Seventeen known basalt heads from the Olmec centres of San Lorenzo, La Venta, Tres Zapotes and Rancho la Cobata on the Mexican Gulf coast, carved between roughly 1200 and 900 BCE, the largest over three metres tall and weighing upwards of twenty-five tonnes.
The archaeology
The basalt comes from the Tuxtla Mountains, some fifty to a hundred kilometres from the sites, and was moved without draft animals or the wheel. Each head wears a distinct headdress and has individual features, which is why they are read as portraits of specific rulers rather than as deities. Several were deliberately defaced or buried, which is its own unanswered question.
The diffusionist claim
The reading that the features are West African, and that the Olmec were therefore transatlantic visitors, predates Zecharia Sitchin by decades and is taken up in The Anunnaki Chronicles, where they become African gold miners brought over for the metal. Genomic studies of Indigenous American populations show no West African or Near Eastern component before the colonial period, and no metallurgy has been found at Olmec sites at all, which removes the mining motive. The heads remain among the most impressive transport problems in the Americas without needing anyone to have crossed an ocean.
Connections
The Anunnaki Chronicles · Zecharia Sitchin · Tiahuanaco · Teotihuacan · Lost Civilization Hypothesis · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Fingerprints of the Gods