Central Mound Complex

17.7522°N, 94.7560°W.

The Central Mound Complex at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán in southern Veracruz, Mexico, is the elevated ceremonial centre of the earliest known Olmec capital, occupied between approximately 1500 and 900 BCE. The complex sits on an artificial plateau that the Olmec built up by hauling tens of thousands of cubic metres of earth and clay onto a natural rise above the floodplain of the Coatzacoalcos River. The plateau supports more than 200 mounds and structures, of which the Central Mound is the largest. San Lorenzo is the find-spot of ten of the seventeen known Olmec colossal heads — basalt portraits of rulers weighing up to 24 tonnes, transported 80 km from the Tuxtla Mountains by water and overland. Excavations by Matthew Stirling, Michael Coe, and Ann Cyphers since the 1940s have established San Lorenzo as the founding centre of Mesoamerican monumental sculpture.

The Central Mound Complex is the artificial platform of the city where carved-stone rulership in the Americas was first invented.