Ancient Olmec Civilization & Culture

[Anonymous]

Pre-Mayan written language found in Mexico
By OLIVER MOORE
Globe and Mail Update
Thursday, December 5 Online Edition, Posted at 02:46 PM EST

Scientists believe they have found evidence of the earliest form
of written communication in the New World, a pre-Mayan language
that could shed light on the ancient peoples who populated what
is now Mexico. Several years of research in the Mexican state of
Veracruz has turned up a number of finds suggesting that a people
known as the Olmecs operated an organized state-level political
system that included the use of a 260-day calendar.

New theory advanced on Martian water
The finds include a cyclindrical seal and handful of carved stone
plaques; the former is thought to have been used to imprint
clothing with symbols and the latter used as a form of jewelry.
Both of them would have indicated rank or authority within a
hierarchical society. Other finds included human and animal bone,
food serving vessels and hollow figurines.

"The connection between writing, the calendar and kingship within
the Olmecs is indicated in these communications, dating to 650
B.C., which makes sense, since the Olmecs were the first known
peoples in Mesoamerica to have a state-level political structure,
and writing is a way to communicate power and influence," said
Mary Pohl, anthropology professor at Florida State University.

The research, was was funded primarily by the National Science
Foundation, will be published Friday in the journal Science. The
discovery counters conventional wisdom about the infancy of
written communications in the Americas, leading to speculation
that three ancient languages, Mayan, Isthmian and Oaxacan, could
share as a common ancestor the script of the Olmecs.

"It was generally accepted that Mayans were among the first
Mesoamerican societies to use writing," said John Yellen, an
archeologist and program manager for the National Science
Foundation. "But this find indicates that the Olmecs' form of
written communication led into what became forms of writing for
several other cultures."

Dr. Pohl, who led the excavations at San Andres, near La Venta,
has worked for years to analyze and fine-tune the estimated
dates of the artifacts discovered in the initial dig.

"We knew we had found something important," she said. "The motifs
were glyph-like but we weren't sure at first what we had until
they were viewed more closely." It is unclear what happened to
cause the downfall of the Olmecs, Dr. Pohl says.

"Flooding due to changing courses of rivers over time led to the
abandonment of the Olmec settlement at San Andres and probably
other sites in this area," she suggested. "It is possible, too,
that the Mayans increased their power and came to dominate,
taking over trade routes, leading to the end of the Olmecs as we
know it."

Copyright 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Mike Ruggeri's Ancient America and Mesoamerica News and Links
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Link is dead. No archived version found.


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All rights reserved.

 

[gerardwilkie]

More on a recent Olmec find here :

'Oldest' New World writing found
By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News



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-Columbian 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."


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.


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.


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


"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.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5347080.stm

 

[ramonmercado]

Published online: 14 September 2006;
| doi:10.1038/news090611-11

Written in stone

A previously unknown form of writing — and the oldest piece of text ever discovered in the Americas — has been unearthed in southern Mexico. Kerri Smith tries to decipher the questions posed by ancient scribes.

Kerri Smith

What has been found?

Edit: Here is the image of the stone slab (from the cited article).

The Olmec people may have left records even older than this on materials such as wood.

Science

Archaeologists have unearthed a block of stone from the Veracruz region of Mexico that is inscribed with a mysterious and hitherto unknown script.

By comparing their find to other fragments of ceramics, clay and stone found in the same place, Ma. del Carmen Rodriguez Martinez at the Central Institute of Anthropology and History in Veracruz, Mexico, and her colleagues dated the slab to 900 BC. That makes it the earliest example of writing ever to be discovered in the Americas1. They think it was made by the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica, the first organized civilization in this part of Mexico.

How old is that, for the Americas?

The oldest previous examples from this region were an inscribed greenstone statuette and some cylindrical seals, used to imprint patterns into soft materials such as clay. These have been dated to about 650 BC2.

It is possible that the Olmec civilization, which was around from about 1200 BC, developed a writing system much earlier than this block suggests, but that there is no surviving evidence of it. "My suspicion is they were writing on perishable media, like wood," says Stephen Houston at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who is co-author of the study in Science.

What about elsewhere?

Much older examples exist elsewhere in the world — although the dates are controversial. According to Richard Parkinson, an expert on Egyptian inscriptions at the British Museum, London, the oldest examples of writing have been found in Egypt and the ancient region of Mesopotamia. These date to between 3200-3500 BC, says Parkinson. The Egyptian writings take the form of tags used for linen that show where the products came from.

Another contender is the Indus script found in Pakistan, which could be as old as 5,500 years. But experts are divided over whether this is true writing — it could simply be a collection of symbols or pictures.

So not all inscriptions are 'true' writing?

The key to a true writing system is that it must convey a language as opposed to an idea. A picture of a bird, for example, could mean 'bird' to some and 'eagle' to others, whereas a written version would dictate the actual word.

The latest Olmec script is made up of symbols that sometimes resemble real-world items. But it is likely to relate to language because it shows a linear order with repeated symbols, says Houston.

Edit: Here is the image of the stone's symbols (from the cited article).

The symbols may look like pineapples and roaches, but are probably representative of a real language.
Science

Does anyone know what the new tablet says?

The 'Rosetta Stone' helpfully had the same text written in both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek, but nothing similar has been found for the Olmec script. The Olmec block, however, does contain a few symbols that turn up in later writings and that have been deciphered: the combination of two rectangular symbols (numbers 19 and 20 in the picture) are thought to make up a word meaning something like 'rulership'. But the block's full meaning cannot be decoded without further examples, says Houston.

Are there still some writings we can't decipher?

Yes. There are more than a dozen examples of scripts that no one has been able to crack. Two of the most famous examples are the Indus script and a script termed Rongorongo, used on Easter Island.


References
Rodriguez Martinez M.D.C., et al. Science, 313 . 1610 - 1614 (2006).
Pohl M. E. D, et al. Science, 298 . 1984 - 1987 (2002).

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060911/ ... 11-11.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Ancient City Found in Mexico; Shows Olmec Influence
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

January 26, 2007
Archaeologists have unearthed a city in central Mexico that is more than 2,500 years old and was influenced by the ancient Olmec culture.

Creators of a pioneering written language and calendar, the Olmec are generally regarded as the first advanced civilization in Mesoamerica, the region stretching from central Mexico to eastern Honduras (map of North and Central America).

Located about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Mexico City, the ruins, called Zazacatla, are hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico coast region generally associated with the Olmec (Mexico map).

The discovery of Zazacatla sheds light on early cultural developments and long-distance trade in ancient Mexico. The find also suggests that the influence of the Olmec was perhaps greater than previously thought.

Zazacatla was found buried under housing and commercial development. Its discovery underlines the extent to which Mexico's heritage remains unexplored and unprotected, archaeologists say.

"The public may think that all the important archaeological sites in Mexico are known. But this is not the case," said David Grove, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has worked in central Mexico for more than 40 years.

"Ninety-five percent of Mexico remains essentially unexplored."

Mother Culture

The Olmec are often called the mother culture of Mesoamerica. They flourished during the so-called formative period of the region's history—about 1200 B.C. to 400 B.C.

The Olmec lived in the Gulf coast area that today makes up the states of Veracruz and Tabasco. The most prominent Olmec center was the city of La Venta.

Famed for their colossal sculptures of heads, the Olmec may also have been the first Mesoamerican civilization to develop a writing system.

They may not have been ethnically Olmec, but the inhabitants of Zazacatla seem to have revered Olmec culture.
Two statues and architectural details at the site indicate that the inhabitants of Zazacatla adopted Olmec styles when they changed from a simple, egalitarian society to a more complex, hierarchical one, archaeologist Giselle Canto told the Associated Press.

"When their society became stratified, the new rulers needed emblems … to justify their rule over people who used to be their equals," Canto said of Zazacatla's inhabitants.



Trade Network

The Olmec's influence can be seen farther afield than their traditional area of control, including other cultures' ceremonial-center layouts and artworks, said John Machado, a pre-Columbian art historian at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

"The Olmec need for materials—especially the precious and ritually important jade—developed a broad trade network," Machado said.

"Evidence of this interaction has been discovered as much as 400 miles [640 kilometers] … in Guerrero," a state on Mexico's Pacific coast that is just south of Morelos state.

Numerous Olmec-style rock carvings and statues have been found at Chalcatzingo, a non-Olmec settlement in the eastern part of Morelos state that thrived from about 700 B.C. to 500 B.C.

"However, western Morelos seemed unaffected by such contacts and in fact seemed a backwater during the 900-to-500-B.C. time period," said Grove, the University of Illinois professor emeritus.

"The Zazacatla discoveries change that whole scenario completely," he said. "It now seems that settlements in western Morelos were also involved" with the Olmec.

Unexplored Territory

Zazacatla covered less than 1 square mile (2.6 square kilometers) between 800 and 500 B.C.

The excavation of the site began last year. Since then archaeologists have unearthed six buildings and two sculptures of what appear to be Olmec-style priests, the Associated Press reports.

But much of the site remains buried under housing developments, a gas station, a highway, and a commercial building.

Grove said Mexico doesn't have financial resources for extensive archaeological explorations.

"The forces of modernization" destroy hundreds, maybe even thousands, of unexplored sites every year, he speculated.

"For most of the country there is still a great knowledge void," Grove said. "The further you get from major towns and major highways, the less is known."

"It is usually only serendipitous when building activities bring to light a significant site such as Zazacatla and archaeologists are contacted and are able to study the discovery."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... olmec.html