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A cylinder seat and carved greenstone plaque bearing glyphs dating to ~650 B.C. have been uncovered near the Olmec center of La Venta in Tabasco, Mexico. These artifacts, which predate others containing writing, reveal that the key aspects of the Mesoamerican scripts were present in Olmec writing: the combination of pictographic and glyphic elements to represent speech; the use of the sacred 260-day calendar; and the connection between writing, the calendar, and kingship. They imply that Mesoamerican writing originated in the La Venta polity.
Our excavations at San Andres, located 5 km northeast of the Olmec center of La Venta, produced a cylinder seal and a greenstone plaque with glyphs dating to ~650 B.C., indicating that writing and the calendar originated in the Mexican Gulf Coast region together with other elements central to Mesoamerican civilization. By the Late Formative period (400 B.C. to A.D. 200), three related hieroglyphic scripts and an associated calendrical system had appeared in three different geographic areas (1, 2) (Fig. 1): the Mayan script extending from the Yucatan Peninsula to the Pacific slope of Guatemala and El Salvador, the Isthmian script extending from the Mexican Gulf Coast through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and the Oaxacan script of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. These three Late Formative writing and calendrical systems have close similarities, indicating that they probably developed from a common ancestral script (3, 4) during the preceding Middle Formative period (~900 to 400 B.C.).
Before the discovery of glyphs at San Andres, the earliest examples of writing and calendrics were attributed to Monument 3 from the Valley of Oaxaca site of San Jose Mogote (2). Monument 3 depicts a slain captive with two glyphs inscribed below the body, probably giving the calendrical name of the victim based on his day of birth in the 260-day sacred Calendar Round (Fig. 1). Monument 3 was originally assigned an age of 600 to 500 B.C., but archaeological, iconographic, and linguistic analyses suggest that Monument 3 dates between 300 B.C. and A.D. 200 (3, 5, 6). San Jose Mogote Monument 3 would be contemporaneous with similar, Late Formative monuments depicting glyphs associated with defeated capitals and slain captives from the nearby site of Monte Alban.
San Andres (Fig. 1) was a subsidiary elite...