Global silver trade from the 16th to 18th centuries which China desired, so they traded silver to make up for their trade deficit. The two most important mining colonies of the Spanish Empire were Peru and Mexico, who were estimated to have provided one-hundred thousand tons of silver from the mid 16th Century to the end of the colonial period. The richest, and most productive mine in the Americas was that of Potosí in what is modern day Bolivia. The richest camp in Mexico was in the city of Zacatecas, however the production of this mine was far less than that of Potosi. More simplistic native mining techniques dominated
Olmecs Olmec chronology came to a head at a 1942 Tuxtla Gutierrez conference, where Alfonso Caso declared that the Olmecs were the "mother culture" (""cultura madre"") of Mesoamerica. Shortly after the conference, radiocarbon dating proved the antiquity of the Olmec civilization, although the "mother culture" question generated considerable debate even 60 years later. The name "Olmec" means "rubber people" in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec, and was the Aztec name for the people who lived in the Gulf Lowlands in the 15th and 16th centuries, some 2000 years after the Olmec culture died out. The term "rubber people" refers to