La Venta

La Venta is a modern city in the Mexican state of Tabasco and also the name of the great Olmec ceremonial center beside it. The city lies in the northwest of the state, 130 km west of the capital Villahermosa and about 2 km from the border with Veracruz. Its name comes from the late nineteenth century, when the town specialized in selling timber, la venta meaning the sale.

In 1925 the archaeologists Frans Blom and Olivier La Farge discovered the remains of a political and religious center, the most important ceremonial center of the Olmec culture, which flourished between 1000 BC and 400 BC. It reached its height between 1000 BC and 600 BC. The site rises on an island of only about 5.2 km² in the swampy region formed by the Tonalá river, though the ancient city is known to have covered 200 hectares. Its population is estimated at no fewer than 1,800 people.

At its center is a pyramid built of piled-up clay, 34 m high and 140 m in diameter, with a mass estimated at 99,000 m³. It is considered the oldest pyramid in Mesoamerica. It has no platform at the top, no stairway and no ramp, and its outer surface has ten indentations and ten projections, giving it the shape of a gelatin mold. The other buildings were mostly aligned on a north-south axis. They were platforms of earths, clays and sands, 3 to 4 metres high and at most 100 long, that carried perishable constructions of wattle and palm.

The large basalt stones were brought from the Tuxtlas mountains and used exclusively for monuments. La Venta has yielded the largest number of stone sculptures, among them four colossal heads, stelae and altars, as well as rich offerings of jadeite and pottery and massive offerings found nowhere else in the pre-Hispanic world. One notable basalt altar shows what is probably a shaman in elaborate dress, seated inside what seems to be a cave and gripping a rope. Such altars are believed to have been thrones used in important ceremonies, with the figure read as making contact with ancestors or receiving their help.

Oil changed the site. Large oilfields found nearby in the 1950s brought heavy petroleum activity, and the town began to spread over the archaeological zone. The writer and politician Carlos Pellicer therefore planned to move the colossal Olmec pieces to Villahermosa to save them, and the move took place in 1956 and 1957. Many Olmec pieces remain in the site museum. Today an oil refinery covers the whole southern end of the site, which has been largely demolished, making excavation there difficult or impossible.

La Venta is a monolithic statue in Huimanguillo Municipality, Mexico. Wikidata describes it as: town in Huimanguillo Municipality, State of Tabasco, Mexico. Dating: 800 BCE to 400 BCE. Elevation: 10 m. No English Wikipedia article exists for it; the full text below is the Spanish article "La Venta (Tabasco)", shown in the original language.