Credit: Stephen Houston
This teaser is from an article posted at the LiveScience website in 2009 that I just happened to run across. It’s interesting.
A stone block from Mexico thousands of years old apparently inscribed with a previously unknown writing may be the oldest text in the New World, an international team of archaeologists said today.
This find lights the hope of future discoveries of written records detailing the Olmecs, the likely creators of the block and the ancient civilization that in many respects was the progenitor of all later complex societies in Mesoamerica, such as the Maya and the Aztecs.
…
Surrounding the Cascajal block were ceramic sherds, fragments of clay figurines and broken stone artifacts. Based on their design, the researchers dated the slab back to 3,100 years or before, at least 400 years before writing was thought to have first appeared in the Americas.
