Tres Zapotes

Tres Zapotes is a Mesoamerican archaeological site located in the south-central Gulf Lowlands of Mexico in the Papaloapan River plain.

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 10 km (6 mi) to the east stands Cerro el Vigía, an extinct volcano and important source of basalt and other volcanic stone, sandstone, and clay.

[3] 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.

[10] However, recent scholarship instead highlights "their descent from a common ancestor, the Olmec culture, with some sharing of motifs and techniques in an evolving co-tradition".

Although the Classic era, starting roughly 300 CE, saw continued mound construction and Tres Zapotes remained a regional center, the era nonetheless brought a perceptible decline in Tres Zapotes' fortunes, as the centers of the new Classic Veracruz culture grew in prominence and size.

This date, 7.16.6.16.18, correlates in our present-day calendar to September 3, 32 BCE, although there was some controversy over the missing baktun, the first digit, which Marion Stirling, Matthew's wife, had contended was a '7'.

This equidistant spacing likely reflects a decentralized political structure, each mound group the creation of a separate faction within Tres Zapotes society.

[16] At La Venta three of the four colossal heads were grouped together at the entrance to the ceremonial precinct while the fourth was at the edge of the large central plaza.

Tres Zapotes appears in Graham Hancock's 1995 pseudo-archeological and pseudo-historical book Fingerprints of the Gods, featuring hypothesises on the origin of the Olmecs.