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http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/313/5793/1610

Oldest Writing in the New World
Ma. del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez,1 Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos,2 Michael D. Coe,3 Richard A. Diehl,4 Stephen D. Houston,5* Karl A. Taube,6 Alfredo Delgado Calderón1

A block with a hitherto unknown system of writing has been found in the Olmec heartland of Veracruz, Mexico. Stylistic and other dating of the block places it in the early first millennium before the common era, the oldest writing in the New World, with features that firmly assign this pivotal development to the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica.
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[Zabougornov]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2440379&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Sept. 14, 2006 — In a pile of debris near Veracruz, Mexico, a road-building crew found a stone block, on which someone had carved seven rows of simple pictures.

Scientists, writing in Friday's edition of the journal Science, say the pictures are almost certainly words, nearly 3,000 years old. They were probably carved by members of the Olmec tribe, who dominated Central America at the time. There's no guessing yet what the pictograms say, but if the research team is right, this block is the oldest writing ever found in the Western Hemisphere.

"What's exciting is that it makes this first civilization in Mexico and Central America literate," said Stephen Houston, an anthropologist at Brown University who co-wrote the study. "It gives these people a voice. They're chattering away in this writing system, and it would be enormously important for any understanding of the American past to hear what it is that they find interesting and worth recording in stone."

The stone has come to be known as the Cascajal block. It weighs 26 pounds, is about the size of a legal size piece of paper, and cannot possibly be from the swampy part of southern Mexico where it was found. Archeologists know that the Olmec people brought stone from hundreds of miles away, much of it for the giant statues they made.

Some of the symbols resemble corn cobs, insects, or shells. But what's more important is that they appear to be part of a writing system because the symbols repeat.

There are 62 symbols in all on the stone, but only 28 different ones. Three of them appear four times on the stone; another six appear three times. Houston said those are hints of key words in the document.

"Writing is, of course, linear," he said. "It's arranged in these sequences of signs, and because it's linear, and appears to be sequenced in that fashion, there has to be a reason for it, and the reason would be that it is recording the elements of speech. We have verbs, we have nouns, we have things that have to appear in a certain order."

But what do they say? There is no Olmec equivalent of the Rosetta stone, which made it possible for archeologists to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into Greek. Houston said unless more Olmec writing is found, the chances of decoding the Cascajal block are slim.

It is quite possible, the researchers concede in their paper, that the the writing is not genuine, that they've tripped across something newer than the Olmecs, created for a reason they may never know.

For that reason, they said they want to be cautious.

"We don't want to shower it with a lot of speculation," said Houston. "We just want to show it out there, and see what other people make of it."

What's clear from various markings on the stone, said Houston, is that the stone was erased and reused — that its surface was scraped clean more than once, leaving it slightly concave.

"It's just baffling," he said.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5347080.stm

Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 900 BC, new evidence suggests.

The discovery in the state of Veracruz of a block inscribed with symbolic shapes has astounded anthropologists.

Researchers tell Science magazine that they consider it to be the oldest example of writing in the New World.

The inscriptions are thought to have been made by the Olmecs, an ancient pre-Colombian people known for creating large statues of heads.

Co-author Stephen Houston of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, US, said it was a "tantalising discovery".

"I think it could be the beginning of a new era of focus on Olmec civilisation," he said.

"It's telling us that these records probably exist and that many remain to be found. If we can decode their content, these earliest voices of Mesoamerican civilisation will speak to us today."

Chance find

The slab has been dated to the early first millennium BC. It appears to have been made by the Olmec civilisation of Mesoamerica, a geographical region located between the Sinaloa River valley in northern Mexico and the Gulf of Fonseca south of El Salvador.


I think it's a hugely important and symbolic find
Mary Pohl, Florida State University
The area, once home to the Aztecs, Mayas and their predecessors, covers much of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and western Honduras.

The Olmecs appeared on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico around 1,200 BC. They are known to have carved glyphs - a symbolic figure or character that stands for a letter, sound, or word - since around 900 BC, but scholars are divided over whether this can be classified as true writing.

Cascajal (BBC)
The stone slab, named the "Cascajal block", was first uncovered by road builders digging up an ancient mound at Cascajal, outside San Lorenzo, in the late 1990s.

It weighs about 12kg (26lbs) and measures 36cm (14in) in length, 21cm (8in) in width and 13cm (5in) in thickness. Its text consists of 62 signs, some of which are repeated up to four times.

Mexican archaeologists Carmen Rodríguez and Ponciano Ortíz were the first to recognise the importance of the find, and it was examined by international archaeologists earlier this year.

Precious object

The team says the text "conforms to all expectations of writing" because of its distinct elements, patterns of sequencing, and consistent reading order.

Commenting on the discovery, Mary Pohl, of Florida State University in Tallahassee, said she believed the authors had made a good case.


The incised text consists of 62 signs, some repeated

More details
"I think it's a hugely important and symbolic find," she told the BBC News website. "It's new and further evidence that [the Olmecs] had writing and had text."

The block was carved from precious serpentine rock, suggesting it was probably a holy object used by high orders of society for some kind of ritual activity, she said.

The inscription is indecipherable but scientists hope that further excavations at the site could give clues to its content.

"I think more things will be found," said Dr Pohl. "We can make some progress although I don't think we'll ever be able to decipher it completely."

The Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia, what is now southern Iraq, are generally regarded to be the first people to develop a form of writing around 5,000 years ago; although there have been even older claims made for Chinese inscriptions.
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