A Bit More Detail

I wanted to devote an entry to a recent entry by pauldrye at Passing Strangeness, examining the Cascajal Block, a millennias-old stone tablet that may well be the oldest evidence of writing ever found in the Americas.

The first Mesoamerican civilization was the Olmec, and it’s far from clear that they knew how to write. On the other hand, the Zapotec flourished not long after the heyday of the Olmec, and they had a fairly developed script. This has troubled archaeologists for a while, for the reason that one would expect writing to start out crudely and develop over time. As it happens, this theory had been challenged by better understanding of Sumerian writing, which went from quite crude to quite complex in just a few hundred years. Even so, archaeologists specializing in Central America have kept a close eye out for Olmec artifacts that suggest that the Zapotec learned the trick from their predecessors.

The centre of Olmec civilization was Veracruz state, particularly San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán—unfortunately named because it’s not the Tenochtitlan, AKA pre-Columbian Mexico City (its Olmec name is unknown, so it’s named after two nearby towns, one of which was in turn named after the chief Aztec city by modern-day Mexicans). The centre is there because of the Coatzacoalcos River, which isn’t very long but was to San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán what the Thames is to London or the Tiber was to Rome. About 25 kilometers downstream from San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán is the tiny village of Lomas de Tacamichapa, which contains a road-building quarry named El Cascajal. In 1999 two archaeologists, the husband-and-wife team María del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez and Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos, realized that the quarry was actually an Olmec site. In a pile of rubble left by a bulldozer they turned up many Olmec artifacts, the gem of which was an eleven kilogram block of serpentine stone. The block was incised with various symbols—62 in all, with 28 different ones—and, based on analysis of the other archaeological bits and pieces in the pile, it was anywhere from 2800 to 3000 years old: centuries older than any other writing found to date in the New World.

The news of the discovery, along with an in-depth study of it, was only formally announced in September of 2006; Rodríguez Martínez and Ortíz Ceballos spent six years trying to find any other similar artifacts and, when they found nothing else, they brought in several other notable experts on Mesoamerica. Altogether they came to the conclusion that the sigils weren’t just decoration, which seems a bit surprising given that no-one knows how to read it. Several techniques developed during the decipherment of other unknown texts were used instead and, while not definitive, produced clues that the signs have an underlying meaning.

This Joel Skidmore report (PDF format) goes into more detail. The problem, as Paul points out, is that there are some curious problems relating to the interpretation of the symbols on the stone, some even suggesting it might be a fake. Determining the meaning of the stone's symbols would be hugely complicated, given that no one has any idea what language they spoke, and it would also be next to impossible to reconstruct a language three thousand years before the present. Assuming, of course, that the stone does have writing. Regardless, as I wrote in my June review of Robinson's Lost Languages, I can't help but wish archeologists and linguists and anyone else who could help would have good luck: so much has been lost, in the world and in the disease-devastated post-Columbian Americas, that having some comprehensible text from so far in the past would be quite nice indeed.