Look What They Found! 2,600 Years Old
By Cathryn Conroy, Netscape News Editor
The history books will have to be rewritten. Archaeologists digging in San Andres, an Olmec town on the coastal plain of the Mexican state of Tabasco, have found artifacts that push back the earliest evidence of writing in the Americas by at least 350 years to 650 BC, reports New Scientist. Found was a ceramic cylinder that is about the size of a man's fist and fragments of engraved plaques. The symbols on the cylinder indicate allegiance to a king.
In the Old World, the first known writing is several thousand years older than this and was used to keep records of animals and other possessions. The Mexican artifacts were carbon-dated to provide an accurate age. New Scientist describes the cylinder's markings: It "shows two glyphs linked by lines to the mouth of a bird, giving the impression the glyphs are being spoken. One is 'ajaw', meaning 'king', and the other 'three ajaw', a day in the sacred 260-day calendar used throughout the region for over a millennium."
The cylinder could be covered with ink or paint and then rolled on cloth or even people's bodies. "It's a kind of royal seal, used in decoration," Mary Pohl, an anthropologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, told New Scientist. This would have been a way for the people of San Andres to show their loyalty to the ruler who lived in a nearby town.
View artifact photos here:
http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/photosearch.jsp?&cap=tabasco mexico
