounded San Lorenzo, water was everywhere.

Their sacred jaguars hunted in it.

It made their crops grow, so had life-giving power.

And so springs and pools were sacred places.

This is an ancient volcanic crater lake

and locals believe this water to be bottomless.

To the Olmec, bodies of water like this were entrance ways to the

underworld and to break its surface

is to enter into another dimension.

This underworld was where the Olmec believe their ancestors resided.

By casting objects like the wooden heads into a lake like this

or a watery bog, they were making offerings to them.

This practice tells us that the

Olmec worshipped their ancestors and that by remembering them,

they empowered and legitimised their civilisation.

Other artefacts recovered from these Olmec underworlds have made

it possible to see even more clearly how sophisticated their society was.

Archaeologist, David Morales Gomez, is responsible for the care

of thousands of artefacts found in this region.

But at this storage facility,

his team look after a set of unique items.

These spheres are made of solid rubber and along with the

wooden busts, were made as offerings to the underworld, 3,500 years ago.

This is the first time that these balls have ever been filmed

or seen on television

and they represent something much more than just an offering.

This is one of the earliest rubber balls in the world.

It dates to 1,600 BC.

People were using rubber in the Americas over 3,000

years before it was introduced into Europe.

And the Olmec were playing one of the world's first sports.

This example is the start of an incredibly important

tradition here in the region, the Mesoamerican ball game.

The Mesoamerican ball game was still being

played in Mexico in the 1970s when this footage was shot.

The object was to keep the ball in play,

moving it in the air at all times using your hips or arms.

But for the Olmec, it served a greater purpose than just sport.

Incredible.

So this is one of the largest rubber balls and very,

very difficult to conserve, but it gives you a sense of the scale

of this sport and this would have been used as one of the balls

played between two people in one of these ball courts,

bouncing it from side to side,

but the weight of the ball must have left some serious bruising

on the hips and shoulders which they would have been using to play with.

But it's amazing.

The legacy of the Olmec ball game can be seen today in modern

Mexico, where the ritual of ball sport remains just

as much a part of society as it was 3,000 years ago.

The rubber balls really represent the earliest sport in

the Americas, but sport is crucial, I think, to any society.

Within the Olmec, we start to see the origins of that sport

play out, because as societies grow, as populations grow,

we need other people to represent us,

represent our communities and that is what football teams do,

they represent communities, regions, countries even.

And so the Mesoamerican ball game is

so much more than just a sport, it's a mechanism for playing

out relationships between communities, between city states.

In some ways, it allows individuals to live vicariously through

those who represent them.

I've been invited to represent a local team.

We don't know if the Olmec just played among themselves

or against neighbouring societies, but later,

Mesoamerican cultures used the ball game as a form of proxy warfare.

As there is very little evidence that the Olmec were ever engaged in

military conflict, it may have been that to them, their ball game

was a means of resolving disputes as well as a ritual spectacle.

WHISTLE BLOWS

The development of organised sport within Olmec society has led

to an even greater appreciation of how

sophisticated their civilisation was.

When you take in the complexity of Olmec art,

their spiritual beliefs and social organisation, you really do

have to remind yourself that this was happening 3,000 years ago.

Yet in 900 BC,

the Olmec raised their culture to even greater heights, by planning

and building a new city, one that put San Lorenzo in the shade.

The Olmec chose a site 30 miles northeast of San Lorenzo

for the city, at a place called La Venta.

And they built it from scratch to a very specific design.

Like at San Lorenzo, at La Venta we have these complexes of low

earthen platforms and mounds, but what's different is

there has been careful urban planning at this site.

The whole cityscape sits exactly eight degrees

off a north/south axis.

We don't know why it's on this line,

but it tells us it was constructed this way deliberately.

But what dominates this city, is that.

This is a man-made pyramid.

Constructed from 100,000 cubic metres of clay,

it was the first pyramid in ancient Mexico...

..starting a tradition that would last 2,000 years.

Building it would have been a massive civic project

requiring thousands of labourers,

all of whom would have needed food and sustenance.

So this pyramid demonstrates that the Olmec were still

generating huge food surpluses from their rich flood plain farmlands.

It can be seen from miles around.

It's clear that by 900 BC,

the Olmec had become a supremely confident society.

Rebecca Gonzales has been the lead archaeologist

working at La Venta for the last 20 years.

It's a huge site, the first urban planned city in Mesoamerica.

It's a display of power, basically.

The whole architecture, the whole layout of the site,

it's telling you, we're here, we have the manpower,

we have the ideas and the architects and everything to do this.

One of the first things Rebecca did when she came here 20 years ago,

was to create a map of the city's layout.

This is the map.

It gives you a sense of the scale of the site, because if you look

at the scale, it's 200 metres,

it's running for almost more than a kilometre.

More than a kilometre. We're standing on the Acropolis

facing a four hectare plaza which was probably used for public

ceremonies and we cannot see the rest of the site

because it's covered with vegetation, but it has been mapped.

That gives you an idea that it would be hundreds,

maybe thousands of people who could fit into that plaza

in front of the pyramid, looking at the spectacle.

There must have been a big population here.

They estimate there might have been 10,000 people here.

You can absolutely see it.

It gives a sense of the urban environment

and the creation of an urban landscape.

You see so many things here that are continued on within wider

-Mesoamerican cultures for thousands of years.

-Yeah.

What percentage of this site do you think has been excavated

-scientifically?

-Not even 1%, not even 1%.

We have excavated very, very, very little.

Rebecca's map of the site not only gives a sense of scale,

but shows us how it was built to hold huge ceremonial gatherings.

Dozens of pieces of art have been found here,

some relating to or depicting Olmec rituals and ceremonies.

And one set of finds tells us that at La Venta, the Olmec were

making more extravagant ritual offerings than ever before.

Tonnes and tonnes of serpentine rock,

much of it shaped into beautiful axe heads,

was buried in a massive offering pit at the foot of the pyramid.

This huge pit that was dug between four and seven metres deep

and then rows of serpentine blocks were deposited

and these were placed...

As they were filling it up, covered up, these were placed there

and the massive offerings of these underground offerings of 1,000 tonnes

of serpentine, it's huge amounts of stone that was brought in.

Why do you think these offerings were taking place?

They are obviously probably one of the most important tools

that they used.

They were stone working people.

They were set up standing up like this or some were placed

pointing to north, south, east, west, like this.

Do you think they are making offerings to the rulers

of the site or do you think it's the rulers making

the offerings in order to show off their own wealth

and their ability to make these offerings?

It's again a show of power and a show of wealth and I like the idea

that the massive offerings are offerings to Mother Earth.

But serpentine rock isn't found anywhere near the Gulf Coast.

Just as the Olmec sought basalt rock for their colossal heads,

from La Venta, they were reaching out even further

to source serpentine.

-Where is this stone coming from?

-We think it comes from Oaxaca

which is in the western coast of Mexico.

How, we don't know, but they were brought in, yes.

There is a colossal amount of trade coming across hundreds of miles.

-Yes.

-It really says something about the importance of the site if you're

getting this extent of interaction across the whole of Mesoamerica.

Yeah.

From here at La Venta,

the Olmec were using the wealth they were generating from

their rich farmlands to trade across the length and breadth of Mexico.

But the cultures they encountered weren't as advanced as they were.

Archaeologists never like to use the term "first"

because you're always going to be proved wrong eventually.

But this is the first pyramid in Mesoamerica,

the first planned layout of a town.

But what's so special about this site, is just the way it

pulls in wealth from hundreds of miles away.

You find stone resources from Guatemala,

the central highlands of Mexico and Oaxaca.

But what I want to know, is how does this site, how does this

culture influence those regions hundreds of miles away?

I'm travelling 400 miles west of La Venta on a journey that

would have taken the Olmec the best part of a month on foot,

to a gap in the mountains that allows access between east

and west Mexico, called Chalcatzingo.

Situated in Mexico's central highlands, Chalcatzingo

was a trading post community that controlled

the flow of goods between east and west.

The Olmec came to this area to acquire serpentine.

They may have traded for it with agricultural produce,

perhaps with jaguar pelts and with rubber which could only have

been harvested from the Gulf Coast environment.

And certainly there is evidence that the rubber ball game

they seem to have originated, found its way here.

So this is a classic example of a Mesoamerican ball court.

Here in the middle is where the game would actually have been

played with maybe two to four players on each side of the team

and the rubber ball would have been bounced up and down this channel.

What's quite interesting about this particular ball court, is it has

these raised ramps.

From up here, you can get a picture of what this game

would have looked like.

An audience perhaps up on this hill,

looking down on the players, playing within this channel.

The rubber ball bouncing up and down but it's more than just

a relationship between the players and the spectators.

It's about the positioning of this court itself.

It's located in the heart of the ceremonial centre,

just metres from this stepped pyramid.

So it gives us a sense of how important the ball game is

within Mesoamerican society and if we think back to the rubber balls

we saw from Nahuati, 1,600 years before Christ,

this game is something that lasts within

Mesoamerica and Mesoamerican culture for thousands of years.

Tellingly, it seems the Olmec came here as influential traders

rather than military conquerors.

Yet it seems they had a profound impact here

and the evidence can be found carved into the mountainside.

Here you have these three feline figures,

maybe pumas or jaguars, but if you look at the mouth,

they are almost fantastical in the way they are represented.

Things like these cats, these feline figures,

they aren't indigenous to this area, so we're getting the sense

of iconography and art and ideas being brought into this region.

There are over 30 elaborate carvings in the rock here

at Chalcatzingo.

But did the Olmec, who came here, create them

or were they carved by the people of Chalcatzingo

themselves, having been inspired by Olmec iconography?

Archaeologists have spent years trying to find

clues in the details of the 2,500-year-old carvings

in an attempt to understand more about them.

There is El Rey, the King.

It's thought to be a cave entrance.

The cave is an entrance to the underworld where the ancestors are.

Travis Doering and Laurie Collins are currently conducting

a two-year study to document the monuments at Chalcatzingo.

This monument in particular shows a ruler who seems to be wielding the

same power over the elements that the Olmec elite claimed they had.

There is all kinds of iconography on here.

These are rain clouds here

and these are raindrops signifying that they can control the rain.

They're spread out across the whole panel.

They have control of the underworld where the ancestors

live and also the natural world.

But the evidence of Olmec iconography is

disappearing before their eyes.

You can see how much rock loss is happening and the cracking

and the defoliation of the stone.

We have air pollution, acid rain, tectonic activity.

This site is on the 100 most imperilled archaeological

sites on the World Monuments Fund list.

Luckily, Travis and Laurie have a 21st-century tool to help them.

This piece of kit is the latest in 3-D laser scanning technology.

In the past, archaeologists might have photographed or taken

a plaster cast of the carving,

but now we can record it in a far more accurate way.

It shoots out a beam, the beam is returned to the

machine and it has an accuracy level of 2mm or less.

We're capturing 360 degrees, so we're really taking in a lot

of data all around us and then from here,

if we kind of zoom in on this, there is El Rey right in front of us.

What I've done is, I've gone in and highlighted all of the carved areas.

The detail on the carved figure suddenly pop out.

Those three clouds and the raindrops coming down,

it completely pulls it out.

We're seeing new things, basically.

It makes it look almost like a piece of art rather than being

part of the landscape.

The resolution you're getting on these images is just exceptional.

To what extent does that pull out different iconography and help

you interpret it and understand some of the cultural links?

We can actually computationally examine how similar or

dissimilar things are.

We can say, yes, this site is like this site

because it's got this shared iconographic

representation on the carving

and it just speaks to the inter-relationships that were

going on at this time period.

Stylistically, you can see connections

between this rock art and all across the Gulf Coast

and the Olmec art land.

These scans not only preserve a visual record of the carvings

but help us see them much more vividly.

They must have been a truly awe-inspiring sight to people

here 2,500 years ago.

But the Olmec weren't in control at Chalcatzingo.

This isn't an Olmec ruler, it's a local one.

Detailed studies of these carvings have shown them

to be inspired by the Olmec but distinct to this region.

It appears that the rulers of the developing culture in this

region were between 800 and 500 BC,

adopting the elite iconography of the Gulf Coast Olmec to

justify their own claims to power and prestige.

And that spread of Olmec iconography doesn't just end here.

Across Mesoamerica,

archaeologists have found examples of local communities

and emerging civilisations imitating Olmec style imagery as far

west as the Pacific Coast and south into modern day Guatemala.

But one of the most extraordinary can be found in Oaxaca

near the Pacific Coast of Mexico...

..in a place that 2,500 years ago would have been desperately

hard to get to.

And even today, it's not easy.

These caves are sacred places that chime with the Olmec view

that water pools and fissures in the earth are entrance ways into

the underworld, a portal into another dimension.

By the looks of it, this cave was being used by people centuries ago.

Down here, you can see a skeleton that has been fossilised over time.

Now it's turned into this mineral remnants of what was once there

but here you can see the femur,

the leg bone coming up into the pelvis,

a vertebrate going right up to the cranium at the top and over time,

you can see the bones have become mineralised,

covered in this calcified deposit

that has come down from the water dripping down from the ceiling.

We know it's old but it's impossible to date.

It gives us a sense that people have been coming here for a very

long time, right here into the heart of the cave.

But this is not what I came here to find.

I have to go further, nearly a mile down into this cave network.

And the deeper I go, the less oxygen there is.

And this can make you feel light-headed, euphoric

and nauseous at the same time.

OK, here it is.

This cave painting or pictograph has always been associated

with the Olmec.

It's of this powerful figure that you can see with this cape,

standing up with this red and yellow tunic.

What I really like, though, is the details on the cape,

the legs and the hands, the spotted yellow

and black coverings which are clearly jaguar pelts.

In the hands, holding some sort of rope, looking towards

a figure just down there, either cowed or bent down, sitting down.

This has been interpreted either as an evidence of power,

this powerful elite figure,

subjugating the poor little person next to them, or it's

of lineage, someone coming here to accept the power of their ancestry.

This is not a piece of public art.

It feels like this is an exclusive sacred place. Were future leaders

brought down into this underworld as part of an initiation ceremony?

Perhaps to be taught about the lineage, that they

were descended from the jaguar

and that this was justification for their status as a ruler.

You know, it's a bloody long way to get down to this cave.

Why are these people coming down here to see these paintings

on the walls?

It has a real sense of people coming to tap in with their ancestors

and understand the power of their culture.

1,000 years after the Olmec first began immortalising

and empowering their rulers as half man, half jaguar beings,

their ideas and iconography had filtered right across Mexico.

And by 500 BC, Olmec art,

sport and beliefs were spreading to the furthest corners of

Mesoamerica to influence the development

of other civilisations.

But back on the Gulf Coast,

the environment that had provided the Olmec with a stable

foundation for their complex society was beginning to change.

The Olmec had risen up,

thanks to their ability to produce a food surplus.

It had sustained a growing population and fed large workforces

as they undertook civic projects and created colossal stone artworks.

Their elite claimed that their supernatural power

made this possible.

But either gradually or quite suddenly, we simply don't know,

the vast farmlands of the Olmec ceased being productive.

There's an almost industrial scale of production clearing away

all the vegetation,

creating these huge fields reliant on irrigation channels.

But that process of clearance leads to soil erosion that silts up those

irrigation channels and creates huge problems with production.

In some ways, the reasons for the rise of La Venta

also sows the seeds of its destruction.

By 400 BC, La Venta had been abandoned

and the demise of the city meant the demise

of the Olmec elite themselves.

It was their claimed ability to influence natural forces that

had maintained them in positions of privilege and prestige.

But in the face of failing crops, even famine,

the Olmec elite at La Venta may well have been overthrown.

This idea about La Venta tells us

a fundamental truth about civilisation.

I think that the Olmec allowed themselves to be ruled.

It's the people who keep their rulers in place

and if those rulers fail, they can be overthrown,

but this wasn't the end of the Olmec civilisation,

they rebuilt and entered a new phase.

400 BC to 100 AD marked a period of adaptation for the Olmec.

They reverted back to living in smaller spread out settlements.

And although they stopped creating colossal

heads in honour of their elite, the Olmec still produced works of art.

They also developed a new way of communicating.

I returned to the Xalapa Museum to see one last truly

fascinating Olmec artefact that dates to the final

phase of Olmec civilisation in the first century AD.

This is the La Mojarra Stela.

The stone not only features a carving of a remarkable

figure in a headdress, it's also covered in hundreds of symbols.

Archaeologist, Lourdes Budar,

believes these represent another first for the Olmec.

Although the leaders aren't being immortalised by colossal

heads or depicted as supernatural beings,

the Olmec still clearly maintained a ruling elite.

Attempts at translating what the symbols actually say has

provoked heated debate.

But the carvings represent a hugely significant

feature of cultural development.

The power of the written word as a mechanism of order and as a

device for recording a version of history is immense and symbolic.

If it's carved in stone, it's permanent, indisputable.

And perhaps the Olmec were trying to ensure that they weren't forgotten.

These Olmec must have known that they were a shadow of what

they had once been.

But whilst the Olmec civilisation faded from history,

their influence outlasted them.

When archaeologists discovered the colossal heads, sculptures

and carvings in the jungles of the Gulf Coast of Mexico,

it was assumed they were Mayan.

But over the decades, archaeologists have begun to discover

and celebrate the uniqueness of Olmec culture and its antiquity.

And this has led to a series of startling discoveries

about the nature of the relationship between the Olmec and the Maya.

This is the Maya city of Comalcalco just inland from the Gulf Coast

and it lies only 50 miles east of the old Olmec centre of La Venta.

But this settlement was built in 500 AD,

1,000 years after La Venta had collapsed, and here, the Maya

constructed their monumental architecture using clay brick.

There are carvings on display depicting shared beliefs.

And it has large ceremonial plazas.

Walking through this plaza, I can't help but be reminded

of the Olmec site of La Venta,

because this plaza has the same earthen mounds

either side, the same demonstrations of public art

and at the end, this imposing, dominating pyramid.

There are dozens of pyramids in Mexico built by different

Mesoamerican cultures but the Olmec are credited for building the first.

The cultural innovations of the Olmec didn't disappear with them.

They weren't reinvented by the Maya.

City planning, the centralisation of economic and agricultural

resources, the creations of elite power and divine religion

and the affirmation of these through public art and ceremony.

These social institutions of the Olmec remained with the people

of this region, morphing through time to become

ever more sophisticated and complex.

Civilisation is a word that archaeologists have used to

differentiate between different stages of social development.

It certainly doesn't mean that the people who live in

civilisations are any more civilised than hunter gatherer societies,

but rather that they've undergone a set of key social transformations.

They can produce a food surplus,

they have a hierarchical social structure,

cities and an economic system are in place, they express shared

beliefs and ideas through art writing and ceremonial events.

These are all traits that we recognise today,

perhaps even take for granted.

But here in the Americas,

the Olmec developed these traits for the first time over 3,000 years ago.

For too long, the Olmec have lain dormant and it's

only now that the true power of their culture

can be fully understood.

The Olmec represent a turning point in human

development of the Americas and their legacy of urban planning,

sport, public art, complex social relationships

have lasted thousands of years down through the generations

and right up to the 21st century.