The Olmec Cascajal Block: Is This the Oldest Writing in the Americas?
alyzza may
The Cascajal Block is one of the most controversial and exciting discoveries in Mesoamerican archaeology. Found in the late 1990s in a gravel pit in Veracruz, Mexico—the heartland of the Olmec civilization—it potentially pushes the dawn of writing in the Americas back to approximately 900 BCE . If authentic, it suggests the Olmecs, often called the "Mother Culture" of Mesoamerica, were the first in the Western Hemisphere to develop a true system of writing, centuries before the Zapotecs or the M