Carved In Stone
By Bill Mesusan
June 2007 Guadalajara-Lakeside Volume 23, Number 10

     An Olmec stone slab discovered in the state of Veracruz, with sixty-two distinct signs chiseled into its surface, contains the oldest writing ever discovered in the Western Hemisphere.
     The 3,000 year old script pushes back the date for writing in Mesoamerica to 900 B.C. This is four hundred years before writing had been known to exist in Mesoamerica, the region from central Mexico down through much of Central America.
     The old saying, “It’s not carved in stone,” certainly doesn’t apply in this case. The discovery of the “Cascajal Stone,” as it’s being called, is a remarkable event. The last unknown writing system to be unearthed was the Indus Valley Script, back in 1924. After years of studying the Veracruz slab Mexican scientists, and their colleagues from the United States, agree that the order and pattern of symbols delicately incised on the concave top surface of a block of soft stone appear to be that of an authentic writing system.
     The stone slab measures fourteen inches long, eight inches wide, and five inches in depth.  It was discovered 1999, when road builders came across it amidst debris from an ancient mound at Cascajal, in the “Olmec heartland.”
     The village was located on an island, in southern Veracruz, about a mile from present day San Lorenzo.
     Radio carbon dating of other ruins found at Cascajal, considered one of the most important cities of early Mesoamerican culture, indicates that the Olmec flourished on the island from 1,200 B.C to 900 B.C.
     Much of the history of the Olmec is shrouded in mystery. The Olmec were an ancient pre-Columbian people who created a civilization in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico, in the present-day states of Tabasco and Veracruz, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. They dominated this region and far beyond the “Olmec heartland” from 1200 B.C. to 400 B.C. Their artwork has found as far away as Oaxaca, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
     The name “Olmec” means “rubber people” and is a Nahuatl (Aztec) word. Mesoamericans extracted latex from Castilla eslastica, a type of rubber tree indigenous to the area. They mixed it with the juice of a local vine, Opomoea alba, to create rubber as early as 1600 B.C. Not surprisingly, ancient ball games made use of rubber balls.
     We have no idea what language the Olmec spoke or what they called themselves. The Olmec worshipped a Jaguar God. What was it about this creature that resonated in their collective soul? Perhaps this culture chose the jaguar in the belief that it was the most fearful and powerful animal in the world, hence the best representative of the incredible, often unpredictable forces of the natural world.
     Jaguar was their totem, their teacher, and gave the Olmec access to their most intimate experience of the wild soul of nature. Jaguar chased away the ghosts and warded off evil spirits. Olmec shamans, or holy men, were thought to have the ability to assume the powers of animals.  Such animals are called Nahales.  In Olmec art the most reproduced Nahale is the jaguar.
     The Jaguar Child, a common symbol in Olmec art, may exemplify the spirit and intellectuality of man (and woman) combined with the ferocity and strength of the Jaguar.
     The Olmec seemed mesmerized by the sheer creaturely beauty of the sleek, black Jaguar. It initiated them into the experience of “aesthetic arrest,” a relaxed state of contemplation or middle way between the opposites of desire and loathing.  For the Olmec culture, Jaguar evoked the essence of religious and artistic experience.
     Perhaps the Olmec called themselves The Jaguar People. First the Olmec worshipped the Jaguar, then they worshipped its form, and finally form itself captivated them; art as the antidote to rigidity and chaos. In art, both highly stylized and naturalistic, they were the first maestros (masters) of the Western Hemisphere.
     Although the Jaguar God is pre-eminent, it’s been determined that the Olmec pantheon included at least ten different rain and fertility gods, The Olmec are most remembered for their sculpted enormous basalt heads, some eight to nine feet high, almost all of them with wide, thick lips, flattened noses, and rather childlike features. These figures all wore capped headpieces, headgear similar to American football helmets. Not the hard-shelled modern helmet, more like the early leather helmets worn in the 1930s and 40s (and even into the early fifties). 
     Were these colossal heads representative of warrior-kings or famous ball players? Did they glorify heroes while they were still alive or commemorate them after they had died?  We’ll probably never know the answer to these questions. The gigantic cabezas are one more mystery the Olmec left for us to contemplate. Ten of these gigantic heads, some the size of small cars, were unearthed in the vicinity of San Lorenzo, near the site of the discovery of the “Cascajal Stone.”
     It’s estimated that the largest of these heads weighs from twenty to forty tons. Geologists have determined that the basalt used for the sculpted heads was quarried in an area of the Tuxtlas Mountains. Archeologist Alfonso Medellin Zenil discovered a basalt quarry site and monument workshop in 1960, at Llano del Jicaro, which demonstrates that the heads were given basic shape at the quarry site before being transported (either dragged and/or rafted down rivers), more than fifty miles, to cities and ceremonial centers where the finishing touches were later added.
     The Olmec flourished along the Gulf of Mexico long before the Maya and Zapotec peoples rose to prominence elsewhere in the region. The Olmec used a calendar and there’s been speculation that they were the first culture in the Americas to develop the zero. They are justifiably considered the mother culture of Mesoamerica.
     The Olmec developed a system of writing almost a thousand years before the birth of Christ as evidenced by the discovery of the “Cascajal Stone.”
     When the stone slab first surfaced, Maria del Carmen Rodriguez of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico and Ponciano Ortiz of Veracruz University were called in.  The archaeologists, who are husband and wife, quickly recognized the importance of the discovery. They are the lead authors of the report of the find, published in the September issue of the journal Science.
     According to the report, the sixty two signs inscribed on the stone tablet “link the Olmec to literacy, document an unsuspected writing system and reveal a new complexity to this civilization.”
     After the 1999 find, the two Mexican archeologists devoted another six years to additional excavations, searching for more writing specimens and performing comparative analysis with previously studied Olmec iconography, before inviting other Mesoamerican scholars to join the study.  Earlier this year they were joined in their research efforts by Richard A. Diehl, a specialist in Olmec research at the University of Alabama; Michael D. Coe of Yale; Karl A. Taube of the University of California, Riverside;  Stephen Houston of Brown University; and Alfredo Delgado Calderon of the National Institute of Anthropology and History.
     Like the Olmec themselves, the “Cascajal Stone” is a mystery as yet to be deciphered. Experts who have examined the symbols on the stone believe they’ll need many more examples before they can hope to understand them and read what is written.
     Researchers note that the text “conforms to all expectations of writing,” and that the sequences of signs reflects “patterns of language, with the probable presence of syntax and language-dependent word orders.” Several paired sequences of signs have prompted speculation that the text contains couplets of poetry.
     Specialist Diel, a co-author of the Science article, said, “My colleagues and I are absolutely convinced the stone is authentic. Some researchers aren’t convinced that the dating of the inscription is accurate and point out that the stone was unearthed in a gravel quarry where it and other artifacts were all jumbled together. The slab, as well as the other relics, may have been out of their original context.
     The discovery team countered this skepticism with their belief that clay figurines, ceramic shards, and other broken artifacts accompanying the stone appear to be from a particular phase of Olmec culture that ended around 900 B.C. They admit, however, that the disarray at the site makes it next to impossible to determine accurately whether the “Cascajal Stone” had originally been in a place relating to a religious ceremony or to the governing elite.
     Stephen D. Houston of Brown University, another co-author of the journal report, admits that researchers are puzzled by the fact that the symbols in the inscription are unrelated to later Mesoamerican scripts which brings up the question of the influence the Olmec had on the course of later Mesoamerican cultures.
     Still, Dr. Houston calls the discovery “tantalizing” and believes, “It could be the beginning of a new era of focus on the Olmec civilization.”  Houston examined the stone searching for clues that the symbols are true writing and not just iconography unrelated to a language. An expert, a leader in deciphering of Maya writing, Houston detected regular patterns and order, which he believes suggests “a text segmented into what almost looks like sentences, with clear beginnings and clear endings.”
     Mesoamerican researchers not involved in the Veracruz find agree that the tiny, delicate signs appear to be a true script.  The slab is expected to inspire more intensive study of the Olmec whose culture emerged around 1,200 B.C.
     All cultures rise and fall, and the Jaguar People were no exception. They disappeared around  400 B.C.  How they moved south to influence the Maya world and crossed Mexico from east to west to influence cultures in the present-day state of Oaxaca is not known.
     The carved stone challenges researchers with what amounts to a language puzzle. Some of the pictographic signs are frequently repeated, especially ones that look like an insect or a lizard. Do these signs alert the reader to the use of letters and words that sound alike but have different meanings—as in the difference between “see” and “c” or “why” and “y” in English?
     According to Dr. Houston, “the linear sequencing, the regularity of signs, the clear patterns of ordering, they tell me this is writing. But we don’t know what it says.”
     It’s been said: In the beginning was the word. Actually in the beginning was the world, and words came along later to describe both inner and outer landscapes. If we’re lucky, the Cascajal Stone may eventually yield itself to interpretation providing us with a window into an ancient world. 
     The Olmec, enigmatic sculptors of massive basalt heads and small, delicately carved jade pieces, deftly chiseled their words and descriptions of their exotic world into rock slabs, leaving us a mysterious legacy carved in stone.