Desde La Matriz De Olman: the Birth of Writing in Formative Era Mesoamerica

Desde la matriz de Olman: The Birth of Writing in Formative Era Mesoamerica

by Stephanie Michelle Strauss

B.A. in Anthropology & Latin American Studies, May 2011, Yale University

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

May 19, 2013

Thesis directed by

Jeffrey P. Blomster Associate Professor of Anthropology

Dedication

The author wishes to dedicate this work to Stephen, for love, support, and never losing hope; to Debbie and Dale, for 23 years of encouragement and brave draft reading; to Scott, Aiden, Gregg, Laura, and Nathan, for providing love and levity; and to Dean, for keeping me company along the way.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge and sincerely thank Dr. Jeffrey Blomster for two years of guidance, encouragement, instruction, and support. I have become a better scholar, writer, and thinker under his excellent tutelage, and owe him a debt of gratitude.

I would further like to thank Dr. Catherine Allen and Dr. Alexander Dent, both of who have deepened and enriched my theoretical work, and Dr. Linda Brown for her enthusiasm and suggestions. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Mary Miller for inspiring me to both begin and formally pursue this journey into Mesoamerican archaeology and epigraphy.

Table of Contents

Dedication...... iii

Acknowledgements...... iv

List of Figures...... vi

List of Tables...... vii

Chapter 1: Introduction...... 8

Chapter 2: The Formative Landscape of Olman...... 15

Chapter 3: Evidence of Olmec-style Writing...... 21

Chapter 4: The Cascajal Block...... 32

Chapter 5: The Mixe-Zoquean Language Family...... 44

Chapter 6: The Zapotec Writing System...... 57

Chapter 7: The Proto-Maya Writing System...... 64

Chapter 8: The Isthmian Writing System...... 76

Chapter 9: Iconoglyphic Elements at Izapa...... 95

Chapter 10: Conclusion...... 101

Bibliography...... 103

List of Figures

Figure 1: La Venta Monument 13...... 22

Figure 2: San Andres Seal and Greenstone Plaque Inscriptions...... 25

Figure 3: Alternate San Andres Seal Orientation...... 27

Figure 4: Chalcatzingo Monument 2 and the San Andres Seal...... 28

Figure 5: San Andres Double-Merlon Glyph and the Olmec-style Ceremonial Bar...... 31

Figure 6: Cascajal Block Inscription...... 32

Figure 7: Published Cascajal Block Reading Orders...... 39

Figure 8: Cascajal Block Signary and Repeated Glyph Sequences...... 41

Figure 9: Mixe-Zoquean Phylogentic Tree...... 49

Figure 10: Modern Mixe-Zoquean Distribution Map...... 51

Figure 11: Divergence Dates for proto-Mixe-Zoquean...... 53

Figure 12: San José Mogote Monument 3 and Monte Albán Orthostats...... 61

Figure 13: Sub-V Glyph Block from San Bartolo...... 66

Figure 14: Comparative Analysis for Olmec-style and proto-Maya Glyphs...... 68

Figure 15: Chalcatzingo Monument 31 and T632...... 70

Figure 16: Documentation of Kaminaljuyu Stela 10...... 74

Figure 17: Isthmian Cognates on Kaminaljuyu Stela 10...... 75

Figure 18: Comparative Analysis of Isthmian and Olmec-style Glyphs...... 78

Figure 19: Comparative Analysis of Isthmian and Zapotec Glyphs...... 79

Figure 20: Comparative Analysis of Isthmian and proto-Maya Glyphs...... 80

Figure 21: The Tuxtla Statuette Inscription...... 82

Figure 22: La Mojarra Stela 1...... 85

Figure 23: The Chiapa de Corzo Sherd Inscription...... 91

Figure 24: Comparative Analysis for Isthmian glyphs and Izapan Iconoglyphs...... 98

List of Tables

Table 1: Olmec-style Inscriptions...... 23

Table 2: Possible Proto-Mixe-Zoquean Loanwords...... 56

Table 3: Isthmian Inscriptions...... 77

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Chapter 1: Introduction

In the oft-competitive world of Mesoamerican archaeology, “firsts” are desperately pursued and vehemently contested. The initial cultivation of maize, the first instance of ceramic production, the earliest claimant for statehood – many archaeologists dream of discovering such a pioneering advance in the archaeological record, while others work tirelessly to ensure the pre-eminency of their region of specialty. As the corpus of Formative era writing samples grows, the concomitant race to pinpoint the birth of Mesoamerican writing is accelerating. Four early Mesoamerican script systems are known: the enigmatic “Olmec-style” script1, the Isthmian (or, alternatively, epi-Olmec) script, the Zapotec script, and the proto-Maya script. The relationship between these hieroglyphic systems is a point of contention among archaeologists and epigraphers alike.

New discoveries continue to add fuel to this already fiery debate: successively earlier examples of proto-Maya glyphic texts are coming to light in the Peten (Saturno, Stuart and Beltrán 2006) and fascinating, but at times unprovenienced, new samples of Olmec- style writing (Rodríguez Martínez et al. 2006) and Isthmian inscriptions (Houston and

Coe 2003) are surfacing as well.

The study of ancient scripts is a consumptive task – epigraphers are, by necessity, more familiar with their own script specialty than contemporary script systems. The temptation to laminate glyphic interpretations from one’s own specialty onto outside systems is great. A survey and synthesis of extant Formative texts – from a neutral epigraphic perspective – is thus sorely needed. This thesis will attempt to provide such a synthesis. I will, further, make a case for the relatedness of the florescent and likely

1 A satisfactory name for this script system – exemplified perhaps most clearly and securely by La Venta Monument 13 – has yet to be coined. Indeed, the use of “Olmec” to describe the Formative lowland Gulf

logosyllabic Isthmian script system and the shorter, perhaps more logographic system encoded in Olmec-style inscriptions like those on the San Andres Seal and Humbolt Celt.

The telling geographic distribution and comparative complexity of the Isthmian script in the Terminal Formative suggests an epigraphic pedigree that reaches backward in time to the very earliest attempts at writing in the New World; and while calling the Isthmian script “epi-Olmec” is a rather transparent comparative tactic, it may yet be an apt – if deterministic – descriptor of the ways in which the Olmec influenced the development of writing in Mesoamerica.

In debating the origin of writing in Mesoamerica, some archaeologists believe that all Mesoamerican hieroglyphic writing styles “can be boiled down to two major legacies, both emerging from iconographic traditions of the Early and Middle Formative periods, in a time roughly coincident with the first half of the first millennium BC” (Houston

2004: 279). Paralleling their ostensible zones of florescence, Houston calls these two branches “Oaxacan” and “Southeastern” (in this paper represented by Zapotec in the

West and proto-Maya and Isthmian in the East, respectively). While this distillation does acknowledge a potential Formative period iconic progenitor for both scriptorial branches,

I believe it obfuscates the potential role of a true Olmec-style script in the development of writing systems throughout Mesoamerica, as well as potential differing degrees of relatedness between an Olmec-style system and subsequent Zapotec, proto-Maya, and

Isthmian scripts. These issues will guide the development of this paper, as well as the questions asked about the iconogaphic and structural relatedness of Formative era writing systems.

Before launching into a full discussion of these Mesoamerican writing systems, it is necessary to define what is meant by the term “script,” as contrasted with “writing.”

According to Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican scripts are “heterogeneous systems, partly pictographic, partly logographic, and partly syllabic (or phonetic)” (1992: 28).

Mesoamerican writing systems are recognizable by a constellation of traits, including a typically linear format, purposeful reading order, relationship to a spoken language and/or grammar, and integrated calendrical system. Stephen Houston further stresses the relationship between spoken and written language: true writing is “disposed into lineary sequences that can theoretically expand into greater degrees of syntactic complexity”

(2004: 203). While a broad definition of writing stands as a communicative system codified in conventionalized signs, linguists and epigraphers often draw a bold line between semasiography and glottography (Trigger 2004: 44). Indeed, semasiography, or

“descriptive-representational and identifying-mnemonic devices” (47), stands in contrast with glottography’s independent representation of spoken utterances (44). There is a structural difference, for example, between isolated iconographic elements that evoke singular ideas or words and a script system that records the sounds of language, as the logosyllabic Classic Maya script does. Within this schema, then, most examples of early

Olmec-style writing would not be considered samples of a “true”2 linguistically transparent script.

This conservative qualification, however, should not be taken to mean that a true

Olmec script did not exist at some point in time. First, the relatively lengthy, non-

2 Imprecise labels such as “true script” are, unfortunately, both central to epigraphic analysis and loaded with evolutionary baggage. The appearance of so-called “true” writing in the archaeological record should not be equated with a neo-Darwinian shift from simple/undeveloped to complex/developed. When used in this thesis, these terms should not be read as exclusionary or value-laden (see Chapter 9).

calendrical texts of the San Andres Seal, La Venta Monument 13, and the Cascajal Block

(see Chapters 3 and 4) – as contrasted with the truncated naming glyphs characteristic of the Middle Formative Danzante blocks at Monte Albán – stand as tantalizing evidence for the existence of an elaborated Olmec scriptorial system. Second, the corpus of extant

Olmec-style glyphs on basalt, greenstone, and obsidian may represent only a fraction of the ancient Olmec text library. These already few samples survive to the present because they appear on the hardiest (most durable) mediums used to record written language. An unknown number of Olmec-style texts may have appeared on more fragile, archaeologically ephemeral mediums (such as wood or cloth). If any such texts existed in antiquity, three millennia in the acidic soils and humid climate of Mexico’s Gulf Coast would have erased any trace of them. Unless/until unique preservation conditions – such as those found at the Early Formative ritual spring of El Manatí – reveal such texts, however, any discussion of their existence remains pure, if not-unprecedented, speculation.

Third and lastly, it is important to note that the Olmec-style script may be more helpfully understood as an “open” script system (Houston 1994) than a semasiographic script system3. Although Houston considers all linear texts to be “closed” – thus placing

Olmec-style inscriptions into the suite of “closed” Southeastern writing systems – I believe the intent of Olmec-style script was likely “open.” The Olmec, like the

3 Mining his terminology from the anthropological peasant class work of Eric Wolf (1955), Stephen Houston proposes a binary schema of “open” and “closed” hieroglyphic systems to describe the orientation of Mesoamerican script traditions (Houston 1994; Houston, Baines and Cooper 2003; Houston 2004). Simply put, “open” writing systems point outward and “closed” systems point inward; they respectively either “transcend or supersede local conditions...[or] accentuate them” (Houston 2004: 275). “Open” texts are characteristic of societies that experience a great deal of cross-cultural interaction, are often accompanied by visual aids, and are easily glossed into a variety of languages. In contrast, “closed” texts are characterized by a high degree of linguistic focus and can be quite lengthy and isolated. Houston makes a broad correlation between western Mexican systems and “openness” and eastern Mesoamerican systems and “closedness.”

Teotihuacanos of the Early Classic and Classic periods (Taube 2000) and the Mixtec of the Postclassic in Western Mexico, may have found greater utility in a script that could be understood by a wider, multi-lingual audience than an idiosyncratic, “closed” script system with a “fuller commitment to linguistic transparency” (Houston 2004: 275). For example, archaeological evidence from the Cuadros phase in the Mazatan region – specifically at the site of Cantón Corralito – indicates that the San Lorenzo Olmec were interacting with and influencing the development of distant societies as soon as the Early

Formative (Clark 2007; Cheetham 2009). The creation of a written system that was deeply situated in the iconographic habitus of the Gulf Coast peoples, but simultaneously broadly transcendent of diverse cultural/regional/linguistic boundaries, would have been particularly useful to a society negotiating power and influence across the Formative landscape. These hypotheses, including the possible transmutation of an open Olmec- style script into a closed Isthmian script in the Terminal Formative4, will be explored more fully in Chapters 3, 4 and 8.

If the people of Olman were experimenting with written inscriptions in the San

Lorenzo and La Venta Horizons, as the San Andres greenstone plaque and La Venta

Monument 13 may indicate, the significantly lengthy and complex Terminal Formative inscriptions of the Tuxtla Statuette, Teotihuacan-style Mask and La Mojarra Stela 1 have a clear possible progenitor. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Formative Olmec possessed a rich iconographic vocabulary that may have signaled greater cosmological meaning across both space and time (Clark 2007; Blomster et al. 2005; Cheetham 2009).

4 It should be noted that some linguists assert that semasiographic systems cannot evolve into glottographic systems (Daniels and Bright 1996 and DeFrancis 1989, in Trigger 2004: 44), but this view is not a monolithic one. Furthermore, the relationship I postulate between Olmec-style writing and Isthmian writing is not one of direct evolutionary relationship (as is assumed for proto-Maya and Classic Maya), but rather one of inspiration and influence.

The pars pro toto tradition of Olmec art, further, predates the inception of hieroglyphic writing in the New World (Cyphers and Di Castro 2009) and yet playfully experiments with the relationship between a signifier and its signified. The fundamental signaling capabilities inherent to a pars pro toto artistic system could have primed the Olmec for the creation of a true Saussurian signaling language system. As the Olmec moved across the cosmographical space of Mesoamerica (Helms 1993), they may have introduced this signaling practice, and perhaps hieroglyphic writing practices directly, to their Formative- era neighbors. While significant gaps in the epigraphic record remain to be filled, I will argue that the most complex and influential society in Early and Middle Formative

Mesoamerica also gave birth to writing in the region, and that the Isthmian script may yet serve as evidence that hieroglyphic writing originated from Olman.

Chapter 2 will begin with a consideration of the Formative era landscape within

Olman, from geography and environmental conditions to the social, cultural, and economic fabric of Formative Mesoamerica. Chapter 3 will review the corpus of extant

Olmec-style writing samples and offer a potential new reading order for some Olmec- style texts; while Chapter 4 will specifically analyze the text on the Cascajal Block.

Chapter 5 will conclude this first arc with an evaluation of the linguistic basis of the

Olmec-style writing system – and by extension, the Isthmian writing system (Campbell and Kaufman 1976; Justeson and Kaufman 1993; Wichmann et al. N.d.). I will refrain from critiquing Justeson and Kaufman’s proposed translation schema for the Isthmian script here (their “decipherment” relies on a proto-Mixe-Zoquean linguistic base), but I will pick this issue up again in Chapter 8. Unless otherwise noted, all epigraphic illustrations included are the author’s own.

The scriptorial innovations of the Middle to Terminal Formative will be addressed in Chapter 6 (the Zapotec system), Chapter 7 (the proto-Maya system), and Chapter 8

(the Isthmian system). As any attempted reconstruction of the Mesoamerican linguistic tree (as well as potential translations of these systems) must rely upon stylistic and iconographic comparisons between recurrent glyphic motifs, in these chapters I will suggest several such points of potential overlap between the Olmec-style, Zapotec, proto-

Maya, and Isthmian writing systems. Chapter 8 will also include a test of the Justeson and Kaufman decipherment schema (using the Isthmian0inscribed Chiapa de Corzo sherd). Chapter 9 will provide a brief treatment of potential glyphic elements at the

Pacific coastal plain site of Izapa, a Terminal Formative site characterized by a unique, and frequently sidelined, blend of indigenous and foreign iconography. Chapter 10 will conclude with a synthesis and a hopeful look toward the future of Formative epigraphic studies.

As the Olmec moved across the cosmographical space of Mesoamerica (Helms

1993), did they introduce hieroglyphic writing practices to their neighbors? In the context of the Formative era landscape, I will argue that it is very likely that they did. A pre- proto-Mixe-Zoquean speaking Olmec people, in fact, may have directly passed their knowledge on to a related proto-Mixe-Zoquean group: the producers of the elegant and elaborate Isthmian script of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Through comparison with other early writing systems, I hope to connect these two traditions across time and space, and shed new light on the development of written language throughout Mesoamerica.

Chapter 2: The Formative Landscape of Olman

There is some disagreement among Mesoamerican scholars as to the most appropriate name for the era preceding the so-called Classic period. Specialists in the

Maya region show a proclivity for “Preclassic,” while scholars working in Western

Mexico tend to “Formative.” These Preclassic and Formative labels are in constant dialogue with the Classic designation, creating an indexical relationship that erroneously hints at an evolutionary link between the Formative and Classic epochs. “Preclassic,” for example, codes for an incipient era that builds up to the height of the Classic (usually

Maya) civilizations. “Formative” indexes a similar relationship, but places greater emphasis on the role this era played in the formation of the ancient Mesoamerican cultural landscape. Over the past several decades, archaeological research from El

Mirador to El Manatí has demonstrated that massive building campaigns (Sharer 1989:

271; Inomata et al. 2013), long distance trade (Blomster et al. 2005) and complex cosmological practices (Grove 2000) were already well established by the Late Formative era. In the florescent years from 1800 BCE to 200 CE, symbolic meaning was codified in basalt, greenstone, wood and clay; stylistic horizons stretched out across the

Mesoamerican landscape; and hieroglyphic writing began to appear on monumental and portable art. For these reasons, then, the Formative designation will be employed throughout this text (Early Formative: 1800 – 800 BCE; Middle Formative: 800 – 300

BCE; Late Formative: 300 BCE – 0 CE; Terminal Formative: 0 – 250 CE5).

The Olmec heartland stretches west from the Gulf of Mexico to the mountains of

Oaxaca and Chiapas, and south across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This core occupation

5 All dates, unless otherwise noted, are in uncalibrated radiocarbon years.

zone is most commonly referred to by its colonial Nahuatl name “Olman,” or “The

Rubber Country,” and is bounded within the “Coatzacoalcos and Tonalá river basins and adjacent foothills south and east” (Diehl 2004: 19) of the volcanic Tuxtla mountains.

Tributaries, springs, and streams lace through the Coatzacoalcos and Tonalá river basins, and heavy rains blanket the region for some ten months out of the year (20). While the region likely experienced some human occupation from the Paleo-Indian epoch onward,

Olman’s earliest archaeological deposits date to 5100 BCE at the waterlogged site of San

Andrés, just north of La Venta (Rust 1986; Pohl, Pope and von Nagy 2002). “By 2500

BC farmers at San Andrés…were living in an estuary bordered by channels of the

Grijalva river delta and practicing a mixed economy of foraging and farming” (Diehl

2004: 24), including clearing natural forest, cultivating domesticated maize, sunflowers, and cotton, and gathering squash and other local resources.

While it is impossible to prove these indigenous peoples gave rise to the Olmec culture of the Early Formative, it is clear that Olmec-style materials are present in the region’s archaeological record by 1600 BCE. The ritual freshwater spring at El Manatí sees its earliest occupation phase, Manatí A, from 1600 – 1500 BC (Ortiz and Rodriguez

2000), and the occupation of San Lorenzo begins with the Ojochí phase, from 1500-1350

BC (Coe and Diehl 1980: 137). Most archaeologists agree that San Lorenzo achieved its city status by 1200 BC, with Symonds, Cyphers and Lunagómez (2002: 56) asserting that the great Olmec center already covered more than 20 hectares by 1250 BC and began producing pars pro toto Olmec-style motifs even earlier than that (Cyphers and Di Castro

2009). Characteristically Olmec-style materials, including differentially fired black and white pottery, Olmec-style hollow figurines, and stone sculpture fragments were well

established by San Lorenzo’s Chichárras phase (1250 – 1150 BC), and the Chichárras phase gave way to the San Lorenzo phase in 1150 BC. According to Richard Diehl, by

1200 BC

the Olmec world was experiencing cultural ferment as processes that had begun three of four centuries earlier coalesced into a new rich and flamboyant civilization of a sort that never existed before in Mesoamerica (2004: 28).

The city of San Lorenzo, however, although clearly the largest and most complex settlement in Early Formative Olman, was not isolated on the landscape. By the San

Lorenzo phase, San Lorenzo had grown to at least 500 hectares, with some estimates reaching almost 700 ha (Cyphers and Di Castro 2009). The urban center was surrounded by a network of strategically located secondary centers, including El Remolino and Loma del Zapote on the Coatzalcoalcos’ upriver and downriver junctures (Symonds, Cyphers and Lunagómez 2002). Sketchy Early Formative occupations can be found at the sites of

La Venta, Tres Zapotes and Laguna de los Cerros, as well (Gillespie 2000; Pool 2007)6.

Although San Lorenzo, La Venta and Tres Zapotes are frequently described as Olman’s three major, sequentially influential city-centers, these early years of overlap are telling.

If we trust that Cascajal Block dates to the San Lorenzo phase, then the more contextualized, younger samples of Olmec-style writing from San Andres and La Venta can, perhaps, be examined as dialectical objects, both indexing and diverging from incipient recording events within San Lorenzo proper.

By the time San Lorenzo collapsed in approximately 900 BC, the epicenter of

Olmec power had shifted to the northeast to the riverine coastal site of La Venta.

Although it is difficult to reconstruct the local significance of La Venta during the second

6 Occupations at La Venta date to at least 1000 BC (Diehl 2004: 44). Several Early Formative occupations have been found within the boundaries of the Late Formative center of Tres Zapotes (Pool 2000), with the Arroyo phase securely dated to the Early Formative in 2003 (Pool et al. 2010).

millennium BC, in the power vacuum that followed San Lorenzo’s collapse, the city rapidly became the dominant capital of Middle Formative Olman (Pool 2007). La Venta is located amidst the many tributaries and streams of the Palma River, and provides clear evidence of monumental architecture and sequential building phases. La Venta’s abundant estuarine environment supported a substantial, socially-stratified population in the Middle Formative (Reilly 1999: 16), and by the city’s collapse in 400 BC, the urban core had grown to some 200 hectares (González Lauck and Solís Olguín 1996).

Using Maya analogs and structural analysis, some scholars have postulated that

La Venta’s urban center was designed as an earthly, ritual map of the Olmec cosmos

(Reilly 1999). Rebecca González Lauck (2010), on the other hand, analyzed La Venta art and architecture on its own terms and as clustered units, concluding “that sculpture was used as a sophisticated visual language whose messages are still, for the most part, undeciphered” (129). La Venta certainly stands alone amongst known Olmec centers for its elaborate architectural plan, dominated by what may be the earliest pyramidal structure erected in the New World (although this claim is contested by archaeological investigations on El Trapiche Structure E3-1-2 at Chalchuapa, El Salvador – see Sharer

1989 – and problematized by recent Preclassic excavations in the Maya region – see

Inomata et al. 2013). The material culture at La Venta generally follows artistic precepts pioneered at San Lorenzo and includes the carving of basalt sculptures, procurement of greenstone portable objects, and inclusion of tropes characteristic of “Olmec-style” iconography – but it also exhibits a unique artistic flavor. Beatriz de la Fuente (2000) argues these differences are the result of separate artistic “schools” at the two sites, comparing the broad range of human, animal, and composite figures and “impersonal

geometricism of La Venta climax art…to the compact naturalistic style [and humanistic representations characteristic] of San Lorenzo” (2000: 258). La Venta further stands out for its dramatically intensified use of jadeite/greenstone objects7. Tomb C in Mound A-3 contained, for example, over 150 greenstone objects (ranging from celts to beads to earspools); and Massive Offering 1 in Complex A contained more than 1,000 tons of serpentine blocks (Diehl 2004: 72-73).

The large, complex Late to Terminal Formative site of Tres Zapotes is located along the far western border of Olman in the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin (Pool et al.

2010: 95). The city lies northwest of the intriguing site of Laguna de los Cerros and its outlier Llano de Jícaro, the location of an apparent stone-working workshop (Gillespie

2000). Although Tres Zapotes achieved its urban-center status around 400 BC (Diehl

2004: 46), Calzadas Carved and Limón Carved-Incised ceramics recovered from stratigraphically secure deposits within Tres Zapotes’ Arroyo group indicate the site was occupied by at least 1500 – 1000 BC (calibrated) (Pool et al. 2010: 95). These typically

Olmec-style ceramic types account for just 1% of Arroyo phase sherds at the site, however, which seems to suggest “that relative frequency of…Olmec decorative styles at

Tres Zapotes [was] in line with such distant [outlier] sites as Canton Corralito…[rather] than…the much closer site of San Lorenzo” (98). Pool et al. further date Tres Zapotes’

Olmec-style monumental sculpture8 to the early years of the Middle Formative, predating the city’s height by some four centuries.9

7 Archaeologists once believed that the pan-Mesoamerican cosmological significance of greenstone found its roots in the ideology of the La Venta Olmec. Discoveries of greenstone caches at San Lorenzo, and even earlier at El Manatí (Ortiz and Carmen Rodriguez 2000), however, have put this erroneous assumption to rest. The sheer volume of greenstone artifacts recovered from secure deposits at La Venta nevertheless suggests an intensification of greenstone use that is unique to this Middle Formative center. 8 Some art historians – notably, George Kubler (1962) and Beatriz de la Fuente (1977) – have argued that the monumental sculpture of Tres Zapotes falls outside the bounds of Olmec-style art – particularly the so-

Tres Zapotes’ reached its height in the Late and Terminal Formative, and by that time is considered archaeologically “epi-Olmec” rather than “pure” Olmec in its occupation. The Late Formative site was comprised of “three clusters of modest-sized mounds surrounded by at least 100 small house mounds” (Diehl 2004: 182; Pool 2007) and its epi-Olmec materials include stelae and flattened altars in local and foreign styles

(including the geographically-distant Izapan style). Beginning around 200 AD (the beginning of the region’s “Classic Veracruz” period), a clear shift in regional influence from Tres Zapotes to the proximal site of Cerro de las Mesas occurs (Pool 2007).

Interestingly, and to foreshadow Chapter 8, the extensive, Isthmian-inscribed La Mojarra

Stela 1 was recovered from the banks of the Acula River (Winfield Capitaine 1988), which runs between Cerro de las Mesas and Tres Zapotes. Cerro de las Mesas itself contains several late, Classic period Isthmian inscriptions, but little is known about the site of La Mojarra. Sergio Vásquez Zárate and Richard Diehl explored its artificial mounds by magnetrometry in 1995 and uncovered only scattered ceramic remains (Diehl et al. 1997).

called Tres Zapotes “colossal heads” that are dwarfed by their San Lorenzo and La Venta cousins. Rather than placing these heads in a cultural-artistic tradition separate from Olmec-style works, I believe it is more fruitful to ground their smaller size and angular design within the context of a secondary, peripheral center participating in a relatively loose artistic tradition that stretched over miles of the Mexican gulf coastal plain. 9 It is a notoriously difficult task to date monumental sculptures, unless they bear calendrical inscriptions. Pool et al. (2010) date the nine Olmec-style monuments at Tres Zapotes through art historical and sociological considerations (for example, “we doubt that community leaders of the Arroyo phase…had the authority or labor reserves to carve and transport” such works) (100).

Chapter 3: Evidence of Olmec-style Writing

Of the four scriptorial traditions explored here, the Olmec-style is by far the least well-understood, the most diverse, and the most under-represented in the epigraphic corpus. Inscriptions are frequently short, often controversial, and always enigmatic.

These inscriptions are linked by few unifying traits – a chronological and spatial attribution to Olmec settlements throughout the Gulf Coast region; iconographic elements that index motifs found in Olmec-style portable, monumental and parietal art; and, in some but not all cases, similarity to one another. Objects displaying Olmec-style inscriptions have been excavated from good archaeological contexts (the San Andres Seal and Greenstone Plaque and the La Venta obsidian blade and core), tracked in private collections (the Humbolt Celt), and discovered in disturbed contexts by both professionals and non-professionals alike (La Venta Monument 13, La Venta Altar 7, the

Oxtotitlan Paintings, and the Cascajal Block). Known objects displaying Olmec-style glyphs or iconoglyphs are listed in Table 1, below. Where needed, illustrations of objects and inscriptions will be included within the text for direct reference – unless otherwise noted, all drawings are the author’s own.

The first widely known (but not oldest) example of hieroglyphic writing in Olman appears on Monument 13 at La Venta [Figure 1]. La Venta Monument 13 was erected in the final phase of construction at the site and likely dates to 600 – 400 BC, based upon ceramic association and typology (Drucker 1952). This large carved bolder may, therefore, be contemporaneous with or slightly older than the Danzante orthostats of

Monte Albán (see Chapter 6). Monument 13 depicts a striding male figure wearing a

banded loincloth, woven headdress, tasseled sandals, and jewelry ornaments on his wrists, neck, and nose. The figure carries a sharp handled object in his proper left hand – perhaps a weapon or agricultural apparatus – and is flanked by four glyphic elements. An isolated pictogram of a foot appears on his left, and a three-glyph vertical sequence appears on his right. Stephen Houston considers this right-hand sequence to be the oldest evidence of columnar inscription in Mesoamerica (2004: 276).

Figure 1: La Venta Monument 13 (redrawn from Smithsonian Olmec Legacy Archives photograph, Houston 2004 and Diehl 2004).

Glyphs A1 and A2 are severely eroded; therefore, only their general outline can be securely reconstructed. A3, however, appears to depict an avian head; the beak is oriented to the right and mimics the orientation/movement of the central figure himself.

This right-facing orientation is notable for several reasons. Early Mesoamerican texts from outside the Olmec-style tradition (as well as their concomitant visual aids) are typically oriented to the left (cf. Monte Albán Danzante MA-D-55; the Dumbarton Oaks

Jade Pectoral; and Tres Zapotes Stela C). Among hieroglyphic traditions cross-culturally

– from ancient Egypt to the Classic Maya – facial orientation typically indicates reading order, with human, beast, and fantastic heads facing into the reader’s line of sight

(Montgomery 2002: 40; Houston 2010). Although this truism is far from concrete and isolated cases of reversed reading order are not unheard of (cf. Yaxchilan Lintel 21), glyphs that typically face the reader reveal “there is almost a conceit—and perhaps a perceived reality—of social interaction between the reader and the sign” (Houston 2010).

Instances of right-facing Olmec-style glyphic orientation, furthermore, are not limited to

La Venta Monument 13 (see discussion of the San Andres Seal below and the Cascajal

Block in Chapter 4; for Isthmian inscriptions, see the Chapter 8 entry on La Mojarra Stela

1). A right-facing orientation, again, does not demand a right-to-left reading order, but it is a possibility that must be addressed and therefore will be discussed in more detail below.

Table 1: Olmec-style inscriptions.

Location Object Cascajal The Cascajal Block San Andres Seal (or Roller Stamp) Greenstone Plaque La Venta Monument 13 Altar 7 Obsidian Blade Obsidian Core Chalcatzingo Monument IV-7 Oxtotitlan Painting 3 Painting A-1 Unprovenienced Humbolt Celt The "Young Lord" Tlatilco Roller Stamps/Sellos

La Venta Altar 7 also contains weathered evidence of hieroglyphic writing from

Middle Formative Olman. Altar 7 depicts a “human face with a duckbill mask” (Pohl,

Pope, and von Nagy 2002: 1986), flanked by a human figure with pebble-like, rectangular glyphs emanating from its mouth. The human/duckbill combination appears

to stretch across time and space in Mesoamerica – from a possible Early Formative human-duck effigy tecomate in Chiapas10 (Rosenswig 2003: Figure 4), to the Terminal

Formative Tuxtla Statuette in the Isthmus (see Chapter 8). The practice of representing speech as smoke and glyphs exiting the mouth, furthermore, is a trope found across

Mesoamerica, from the Maya to the Aztec (Coe and Koontz 2006). A similar trope may even be visible on the first secure, archaeologically excavated example of Olmec-style writing to be recovered: the San Andres seal (Pohl, Pope and von Nagy 2002).

In 2002, at the site of San Andres (located just 5 kilometers northeast of La Venta and, as aforementioned, site to the oldest known occupation within Olman), Mary Pohl,

Kevin Pope, and Christopher von Nagy made one of the most exciting discoveries of the past decade. Pohl et al. uncovered a cylinder seal and two pieces of a greenstone plaque with evidence of Olmec-style hieroglyphic writing. Pohl, Pope, and von Nagy took radiocarbon dates from charcoal samples sealed in the strata that contained the seal and the plaque pieces, as well as from the two strata above their finds. They correlated these radiocarbon dates with the Early Franco ceramic phase materials found in association with the seal and the plaque and produced a calibrated date of approximately 650 BC

(2002: 1984).

The San Andres seal and greenstone plaque fragments [Figure 2] appear to come from a midden laid down during a ritual feasting event. The San Andres greenstone plaque pieces display two complete, rounded, geometric glyphs, as well as tantalizing hints of longer glyphic inscriptions now lost (see below and Chapter 8). The San Andres

10 This vessel, found in a stratified midden at the site of Cuauhtémoc on Chiapas’ Pacific Coast, is attributed to the Locona Phase (1400-1250 BC), which would make it the oldest duck-mask imagery known to date (Rosenswig 2003, 2010).

seal depicts a right-facing bird with wings outspread. Two lines, or “speech scrolls,”11 emanate from the bird’s mouth and lead to two clear, complex glyphic elements.

According to Pohl et al. the San Andres seal

provides evidence for the initial stages of logographic writing in the Middle Formative on the basis of comparisons with Late Formative to Early Classic period Mesoamerican conventions, specifically speech scrolls, cartouche encircling day signs, and paired glyphs composed of grouped elements including affixes and dots as numerals (Pohl, Pope and von Nagy 2002: 1985).

The glyphs on the seal and the greenstone plaque fragments – unlike those on La Venta

Monument 13 and Altar 7 – appear to directly incorporate iconographically Olmec-style elements, including the U-shaped motif, scrolls and brackets, the E-shaped element, and the double merlon. These elements appear on a variety of Olmec-style materials, including the unprovenienced “Young Lord” figurine and the Humbolt Celt, and even more notably in the earliest pars pro toto motifs of the Early Formative period (Cyphers and Di Castro 2009).

Figure 2: (A) San Andres Seal; (B) San Andres Greenstone Plaque Glyph A; (C) San Andres Greenstone Plaque Glyph B. Redrawn from Pohl, Pope and von Nagy (2002).

11 Uncritically describing these linear motifs as “speech scrolls,” however, is both Maya-centric and a stylistic misnomer.

Pohl, Pope and von Nagy (2002) interpret the top glyph of the San Andres cylinder seal as a typically Olmec-style “U” glyph and read the bottom “cartouched” glyph as 3 Ajaw. Their complete translation of the San Andres seal is King 3 Ajaw (2002:

1986), not unlike the interpretation given by Joyce Marcus for the calendrically-derived name on San José Mogote Monument 3 (see Chapter 6). This interpretation has not been widely challenged, and if it is correct, the San Andres seal could be the oldest evidence of the Mesoamerican 260-day calendar round known to date (Stokstad 2002: 1873). As the authors point out, this reading also strengthens Justeson and Mathew’s (1990) hypothesis that Mesoamerican writing began with the association of numerals and calendrical day signs.

The validity of the Pohl et al. translation, however, is questionable – the authors make reference to the two glyphs’ resemblance to both Zapotec and Isthmian glyphic elements, but derive glyphic meaning from resemblance to early Maya inscriptions only.

While the U-shaped bracket is clearly a recurrent motif in Olmec-style art, it is also a rather simple/ubiquitous geometric element. It is true that proto-Maya glyphs for the word Ajaw include this U-shaped bracket (see Pohl, Pope, and von Nagy 2002: 1985,

Fig. L-O), but the U-bracket is arguably more significant within the Isthmian system, as evidenced by the ubiquity of glyphs MS1, MS20, and especially MS141 (Macri and Stark

1993: 1). Furthermore, the resemblance of the second glyph to proto-Maya glyphs for ajaw and to be seated is superficial at best, and a more direct – if equally shallow – similarity could be drawn to MS39 (Macri and Stark 1993: 8).

Lastly, and most significantly, I believe Pohl et al. make a critical error in their assessment of the San Andres seal’s orientation [Figure 3]. The triple-drop, downward-

facing E-shaped element present in both glyphs is a common Olmec-style motif.

Interpreted as a “water element” when read, for example, on the monumental duck basin of San Lorenzo Monument 9 (Coe and Diehl 1980, Figure 433; Taube 1995, 2004), this element is almost always displayed as a capital “E” rotated 90 degrees clockwise. If the glyphs on the San Andres seal are re-oriented in this direction, the glyphs’ “design” (and thus resemblance to any known glyphs) would change considerably. Not insignificantly, this new orientation would also allow for a possible right-to-left reading order, as the numeral in the second glyph block – extrapolating from pan-Mesoamerican hieroglyphic traditions – would need to be read first. This possible right-to-left reading order, furthermore, would then parallel the bird’s own right-facing orientation, and both the text and the image would face into (and communicate with) the reader’s line of sight.

Figure 3: (A) Pohl et al. 2002 San Andres seal orientation; (B) Proposed alternative orientation for the San Andres seal; (C) San Lorenzo Monument 52 (reproduced from Markman and Markman 1990, Plate IV; note headdress “E-elements” and cross-bar motif on chest pectoral).

One might counter that rotating the San Andres seal inscription 90 degrees would place the “E” element in the proper orientation, but in the process upend the U-bracket

above it. Indeed, the presence of the upright U-bracket in Olmec-style art and, significantly, Isthmian glyphic texts is one of clearest, if perhaps most superficial, stylistic link between Olmec-style and Isthmian writing. Evidence from Olmec-style art indicates that the orientation of the U-bracket is somewhat less stable than the orientation of the E element, however. I would also draw one’s attention to a compelling, if isolated,

Middle Formative example of the E element and U bracket placed together and oriented as I propose [Figure 4].

Figure 4: (A) Chalcatzingo Monument 2 (redrawn from Piña Chan 1955: 69) and checked against author photograph; (B) Inset headdress element; (C) San Andres Seal text.

Chalcatzingo Monument 2 is an Olmec-style panel carved into the rock of Cerro

Chalcatzingo, a steep, rocky pass in the Mexican state of Morelos (Grove 2000). The site is, admittedly, located outside of Olman proper (see Chapter 2), but bears discussion in

this comparative analysis. Chalcatzingo Monument 2 is part of a pantheon of Olmec-style carvings at the site of Chalcatzingo (see Chapter 7), and depicts four presumably male figures engaged in a ritual-ceremonial act. The so-called “Marching Olmecs” monument shows three masked Olmec-style figures standing over a bound, de-masked, and naked captive. The figures carry sharp and foliated implements and the scene has alternatively been interpreted as a warfare/conquest or harvest/fertility ritual (Diehl 2004). The headdress/mask of the third “marching” figure, most importantly, contains both a downward oriented E element and a downward oriented U bracket [Figure 4].

The act of “naming” and labeling is intrinsic to hieroglyphic writing systems across Mesoamerica, from the victim on San José Mogote Monument 3, to the possible

Olmec-style glyph(s) on the San Miguel Amuco Stela, to Classic period Maya Primary

Standard Sequences. Signs embedded in headdress elements commonly identify individuals (Kelley 1982; Houston and Stuart 1998), and the iconic elements in the headgear of the Olmec-style Colossal Heads have been interpreted as naming or lineage elements (Diehl and Coe 1995). “The view that these [headdress elements] represent names remains the best possibility, in part because this practice accords with later headdresses among the Maya and the Mixtec” (Houston 2004: 289). The Chalcatzingo

Monument 2 figure is, furthermore, wearing more than a headdress – he is wearing a characteristic Olmec-style deity impersonation mask (Taube 1995). The inset E and U- bracket elements may have served to “label” – if not phonetically, then at least symbolically – the mask’s deity. These glyphic elements may also mark the figure as somehow “different” from the others depicted – indeed, he is the figure bearing down on

the scene’s captive. The downward orientation of the two elements, critically, also matches that proposed for the San Andres seal.

Several other examples of Olmec-style writing are known, but these samples do not appear to have the logographic integrity of the La Venta sculptures and the San

Andres seal. These samples range from the frustratingly simple La Venta obsidian blade, to a collection of clearly Olmec-style geometric roller stamps from the Tlatilco region

(Coe 1965: Fig. 4712; Reilly 1994), to the elaborate Oxtotitlan wall paintings (Grove

2000). It is not clear that these samples meet the criteria of a glottographic system, but they may have signaled clear meaning within an “open” Olmec-style communicative schema – not unlike the pars pro toto Olmec-style motifs inscribed on pottery, laid down on tile floors, and carved into monumental sculpture.

The second glyph on the San Andres greenstone plaque [Figure 5] clearly falls into this liminal space between icon and sign. The round glyph (a double-merlon over parallel lines) appears to be the “head” of a ceremonial bar13 frequently carried by

Olmec-style figures14. Such figures typically hold the ceremonial bar in one hand and a so-called Olmec-style “knuckle-duster” in the other (cf. Taube 2000, Figure 15c, d;

Taube 2004, Plate 12; Diehl 2004, Figure 180). This elite-indexing pairing, most importantly, is immediately recognizable in its full form on the Cascajal Block (glyphs

CS57 and CS58, see Chapter 4). The round double-merlon on the San Andres greenstone plaque, thus, may be disassociated from its “full” iconographic context. Cautiously, the

12 See Gay (1973: 285) for a rollout of a Tlatilco sello with a U-bracket motif and a crossed-bar and dot iconoglyph similar to both the Isthmian glyph MS32 and the proto-Maya Venus glyph. 13 Taube (2004) interprets this object as a maize ear fetish. 14 Unfortunately, most of these designs come from unprovenienced portable greenstone objects; but the ceremonial bar can be clearly seen in many Olmec-style monumental stoneworks, as well.

part – in this case, the glyph – may signal the whole – or the complete, culturally- constituted meaning of the bar/knuckle-duster pairing.

Figure 5: (A) San Andres greenstone plaque glyph; (B) Ceremonial bar/maize fetish from Dumbarton Oaks jade figurine (redrawn from Taube 2004: Plate 12); (C) Ceremonial bar/maize fetish from Chalchuapa Monument 12 (redrawn from Anderson 1978); (D) Cascajal Block glyphs CS57 and CS58.

B C

While it is highly unlikely that archaeologists will ever be able to “translate” such

“open” inscriptions, elements from these samples will play a significant role in my comparison of Olmec-style writing and Mesoamerica’s three younger script systems –

Zapotec, proto-Maya, and Isthmian (see Chapters 6, 7, and 8) Prior to that endeavor, however, one final Olmec-style inscription must be discussed.

Chapter 4: The Cascajal Block

Figure 6: The Cascajal Block Inscription (redrawn from Rodriguez Martinez 2006).

Perhaps the most exciting, and controversial, recent discovery in the field of

Olmec-style writing is the Cascajal block, a serpentine slab incised with 62 clear, individual glyphs [Figure 6]. The Cascajal block was published by what reads like a list of epigraphic heavyweights – Rodríguez Martínez, Ortíz Ceballos, Coe, Diehl, Houston,

Taube and Calderon – in 2006. As a preface to their treatment of the Cascajal block inscription, Rodríguez Martínez et al. dismiss the aforementioned glyphs on the San

Andres cylinder seal and La Venta Monument 13 and Altar 7 as, respectively, “roller-seal

iconography and isolated discontinuous incisions, neither sure to be script” (2006: 1610).

The 36 cm by 21 cm by 13 cm Cascajal block carries an inscription of over 25 unique signs, some of which share clear iconographic similarities with Olmec-style decorative motifs. Rodríguez Martínez et al. hail the Cascajal block and its script for its ability to

“link the Olmec to literacy, document an unsuspected writing system, and reveal a new complexity to [the Olmec] civilization” (1611). Unlike the San Andres seal and the La

Venta monuments, however, the Cascajal block hails from an insecure context; making it a subject of some scholarly skepticism.

Workers mining gravel from a quarry near Lomas de Tacamichapa accidentally discovered the Cascajal block in 1999. The gravel quarry, a source of road construction fill for the municipality of Jáltipan, Veracruz, covers the archaeological site that the

Insituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) labeled “Cascajal.” The Cascajal archaeological site (four man-made mounds visible from the salt dome of San Lorenzo) has Classic period surface deposits and frequently turns up archaeological material in the course of gravel removal. According to Maria del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez and

Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos, the first archaeologists to view the Cascajal block

during the destruction of the mound from which the serpentine block came, a number of ceramic sherds, clay figurine fragments, and broken artifacts of ground stone were collected by the local workmen (Rodríguez Martínez 2006: 1611) and housed by Cástulo Gabriel Cruz, the local authority for cultural materials. Although these materials have not been published15, Rodríguez Martínez et al. (2006) assert that three-fourths of the material is Formative, and of that portion, “all but two or three sherds of the Formative period can be positively identified as belonging to the San Lorenzo

15 Although no Olmec-style motifs appear on these ceramic materials, the collection does include the differentially-fired ceramic type characteristic of the San Lorenzo Phase at San Lorenzo (Jeffrey Blomster, personal communication).

phase” (1611). These aberrant sherds date to the Palangana phase – contemporaneous with and characteristic of the height of La Venta. Interestingly, the remaining fourth of artifacts are Fine Orange ceramics that date to the Terminal Classic Villa Alta phase. As

Rodríguez Martínez et al. explain, the Villa Alta phase is common throughout the

Coatzacoalcos drainage and, in fact, covers earlier deposits at the nearby urban center of

San Lorenzo. It seems likely, therefore, that the Cascajal block dates to the Formative era, and perhaps most clearly and stunningly, the Early Formative San Lorenzo Horizon.

As an unexcavated artifact, the Cascajal block should, of course, be treated with some degree of caution. Uncritically declaring this potentially game-changing artifact a fake, however, does a severe disservice to the potential significance of the find. In the wake of the Cascajal block’s publication in Science, Karen O. Bruhns and Nancy L.

Kelker sent a “letter of concern” to the journal. Among other miscellaneous concerns16,

Bruhns and Kelker question the artifact’s lack of context and supposedly “unusual” form and glyphic orientation. The authors argue “known Mesoamerican writing systems are written either vertically or linearly (or a combination of the two, as in Maya glyph blocks); they do not randomly “bunch” glyphs as on the Cascajal block” (2007: 1365).

Bruhns and Kelker’s critique falls prey to that most insidious epigraphic trap – mapping the conventions of better-understood writing systems onto unfamiliar ones. Avoiding this trap is not even solely the burden of epigraphers: the tendency can also be seen in retroactive archaeological interpretation. Flannery and Marcus (2003: 6), for example,

16 I do agree with one of Bruhns and Kelker’s concerns: Rodríguez Martínez et al. assert that the Cascajal block may have been used as an erasable, revisable document (2006: 1612). Their only evidence to support this hypothesis is the block’s “carefully ground” surface. I believe it is much more likely that this surface was ground to remove imperfections in the block and create a polished surface for the current inscription. Rather than the highly prized, hard serpentine of the Cascajal block, less valuable and less difficult to work materials may have been better suited for such proposed “revisable” documentation.

rejected Ann Cypher’s (1997) interpretation of the Red Palace at San Lorenzo as an elite residence primarily because the structure’s packed red sand floor, thick earthen walls, and basalt benches and drains (98) did not conform to later elite residence precepts from the

Zapotec and Maya regions.

If the Cascajal block truly dates to the San Lorenzo Horizon, as I believe it does, it would be the earliest known example of writing in Mesoamerica. Even if it dates to the end of the San Lorenzo phase, its discovery would push hieroglyphic inscription back almost three centuries. Why should this pioneering Olmec-style script, then, conform to the directional conventions of scripts five centuries in the making? True, the glyphs on the Cascajal block are not perfectly linear, but neither are they randomly strewn across the surface of the block. While opinions still vary about the proper directionality of the

Cascajal text (see below), there are clear sequences and groupings of glyphs on the block.

Several lines of evidence, further, support the artifact’s authenticity. In addition to the associated ceramic evidence (though of course this, too, lacks secure archaeological context), high-resolution photography and magnification at twenty times the naked eye revealed “unmistakable weathering, including pitting over incisions, with mineralization around the pits and inside the carved lines, a secure sign of ancient surface alteration”

(Rodríguez Martínez et al. 2006: 1612). These weathering patterns have assuaged at least some of the authentication concerns of more prominent archaeologists, like David Grove, who was originally dubious of the text’s apparent horizontal, rather than vertical columnar alignment (Cook 2006).

Several of the Cascajal glyphs, furthermore, fit snugly within the Olmec-style iconographic pantheon. CS2 (under the Rodríguez Martínez numbering system), for

example, displays a characteristically Olmec-style brow-cleft; and CS28 resembles an

Olmec jadeite “spoon” like those found in burial caches in La Venta, as well as the

“knuckle-dusters” held by Olmec-style figures on carved greenstone and ceramics (cf.

Diehl 2004: 180, Fig. 128). CS35 resembles an Olmec-style altar with an inverted U- band/sky-band; CS33 could be a bloodletting needle. Perhaps most strikingly, CS57 matches the ceremonial bars carried by Olmec-style figures on Chalchuapa Monument 12

(see Chapter 3), and the analogous CS4 strongly resembles the bar held by the masked figure of San Miguel Amuco Monument 1.

I agree with Rodríguez Martínez et al. that the orientation of the Cascajal text appears self-evident – the bifurcated, vegetal clefts of CS2, CS24, and CS52 likely point up, as clefts do throughout Olmec-style art, and the altar-thrones of CS19 and CS35 likely have a horizontal orientation. In 2009, however, David Mora-Marín revealed a highly publicized, alternative reading order in Latin American Antiquity (for a powerful refutation, see Houston 2010). Mora-Marín critiques Rodríguez Martínez et al.’s reliance on the iconicity of glyphs to establish text orientation, and instead employs what he calls a “structural analysis” (403) to determine the text’s reading format and order. Mora-

Marín argues for a bottom-to-top and left-to-right reading order, beginning with CS50 and ending with CS1. Because a bottom-to-top reading order would be quite anomalous among Mesoamerican writing systems, Mora-Marín suggests that if the Cascajal block is rotated 90-degrees clockwise (again, from the Rodriguez Martínez orientation), a more conventional top-to-bottom and left-to-right orientation might be employed. For this unusual orientation to work, however, “there would need to be a radical disconnect between representational conventions and the signs that securely descend from Olmec

imagery” (Houston 2010; see footnote 17). Mora-Marín (2009) attempts to support his hypothesis with an analysis of the Cascajal block’s empty spaces (400-401), recurrent glyph sequences within (401-403), and spatial distribution. Two fundamental weaknesses

(that go unmentioned by Houston 2010) further undermine Mora-Marín’s thesis, however.

First, even Mora-Marín admits that the recurrent glyph sequences he outlines within his paper are equally well displayed in a bottom-to-top or a right-to-left reading order (although the validity of Mora-Marín’s repeated sequences is itself questionable

(Houston 2010)). More importantly, the same could be said for the “couplets” proposed by Rodriguez Martínez et al. – opening couplets in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom format maintain their association but become closing couplets in a right-to-left, top-to-bottom format. Second, despite Mora-Marín’s strong critique of Rodriguez Martínez et al.

(2002) for “simply assuming a pattern” (Mora-Marín 2009: 397), Mora-Marín himself dismisses a possible right-to-left reading order with a tenuous interpretation of the

Cascajal block’s “blank spaces.” A right-to-left reading order, Mora-Marín claims,

“would require that lines #2 and #1 would start with a significant gap on the margins,” a format he regards as less likely than his proposed bottom-to-top orientation (403).

While I am highly skeptical of Mora-Marín’s proposed reading order, I appreciate his critique of the lack of explanation behind several of Rodríguez Martínez et al.’s glyphic interpretations. For example, Rodriguez Martínez et al. admit

reading order is more difficult to establish [than text orientation]. Most Mesoamerican scripts read left to right in unmarked conditions, i.e. when not arranged in unusual architectural settings. Left to right is likely to be present here, too. Yet, there is no strong evidence of overall organization. The sequences appear to be conceived as independent units of information, although to judge

from shared details of carving they were recorded by the same hand (Rodríguez Martínez et al. 2006: 1612).

Yet the authors (and David Mora-Marín, for that matter) assume a left-to-right reading order with little to no explanation for their reasoning. No faces appear in the text, and inferences based on the directionality of CS1 – the legged-bug sign – are structurally weak17 (Skidmore 2006: 4). Until a cognate of CS1 is found in an Olmec-style inscription that also contains with a human/fantastic head glyph, I believe it is equally plausible that a bug glyph could be oriented either “legs first” or “back first” and still remain “forward- facing” (although I agree with Houston 2010 that a legs up, dead bug orientation is highly unlikely).

To be clear, I do not wish to argue that a right-to-left, top-to-bottom reading order is more clearly supported by the Cascajal text than a left-to-right, or even bottom-to-top, reading order. In fact, I do not believe there is enough evidence on the Cascajal block to support either a left-to-right or a right-to-left reading order. What I wish to do, instead, is push back at some of the underlying assumptions that pervade both Rodriguez Martínez et al. (2006) and Mora-Marín (2009) [Figure 7]. As an academic exercise, then, I will address two of the issues raised by Mora-Marín in support of his bottom-to-top, left-to- right reading order.

17 Skidmore (2006: 4), for example, muses that a 90-degree counter-clockwise rotation (from the Rodríguez Martínez orientation) would place CS1 in a more “naturalistic” pose, with the bug’s feet “touching” a horizontal ground-line. Such an orientation would, however, rotate more securely-understood glyphs onto their sides – an unlikely orientation that defies Occam’s Razor.

Figure 7: The Cascajal Block inscription. (A) Rodríguez Martínez et al. 2006 orientation; (B) Mora-Marín 2009 orientation.

A B

First, one could argue that the “gaps” left along the right-hand margin of the

Cascajal block (see Mora-Marín 2009: 400, Fig. 5) are not the result of the Cascajal scribe moving left-to-right, finishing a line, and then beginning anew on the next line above. These margins could, alternatively, be indicative of a right-handed scribe resting his or her hand on the right margin of the slab, carving the text into the serpentine block from the right to the left. This interpretation is, of course, clearly speculative; but its intent is to underscore the ambiguity of the Cascajal Block’s reading order. Second, I strongly agree with one of Mora-Marín’s reviewers that

there is a very clear clue in the inscription itself that the order is top-bottom. Compare the top line and the bottom lines. The top line has signs that are generally a bit larger and plenty of space is left between them. In the bottom line signs are crammed together. Clearly the scribe must have started out at the top and ended at the bottom, where he began to run out of space (Mora-Marín 2009: 403).

Evidence of such “bunching” and “crowding” in long glyphic and/or artistic sequences can be seen throughout Mesoamerica – from jadeite pectorals to hieroglyphic cylinder

vases to stone carvings such as Yaxchilan Lintel 10. Mora-Marín asserts that it is equally plausible that the scribe began his/her inscription bunching the glyphs together and then spread the glyphs out as it became apparent “there was going to be enough room for all the signs” (403), but I disagree. It seems more plausible – though of course not certain or verifiable – that a scribe trained in the Cascajal tradition might “run of space” than select a valuable, carefully prepared block of serpentine potentially “too small” for his or her task.

Independent of format and reading order, does the Cascajal block represent a semasiographic or a glottographic hieroglyphic script? I believe it represents a mix of the two, with a tendency toward “openness” rather than “closedness.” Clear repetitions of glyphic passages, as well as patterned dispersal of these sequences throughout the text, seem to indicate an adherence to some sort of grammatical – i.e. lingual – precepts

[Figure 8]. CS1 and CS2 (the legged-bug and vegetal cleft glyphs) appear as a repeated pair three times in the text; CS2 is further associated with CS25 on two occasions. CS7 and CS8 (the maize cob and starburst-feather glyphs) are paired twice in the text.

Depending upon the Cascajal block’s reading order, the CS1/CS2 and CS7/CS8 couplets may be clause-initial or clause-terminal phrases. The standardization of such glyphic patterns is typically taken as evidence for an underlying grammatical structure; although of course only more samples of Cascajal script will tell for sure. Both Rodriguez

Martínez et al. (2006) and Mora-Marín (2009) agree, however that the Cascajal text is likely tied to a spoken-language system rather than simply pictographic in nature.

Figure 8. (A) Cascajal Block signary (reproduced from Rodriguez Martínez 2006); (B) (C) (D) Repeated Cascajal Block glyph sequences/“couplets” (redrawn from Rodriguez Martinez 2006 – note that Mora- Marín’s more tenuous repeated sequences are excluded here).

The Olmec-style text on the Cascajal block is certainly too lengthy and complex to fit snugly into Houston’s conceptualization of open versus closed systems (2004: 275) and the remaining Olmec-style inscriptions are truncated (the San Andres greenstone plaque), enigmatic (the La Venta obsidian blade), and, at times, indistinguishable from non-glyphic inscriptions (the Young Lord statue). The clarity of the Olmec-style elements within the Cascajal text, as well those in the inscription on the San Andres seal, however, index at least a certain degree of openness within this early glyphic system. Initial skepticism surrounding the Cascajal block stemmed, in part, from the almost “too- perfect” inclusion of Olmec-style glyphic elements within the text. Even a novice in the field of Mesoamerican art and archaeology would recognize (at the very least) the vegetal cleft glyph as “Olmec-style.” Rather than provoking skepticism, this visual overlap

should instead be treated as a pivotal insight into the development of writing in Formative

Mesoamerica.

An Early Formative citizen of Olman – fluent in the strong visual imagery of

Olmec-style art and iconography, particularly the pars pro toto tradition – would be especially primed to “read” the text on Cascajal block. The iconicity of the Olmec-style text could, perhaps, even traverse cosmographical space and time. To a degree, the text would be “legible” to populations conversant in the Olmec style from Chalchuapa and

Takalik Abaj in the southeast, to Cantón Corralito in the Soconusco region, to Tres

Zapotes in Olman’s western hinterland, and the growing Zapotec settlements to the west in the Valley of Oaxaca (Sharer 1974, 1989; Blomster 2004; Clark 2007; Pool et al.

2010). If the Olmec-style script system is, thus, both glottographic and semi-open, what language does it encode and how does it relate to subsequent open and closed writing systems across Mesoamerica? The former question will be explored in Chapter 5, and the latter discussed more fully in Chapters 6, 7, and 8.

Rodríguez Martínez et al. conclude that the Cascajal block “bears no secure links to later Isthmian writing…and its formal distinction from all later scripts mean[s] that the trajectory of the Cascajal system recalls the obsolescence experienced by the Indus script” (2006: 1613). I believe, however, that a more nuanced interpretation of the

Olmec-style system is required. Perhaps the Cascajal block represents an intermediate step between a system of semasiography (note CS7, the maize ear) and a glottographic system that attempts to record the sounds of language. Perhaps the Olmec-style system was a first experimental step in the development of ancient New World writing, and its influence stems more from its inchoate existence than its direct evolutionary parentage of

any known subsequent scripts. It is exceedingly unlikely that archaeologists and epigraphers will ever be able to “read” the text of the Cascajal block, although perhaps new finds of a similar style or of later Olmec-style inscriptions will yield more clues. It is the Cascajal block’s simple existence, in conjunction with the San Andres finds, and not its potential legibility, however, that is revolutionary. When the Cascajal block and the

Olmec-style script are situated into a deep understanding of the nature and distribution of early Mesoamerican scripts, a new understanding of the pervasive role of the Olmec in the development of Mesoamerican culture comes to light.

Chapter 5: The Mixe-Zoquean Hypothesis

Any discussion of, or decipherment put forth for, Mesoamerican writing systems must, by necessity, include a discussion of the languages spoken in the region. What language(s) did the peoples of Olman speak? Was linguistic uniformity consistent across sites at each level of the stratified Olmec site hierarchy; or was it limited to urban city- centers and their surrounding hamlets? Did dialectic and/or cultural differences exist between that most famous triumvirate of Olmec cities, San Lorenzo, La Venta, and Tres

Zapotes? Over three thousand years separate modern archaeologists and epigraphers from the “Olmec” peoples of Olman, and the extant corpus of Olmec-style writing is not nearly expansive enough to internally signal a particular branch of the Mesoamerican linguistic language. As Kent Flannery (1982: 275) famously penned, “archaeology is the only branch of anthropology where we kill our informants in the process of studying them.” In the case of Formative era epigraphy, our informants are, furthermore, mute – language, unless codified in a recognizable hieroglyphic system, does not preserve in the archaeological record. Students of Formative era writing must therefore look outside of our own discipline for tools that may help to reconstruct ancient linguistic affiliation.

The most likely candidate for cross-disciplinary pollination, for logical reasons, is the field of ethnographic and historical linguistics. In the field of historical linguistics, the spatial distribution and relatedness of modern spoken languages are used to reconstruct linguistic-phylogenetic trees and predict linguistic divergence deep into the past (Renfrew

2000). Unfortunately, the application of lexicostatistics, glottochronology, and time-depth analyses to questions of archaeological linguistics can be highly speculative and

controversial. At the most basic level, very few archaeologists are also fully trained linguists, and like any case of cross-disciplinary borrowing, the specific mechanisms behind the foreign discipline’s methodologies are often poorly understood (see Watson,

LeBlanc and Redman 1971). Some archaeologists, as well as linguistic anthropologists, reject classical linguistics’ genetic-evolutionary model of language (a fundamental assumption to linguistic study at large), arguing that language cannot be modeled on

Darwinian principles. Still others express a logical concern about the great time depth required for archaeological-linguistic inquiry. This last point is particularly salient to the question of Olmec spoken language, as over three millennia separate modern linguists, epigraphers and archaeologists from their “test subjects.”

Although these concerns are not unfounded, some ring a bit stridently of a disciplinary superiority complex. A healthy amount of skepticism should of course greet the entrance of historical linguistic theory into the archaeological field; and whenever possible, historical linguistics should be held up against the archaeological record for support or refutation. Such crosschecking, however, is not always possible; and at this time, it is not available for the question of Olmec linguistic affiliation. In response to the critics of historical linguistics’ entrance into the Formative writing debate, I would make an analogy from within the anthropological discipline itself. The behaviors, patterns and strategies employed by Paleolithic hunter-(scavenger)-gatherers preserve only ephemerally in the archaeological record. While it is obvious that modern hunter-gatherer groups such as the Ache of the Amazon and the !Kung San of the Kalahari are no more the isolated “pristine” descendants of ancient hunter-gatherers than the businesswomen of the New York Stock Exchange or the rice farmers of rural China, these groups are

nevertheless employed by biological anthropologists to model possible ancient human behaviors (Hrdy 1999; Bribiescas 2008; Gray and Anderson 2010). If general analogies18 to modern hunter-gatherer groups are not employed, how else might biological anthropologists model the “invisible” behaviors of our hominin ancestors? In that same vein, if New World archaeologists do not employ, or at least invite, historical linguistic inquiry into archaeological topics, how else might we model the languages spoken by

Formative era peoples?

The primary investigations into the linguistic affiliation of the Formative era

Olmec come from Lyle Campbell, John Justeson, Terrence Kaufman, and Søren

Wichmann, and depend heavily upon lexicostatistics – or the statistical presence of loan words across language families (Campbell and Justeson 1976) – glottochronology (Guy

1980; Justeson and Kaufman 1993, 1997) and historical time-depth in linguistic development (Wichmann 1995). Campbell and Justeson were the first to directly posit a

Mixe-Zoquean linguistic affiliation for the Olmec; and since the publication of their pioneering and controversial 1976 American Antiquity article “A Linguistic Look at the

Olmecs,” archaeologists have tended to cite and reference mainly Justeson’s work when discussing a possible Mixe-Zoquean affiliation. Justeson’s archaeologically focused publications (perhaps because they are, in truth, journal articles and thus constrained in time and space) tend to be methodologically obtuse and light on explication (see Chapter

8). In fact, I believe the general dissatisfaction with the Mixe-Zoquean hypothesis expressed by some within the anthropological community stems from the fact that

Justeson neither explains his methodology for reconstructing loan-word lists nor

18 Of course, the analogies employed in this case are general rather than direct (as may be made, with caution, when studying directly descendant populations of pre-historic groups – such as the modern Maya of the Yucatan).

substantiates his glottochronological estimates with transparent lines of evidence. This is not to imply that Justeson and Kaufman’s work is fundamentally flawed. With a few minor exceptions, indeed, most of Justeson and Kaufman’s work is substantiated by

Søren Wichmann’s significantly more detailed and refreshingly cautious sketch of the

Mixe-Zoquean language family in The Relationship Among the Mixe-Zoquean

Languages of Mexico (1995).

To set the stage for Justeson’s hypothesis that “the archaeological Olmecs, at least in part, may have been speakers of Mixe-Zoquean languages” (Justeson and Kaufman

1976: 80), I will begin with a brief overview of the history of modern Mixe-Zoquean linguistic analysis. This will include an outline of the traits of the Mixe-Zoquean language family, the geographic distribution of its modern dialects (several have gone extinct within the last century), and a reconstruction of the Mixe-Zoquean linguistic tree.

For the Mixe-Zoquean linguistic tree I will defer to Wichmann’s “splitting” approach

(1995: 10) over Justeson and Kaufman’s “lumping” approach (2004), although the two are quite similar, as I believe Wichmann’s phylogenetic tree provides a clearer picture of the development of the Mixe branch of Mixe-Zoquean [Figure 9]. Although Stephen

Houston cites one of the primary issues in linguistic inquiry as the “use of biological metaphors, including ‘offshoot,’ ‘descendant,’ ‘branches,’ ‘descend’ and ‘co-evolved”

(Houston 2004: 279), when reviewing these phylogenetic trees it is important to remember that

a [linguistic] phylogenetic tree not only represents a reconstruction, but also an idealization, of [a language’s] historical development. It is composed of dots and lines that seemingly only delineate paralinguistic nodes. Languages, however, are not nodes: they are continuous traditions of particular ways of speaking. What these nodes represent, rather, are the linguistic conditions that correspond to the phonological, grammatical and lexical inventories of the languages that run

beneath the nodes; i.e. they represent the hypothetical linguistic state of a language immediately prior to its fragmentation into two or more descendant branches19 (Wichmann, Beliaev, and Davletshin N.d.: 3 [emphasis in original]).

Thus, just as conscientious archaeologists are careful to distinguish between archaeological cultures and the once living cultures they represent, linguists – if not always explicitly – do delineate between a “proto-language and the ‘real’ language which a proto-language is seen as representing” (Wichmann 2003: 321). “Real” languages do exhibit all the vibrancy and mutability that Houston describes (2004); the “genetic” terminology of phylogenetic trees and proto-languages20 are instead helpful methodological constructs that result from the application of the linguistic comparative method.

Chiapas Zoque and Midland Mixe were first recognized as related linguistic systems around the turn of the 20th century (Wichmann 1995). By the mid-century, linguists had postulated a division between Soteapan Zoque, Texistepec Zoque, and

Chiapas Zoque on one branch, and Oluta Popoluca, Sayula Popoluca, and Oaxacan

Mixean on the other (Foster 1943). William Wonderly published the first study of modern “Mixe-Zoquean” (an overview of its phonemic and monophonemic correspondences) in 1946. Three years later, Wonderly attempted the first classification of the Mixe-Zoquean language family (Wonderly 1949), but Wonderly committed a fatal error “in applying the methods of dialectology to the family as a whole without first

19 Author translation. Original text: un árbol genealógico no solo representa una reconstrucción, pero también una idealización de un desarrollo histórico. Se compone de puntos y líneas aparentemente solo sirven paraligar los puntos. Sin embargo, lenguas no son puntos, sino que tradiciones continuas de formas de hablar. Lo que representan los nudos son estados linguísticos que corresponden a inventarios fonológicos, gramaticales y lexicales que se pueden reconstruir a partir de las lenguas que se encuentran debajo de los nudos; es decir, representan el estado linguístico hipotético de una lengua justamente antes de su fragmentación en dos o más descendientes19 (Wichmann, Beliaev, and Davletshin N.d.: 3). 20 When compared to a “real” language (eLg), a “proto-language” (pLg) is considered to be both impoverished (excluding items innovated or retained by just one dialect) and anachronistic (collapsing ancient innovations with items innovated both before and after the eLg) (Wichmann 2003: 321).

[applying] the Stammbaum model”21 (Wichmann 1995: 151). In effect, he addressed the

Mixe-Zoquean family as a whole, without reference to potential subgroups and thus temporal considerations. Fieldwork completed in the early 1960s added to the body of knowledge on Mixe-Zoquean dialects – particularly Gulf Zoque and innovations unique to Sierra Popoluca – and led Norman Nordell (1962) and Terrence Kaufman (1963) to publish new phylogenetic trees for the Mixe-Zoquean family. In the last two decades, the

Nordell and Kaufman classifications of the 1960s were revised and updated by both

Nordell and Wichmann (1995) [Figure 8] and Kaufman and Justeson (2004) to produce two fairly similar classificatory schemes22.

Figure 9. (A) Mixe-Zoquean Linguistic Tree; (B) Regional Dialect Chart (redrawn from Wichmann 1995).

21 The Stammbaum model of linguistic change states “that every language is a direct descendant of an earlier language, from which it has preserved some features and lost or changed others…every language exhibits both innovations and retentions in comparison to some earlier stage” (Cysouw 2006: 232). 22 Perhaps the most significant difference between the two Mixe-Zoquean phylogenetic classifications is that Kaufman places Sayula Popoluca and Oaxaca Mixean together in a subgroup of Mixean, while Wichmann has Sayula Popoluca and Oaxaca Mixean no more closely related to each other than they are to Oluta Popoluca and Tapachultec” (Cysouw 2006: 230).

MIXEAN OXACA MIXEAN North Highland Mixe (Totontepec) South Highland Mixe Core (Tlahuitoltepec, Ayutla, Tamazulapan Fringe (Tepuxtepec, Tepantlali, Mixistlán) Midland Mixe North Midland Mixe (Jaltepec, Puxmetacan, Matamoros, Cotzocón) South Midland Mixe (Juquila, Cacalotepec) Lowland Mixe (Camotlán, San José El Paraíso/Coatlán, Mazatlán, Guichicovi) Tapachulteco Sayula Popoluca Oluta Popoluca ZOQUEAN GULF ZOQUEAN Soteapan Zoque (Sierra Popoluca) Texistepec Zoque (Texistepec Popoluca) Ayapa Zoque Chimalapa (Oaxaca) Zoque San María Chimalapa San Miguel Chimalapa Chiapas Zoque North (Magdalena = Francisco León) Northeast A. (Tapalapa, Ocotepec, Pantepec, Rayón) (San Bartolomé) B. (Chapultenango, Oxolotán) Central (Copainalá, Tecpatán, Ostuacán) South (Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Ocozocuautla)

Legend: MAIN DIVISION; SUBGROUP; Language; Dialect area; (Dialect)

The extant Mixe-Zoquean languages are spoken throughout the Isthmus of

Tehuantepec, in the Mexican states of Tabasco, Veracruz, Chiapas and Oaxaca [Figure

10]. This distribution roughly follows the distribution of Olmec sites and sites containing

Olmec-style materials in the Formative period. Approximately 120,000 people speak the seven remaining Mixe-Zoquean languages today, and the family also has several extinct branches, including the language of “Tapachultec Mixe…spoken in southeast Chiapas near the Pacific coast and the border with Guatemala” (Cysouw et al. 2006: 227), not far from the Terminal Classic site of Izapa (see Chapter 9). Although these geographic alignments are visually compelling, they should be treated with equal parts interest and caution. While some linguistically-related populations can display extended geographic permanence (for example, modern Maya-speaking peoples), others continuously move across the landscape (for example, Lenca-speakers and Pipil-speakers).

Figure 10. Modern distribution of the Mixe Zoquean languages (reproduced from Wichmann 1995: xx).

A basic assumption of historical linguistics is that all languages change, although they do so “in different ways and at different rates due to various factors, both internal and external, which are essentially unpredictable” (Cysouw et al. 2006: 226). The comparative method – analysis that relies on shared innovations (generally cognates) to establish family subgroupings – is used to reconstruct the relationships between descendant members of a language family. Although historical linguists acknowledge inherent flaws in the comparative method23, if the independent application of the

23 The two “traps” of the comparative method are the symplesiomorphy trap and the proportionality trap: respectively, the difficulty of distinguishing between symplesiomorphies – shared retentions – and

comparative method results in similar organizational conclusions (as occurs with the

Mixe-Zoquean language family), a fair degree of control can be assumed.

One significant difference between the Kaufman and Wichmann linguistic studies can be seen in the scholars’ different reconstructions of several proto-Mixe-Zoquean roots and terms. When establishing lists of cognates across languages and dialects, “only a portion of these can justifiably be considered reflexes of proto-roots” (Cysouw 2006:

244). Wichmann (1995) follows the general principle that potential proto-roots must be securely attested for in two Mixean languages and two Zoquean languages, a criterion that attempts to weed out cases of internal borrowing. Kaufman and Justeson’s (2004) methodology is not clear, but Wichmann (1995) and Cysouw et al. (2006) believe

Kaufman’s reconstruction of proto-Mixe-Zoquean is skewed and inflated with Zoquean proto-roots mislabeled as proto-Mixe-Zoquean roots. The authors argue that items present in one or two Zoquean languages, but just one Mixean language (most commonly, Sayula Popoluca) should be designated as proto-Zoquean rather than proto-

Mixe-Zoquean. These is because shared cognates may be the result of a high degree of linguistic exchange between Sayula Popoluca speakers and Zoquean speaking neighbors, rather than shared linguistic ancestry from a proto-Mixe-Zoquean root. This potential over-inflation should be kept in mind when reviewing Kaufman’s glottochronological dates (Kaufman 1974) and “loan words” (Campbell and Kaufman 1976) [see Table 2].

In reconstructing the date of linguistic divergence for the nodes of the Mixe-

Zoquean family tree, Kaufman (1974) and Wichmann, Beliaev and Davletshin (N.d.) produce slightly different dates [Figure 11]. Again, while Kaufman’s methodology is not

synapomorphies – shared innovations and “the assumption that a higher percentage of cognates shared between two languages indicates a closer historical relationship” (Cysouw 2006: 226)

made explicit, Wichmann et al. employ the comparative “method improvements of Sergie

Starostin [(2000)]…and a database more extensive than that which Kaufman had access to when he made his calculus”24 (N.d.: 5) on the subject. The authors draw upon the reconstructed proto-Mixe-Zoquean vocabulary published in Cysouw et al. (2006), and the resultant glottochronological divergence dates are somewhat different.

Figure 11. Divergent dates for the principal nodes of the Mixe-Zoquean language family (redrawn from Wichmann et al. N.d.).

Although the glottochronological dates diverge sharply in the proto-Mixean and proto-Zoquean nodes, the dates for the proto-Mixe-Zoquean node are relatively close.

Both dates, more importantly, lie at the beginning of the Early Formative. Campbell and

Kaufman (1976) cite several lines of evidence in their attribution of pMZ to the Olmec, including the aforementioned analogous distribution of modern Mixe-Zoquean (MZ) speakers with ancient Olmec archaeological sites, and, as outlined above, a suitable

24 Author translation. Original: “la aplicación de los mejoramientos del método por Sergei Starostin [(2000)]…y una base de datos más extensiva a la cual tuvo acceso Kaufman cuando hizo sus calculus”24 (Wichmann et al. N.d.: 5).

glottochronological time depth for proto-Mixe-Zoquean. Unlike Wichmann et al. (N.d.), however, Campbell and Kaufman’s (1976) justification for their schema is rather lackluster – simply that a “glottochronological time depth of MZ of 3,500 years (around

1500 B.C.) correlates with the first glimmerings of Olmec civilization” (Campbell and

Kaufman 1976: 80).

Wichmann et al. (N.d.), on the other hand, make an interesting argument about the possible archaeological association of the fragmentation of proto-Mixe-Zoquean into its constituent Mixe and Zoquean branches.

If we compare the glottochronological dates with the archaeological dates…what immediately jumps out is that the differentiation of Mixe-Zoquean dialects appears to have taken place before the Olmec epoch (taken in the sense of the San Lorenzo and La Venta horizons), and that the next linguistic fragmentation coincides with the end of that epoch25 (6).

If this divergence could be independently reconstructed, the implications of glottochronological alignment with the fall of La Venta would enrich archaeologists’ understanding of the Late to Terminal Formative landscape in Olman – particularly the relationship between archaeologically-designated Olmec and epi-Olmec sites. It could, furthermore, have profound implications for the linguistic affiliation of the Isthmian script (see discussion of pre-proto-Zoquean in Chapter 8). The discrepancies between these two correlations, however, must be addressed before either of these glottochronological schemas can be reviewed fully.

In perhaps their most persuasive argument for a pMZ-speaking Olmec, Campbell and Kaufman point to the apparent presence of pMZ loan words in other, geographically

25 Author translation. Original text: “Si comparamos las fechas glotocronológicas con fechas arqueológicas…se salta a la vista que la diferenciación de dialectos mixe-zoques aparentement tomó lugar antes de la época olmeca, tomado en el sentido del conjunto de las fases San Lorenzo y La Venta, y que la siguiente fragmentación linguística coincide con el fin de esa época” (Wichmann et al N.d.: 6).

diffuse Mesoamerican tongues, especially those words that “refer to things which are diagnostic of the Mesoamerican culture area” (1976: 82). Although limited documentation of the Mixe-Zoquean languages has prevented linguistic anthropologists from reconstructing an extensive pMZ vocabulary (the current pMZ vocabulary consists of only approximately 450 words), Campbell and Kaufman use a combination of etymology, geographical and ecological clues, cognates, semantic domains and phonology to determine the pMZ origin of their “diagnostic loan words.” As aforementioned, however, Campbell and Kaufman may artificially inflate their loan-word list with pZ vocabulary – in light of this, a revised, shorter list of “diagnostic loan words” was put forth by Cysouw et al. 2006 and controlled for in Table 2.

Campbell and Kaufman’s (1976) examples of pMZ loan words in other

Mesoamerican languages include powerfully dialectical terms like cacao, manioc, copal, woven mat, axe, twenty, to count, to grind corn, and to cut. If “many broadly disseminated words for plants, maize preparation, and some ritual and calendrical terms are probable loans from Mixe-Zoquean into other, contiguous languages” (Houston 2004:

284), something very linguistically and/or culturally significant was occurring in

Formative Mesoamerica. Mixe-Zoquean words – especially those that carried great symbolic weight – were “moving” across geographic and linguistic boundaries and disseminating into foreign cultures. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the Olmec stand alone amongst Early Formative peoples in their ability to traverse cosmographical space and influence styles and traditions in far distant regions (Helms 1993, Blomster et al. 2005;

Clark 2007). If the glottochronological time-depth of proto-Mixe-Zoquean can be believed, and if these loan words are attested for in pMZ, the Early to Middle Formative

Olmec are the most likely candidates for disseminating Mixe-Zoquean words across the landscape.

Table 2: Reconstructed Proto-Mixe-Zoquean loan words that are attested for in both Campbell and Kaufman (1976) and Cysouw et al. (2006).

Reconstructed pMZ Loan Translation *kakawa cacao *po:mV copal *may to count *?ukA dog *pus to cut *?une child

The Mixe-Zoquean hypothesis occupies an uneasy place in the archaeological discipline – most of the quintessential textbooks in the field mention a possible Mixe-

Zoquean affiliation for the Olmec, but leave the matter open to debate (Coe and Koontz

2006; Miller 2006). Some scholars accept the Mixe-Zoquean affiliation as fact (Diehl

2004), while others express doubt about the validity of such studies due to the extreme time-depth required (Houston 2004). The matter is complicated further still by Justeson and Kaufman’s purported pMZ/pZ-based decipherment of the Isthmian script (1993,

1997), a source of heated debate. The Mixe-Zoquean-Isthmian proposal “specifies linguistic and cultural continuity in a large region over a period of some 2,500 years”

(Houston 2004: 284), a claim some scholars find suspect (Houston and Coe 2003).

Despite these considerations, I believe the linguistic evidence for a proto-Mixe-Zoquean affiliation is strong and the Olmec may indeed have spoken a language ancestral to that still spoken by pockets of peoples in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec today. While this linguistic affiliation cannot, and should not, be used to laminate modern Mixe and

Zoquean cultural practices onto reconstructed Olmec and Isthmian ritual practice (see

Tate 2012), it provides a fruitful starting point for epigraphic analysis.

Chapter 6: The Zapotec Writing System

Prior to the discovery of the Cascajal block and the illumination of Olmec-style text, Zapotec inscriptions from the Valley of Oaxaca were the oldest known examples of hieroglyphic writing in the New World. The Valley of Oaxaca is a network of flat alluvial plains nestled between the peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The Valley is located approximately 400 kilometers southwest of Olman. Poor sampling and uncertain chronology – particularly from the movement and replacement of Formative era monuments in the Classic and Postclassic periods – plague the dating of the earliest

Zapotec inscriptions. “Monuments can only be dated to, at best, 250-year spans calibrated by rather gross archaeological phases rather than by internal dating” (Houston 2004:

292). Associated artifacts and stylistic analysis date early Zapotec monumental inscriptions to between 500 and 300 B.C., “the time of local transition from village life to urbanism and the threshold of state-level forms of social organization” (Urcid Serrano

2001: 1). Following the collapse of Monte Albán, evidence of Zapotec writing begins to dissipate and the system is eventually replaced by the Mixteca-Puebla tradition found in

Late Postclassic Mixtec codices (Urcid Serrano 2001: 2). Zapotec writing, therefore, stands as both one of the earliest and longest-lasting written traditions in Mesoamerica, spanning approximately fourteen centuries of cultural development in the Valley of

Oaxaca.

The Zapotec writing system is characterized by narrative images and accompanying texts – i.e. glyphic passages only rarely appear in isolation from, or without the complement of, visual aides. Javier Urcid Serrano maintains the Zapotec

system is logosyllabic in nature, as the “signary used in the glyphic arrangements apparently comprises both semantic and phonetic signs” (Urcid Serrano 2001: 409)26.

The Zapotec system, however, remains far from deciphered. Efforts to understand the enigmatic system are compounded by a relatively small epigraphic corpus and a paucity of linguistic analysis on the modern Zapotec descendant languages (Urcid Serrano 2001:

409). Early examples of Zapotec writing are roughly coeval with the samples of Olmec- style writing from La Venta. In fact, before the discovery of the San Andres materials and the Cascajal block, debate over the dating of La Venta Monument 13 and San José

Mogote Monument 3 led some to argue that the first linear hieroglyphic writing in the

New World hailed from the Valley of Oaxaca, rather than Olman (Flannery and Marcus

1976a,b; Flannery, Marcus and Kowalewski 1981; Flannery and Marcus 1983; Marcus

1992).

Glottochronological estimates grossly trace the diversification of the

Otomanguean language family to the Archaic period (Hopkins 1984). “The pre-proto-

Zapotecan branch…was already distinct, existing as a relatively independent” and probably internally diversified variety of speech by circa 1300 BC (Urcid Serrano 2001:

18); but little more can be said about the language and its affiliation with Formative sites in the Valley of Oaxaca. Although it seems likely that early “Oaxacan” writing encodes the sounds of a spoken Zapotec language, decipherment is further inhibited by the fact that there is little direct evidence to linguistically link the hieroglyphic system to a spoken

Zapotec tongue (Houston 2004: 294). The few phonetic values postulated for Zapotec suffix glyphs are tenuous at best, and are constructed from a Latin-based, colonial

26 Although detailed explication of the Zapotec system and the evidence for its’ logosyllabic structure cannot be outlined here, these issues are addressed briefly in Joyce Marcus (1992) and thoroughly in Urcid Serrano (2001).

Spanish to Zapotec vocabulario (de Córdova 1578). With the current body of evidence, it seems unlikely that epigraphers will be able to make much further progress in assigning phonetic values to the Zapotec system.

Perhaps the earliest example of Zapotec hieroglyphic writing hails from the site of

San José Mogote. Located in the north of the Valley of Oaxaca, San José Mogote was the region’s primary center during the Rosario phase (between 700 and 500 BC) and at its height covered approximately 60 hectares (Marcus 1992: 35-6). San José Mogote

Monument 3 is a carved stone slab that was discovered on the threshold of walkway between two Rosario phase public buildings (Flannery and Marcus 1976a). It depicts an exposed, disemboweled figure, arms and legs akimbo, and eyes shut, presumably indexing death. Two glyphic elements – a pair of composite circles and triangles – wrap around the proper right side of the monument. These so-called “blood glyphs” drip from the disemboweled and flayed figure, and may indicate San José Mogote Monument 3 was originally displayed in an upright position, as they are obscured when the slab is displayed horizontally (Cahn and Winter 1993).

Two Zapotec hieroglyphs are nestled between the San José Mogote figure’s sprawling legs. The bottom sign – a squared glyph with an inset U-shaped motif nestled in a bracket-like base – has traditionally been interpreted as the number “1”. The upper glyph is a four-pronged square, inset with a solid U-shaped bracket. Taken together with the accompanying visual narrative, this two-glyph sequence may be a calendrically- derived name for the individual depicted on San José Mogote Monument 3. The upper glyph, like many Zapotec glyphs, cannot be directly translated. Joyce Marcus (1992) reads the upper glyph as “earthquake,” the seventeenth day name in the 260-day Zapotec

calendar, but the most widely-accepted, conservative and likely reading of the element is

“Glyph L” (Urcid Serrano 2001).

Although materials from the buildings surrounding San José Mogote Monument 3 may date to approximately 600 BC, it’s likely the monument itself was placed in a later period. Flannery and Marcus’s attribution of the monument to the Rosario phase was first thoroughly critiqued by Robert Cahn and Marcus Winter (1993). Among other logical arguments, Cahn and Winter point out that dating the surrounding buildings through ceramic chinking material “is not a reliable stratigraphical marker since sherds older than the wall could have been used” (1993: 44). Winter also asserts that he personally observed Monte Albán phase materials in the vicinity of San José Mogote Monument 3.

The Monument is certainly in the same stylistic tradition as the orthostats of Monte Albán

[Figure 12], and after the rise of Monte Albán and the concomitant restructuring of power in the Valley of Oaxaca, San José Mogote contracted in both size and influence.

Monument 3 is the only example of early hieroglyphic writing at San José Mogote, but samples are found in abundance at Monte Albán – although this evidence must be treated with caution, I believe it is likely that Monument 3 dates to, rather than pre-dates, the period of the oldest hieroglyphic writing at Monte Albán. Similar conservative dating on the monument places it between 500 and 400 BC (Houston 2004: 294), with some scholars placing the slab significantly later, in Monte Albán phase II (Cahn and Winter

1993) and others as late as 200 AD (Whittaker 1983: 105).

Regardless of the disputed date of San José Mogote Monument 3, Zapotec inscriptions dating to 500 – 300 BC have been recovered from the site of Monte Albán.

Located just 15 kilometers to the south of San José Mogote, Monte Albán dominated the

Oaxacan landscape from ca. 600 BC to 900 AD (Urcid Serrano 2001: 1). Hieroglyphic inscriptions appear with the greatest frequency on the site’s famed “Danzante” orthostats.

The Danzante slabs of Building L frequently bear between two and six individual glyphs, some of which may name the pictured victim or describe the nature of his demise

(Marcus 1992: 41). One such slab (MA-D-55) bears two distinct, columnar inscriptions of three and five glyphs each. MA-D-55 appears to function within a closed system and records non-calendrical information – i.e. the inscription does not include bar, dot or

Zapotec “finger-shaped” numerals (Marcus 1992). Although MA-D-55 likely dates to circa 100 BC, “closed” sequences also appear on older monuments, such as the multi- orthostat sequence of MA-D-142, MA-M-21, MA-D-139, MA-D-140, and MA-D-

141/104.

Figure 12: (A) San José Mogote Monument 3; (B) MA-D-55; (C) MA-D-139 and (D) MA-D-140 (redrawn from Urcid Serrano 2001).

The undecipherable, but at least partially calendrical, carvings on MA-D-139 and

MA-D-14027 have been dated through association to 500 – 300 BC (Caso 1928; 1947).

These orthostats bear lengthy inscriptions in a column format, and their inscriptions include bar and dot numerals as well as composite glyphs. In a reconstruction of the façade of Building L, Javier Urcid Serrano combines the aforementioned orthostats with

MA-D-142, MA-M-21, and MA-D-141/104 to create a five-slab sequence bearing 30 or more distinct hieroglyphs (2011: 166). Interestingly, the three-glyph sequence that concludes the inscription on MA-M-21 is the same as the three-glyph sequence carved on the torso of the figure on MA-D-55. These orthostats bear lengthy glyphic texts that are, significantly, isolated from visual aids and illustrations. Their columnar inscriptions indicate that the Zapotec writing system was “closed” and being used to record extensive linear passages by, at the very least, the beginning of the Late Formative period.

Although similarities between Isthmian and Zapotec glyphs will be explored in

Chapter 8, it is important to note here that some of these Zapotec inscriptions bear similarity to Olmec-style motifs. On orthostats M21 and D139, a suffix element in positions A3 and A1, respectively, resembles Cascajal Olmec-style glyphs CS18 and

CS48. On orthostat D142, furthermore, the composite glyph at B4 includes a downward facing, dripping E-shaped element and a divided step-like “hill” glyph that has stylistic parallels in both proto-Maya and Isthmian inscriptions (MS54; see Chapter 8). David

Grove (2010) also draws a connection between this Zapotec hill glyph and the quatrefoil cave on Chalcatzingo Monument 1, although I believe this analog is more tenuous. The

Zapotec hieroglyphic system is temporally closest to Olmec-style art and writing, and archaeological evidence indicates interaction between Olman and the Valley of Oaxaca in

27 Elsewhere, these orthostats are respectively referred to as Monte Albán Stelae 12 and 13.

the Formative period (Blomster et al. 2005; Neff et al. 2006). The networks of exchange that stretched between these two regions could very likely have introduced signaling practices – if not hieroglyphic writing explicitly – into the Valley of Oaxaca.

Chapter 7: The Proto-Maya Writing System

While the decipherment of Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing has been underway for over half a century, proto-Maya inscriptions from the Formative period remain enigmatic. The early system exhibits conventions held in the Classic period inscriptions, including a double columnar format, compound glyph blocks, and left-to-right reading order. Although the corpus of proto-Maya inscriptions is the most robust of any of the

Formative scripts, only a handful of the most ubiquitous Classic glyphs have recognizable Formative cognates. In the mural rooms of San Bartolo, for example, only three of the most common phonetic syllables are recognizable – po, mo, and ja (Saturno,

Stuart and Beltrán 2006: 1; Wichmann 2006). The vulture-head logogram of AJAW, a royal title, and the accession verb “to be seated” may be legible on an unprovenienced, re-carved Olmec quartzite pectoral in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (Schele and Miller

1992: 120). Proto-Maya inscriptions – many of which are carved into portable, unprovenienced, and thus undatable objects – were once believed to be the domain of the

Terminal Formative; but recent research indicates the proto-Maya system was in use as early as the beginning of the Late Formative. Stylistically, some proto-Maya glyphs bear a greater resemblance to Isthmian glyphs (or vice versa), than to glyphs found in later

Classic Maya inscriptions (see Chapter 8).

A recent discovery at the Late Formative site of San Bartolo pushed the earliest example of linear, extensive Maya writing back by over a century (Saturno, Stuart and

Beltrán 2006). The 10-glyph long sequence was painted on a stone block and uncovered in San Bartolo’s Las Pinturas structure, in the Sub-V platform construction phase. Of the

early writing samples discussed thus far, the San Bartolo glyph block carries perhaps the most secure date. Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating was run on five charcoal samples from the sealed architectural strata immediately above, at, and immediately below the glyph block (Sub-IV, Sub-V, and Sub-VI, respectively). “Taken in concert, these samples and those analyzed in association with the final two phases of construction, imply that the text was painted between 300 and 200 BC” (1).

The Sub-V glyph block [Figure 12] contains only one completely legible proto-

Maya glyph – the logosyllabic ajaw glyph (including Heinrich Berlin’s (1959) “Ben-Ich” superfix) in position pA7. A couple of the Sub-V block glyphs also appear to be logographic in nature – pA2, for example, depicts a hand holding stick-like object, which

Saturno, Stuart and Beltran (2006) interpret as a paintbrush or bloodletter (2). While the inscription itself is undecipherable, a gloss of the second half of the text may be possible.

The ajaw superfix appears in royal titles and emblem glyphs of the Classic Period, and taken in conjunction with the subsequent sequence of glyphs in pA8 – pA10, may be a part of a “more extended title [sic: phrase] in reference to some person, either historical or mythical” (Saturno, Stuart and Beltrán 2006: 2). Interestingly, the Sub-V glyph block sequence occurs in isolation from visual aids, indicating that by at least 200 BC the proto-

Maya system functioned as a linguistically transparent, “closed” writing system.

The Sub-V glyph block text bears some striking stylistic similarities to Isthmian inscriptions – a resemblance also evident in other examples of proto-Maya writing. These similarities will be explored in detail in Chapter 8, but a brief discussion, filtered through the discovery of the Sub-V glyph block, is merited here. Although Saturno, Stuart and

Beltran (2006) do concede that the undecipherable Sub-V inscription resembles Isthmian

writing, the authors use the block’s strong archaeological context and firmly established radiocarbon dates to question the directionality of the relationship between the proto-

Maya and Isthmian scripts. Known examples of “the so-called epi-Olmec script…post- date the San Bartolo block...raising the question of what direction any influence may have flowed” (2006: 2).

Figure 13. Sub-V glyph block from San Bartolo (redrawn from Saturno, Stuart and Beltran (2006).

Questioning the “flow of influence” between the Maya region and other areas of

Mesoamerica has a long, somewhat unsavory history that can be traced at least to the fiery early 20th Century debates between Miguel Covarrubias and J. Eric Thompson

(Covarrubias 1946; see also Coe 1965, 1968). Saturno et al.’s (2006) radiocarbon dates do place the proto-Maya script within the Late Formative culture of literacy that stretched from Oaxaca to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and north into the Petén of Guatemala. The author’s analysis, however, does not mention the potential examples of Olmec-style writing that far predate these Late and Terminal Formative samples. Nor does their analysis consider the potential scalar differences between the labeling glyphs of the early

Zapotec tradition (Winter 1989); the singular column of text on the Sub-V glyph block

(300-200 BC); and the startling extensive Isthmian inscription on La Mojarra Stela 1 (AD

159). Any discussion of influence flow must first address these issues, as well as the fact that compared to the proto-Maya corpus, there are very few Isthmian inscriptions – and yet at least three of these samples are far lengthier than any extant proto-Maya texts (La

Mojarra Stela 1, the Tuxtla Statuette, and the Teotihuacan-style Mask).

Some proto-Maya glyphs, further, bear a resemblance to Olmec-style inscriptions and Olmec-style art. Although the two complete glyphs on the San Andres greenstone plaque fragments have been dismissed as “iconic elements” (Houston 2004: 293), the truncated inscription length and pebble-like quality of these glyphs can be seen in proto-

Maya inscriptions as well (cf. the British Museum Pectoral). This double-merlon glyph

(see Chapter 3) also bears some similarity to a glyph that appears in several proto-Maya inscriptions. An example can be seen in position C6 on the Dumbarton Oaks Jade

Pectoral [Figure 14].

Figure 14. (A) Double-merlon glyph on the San Andres Plaque; (B) C6 on the Dumbarton Oaks Jade Pectoral; (C) B6 on the Jade Museum Slate Disk No. 6528 (redrawn from Mora-Marín 2001); (D) (E) Comparable “Olmec-style” heads from ceramics purported from Tlapacoya (redrawn from Feuchtwanger 1989: figs 154 and 155 in Taube 2004: 97); (F) Classic Maya sign for kab’ (redrawn from Coe and Van Stone 2005: 127).

Interestingly, there appears to be at least one example of an Olmec-style head used as a glyphic element in a proto-Maya inscription. In position B6 of the Jade

Museum’s Slate Disk (No. 6285; see Mora-Marín 2001), an Olmec-style head comprises one-half of the glyph block [Figure 14]. The head is left-facing, as are most faces in the left-to-right oriented Maya texts, and its eye displays a characteristic Olmec-style cleft.

The Olmec-style head is attached to a glyph that appears to be a cognate of a relatively common, but highly polymorphic, Classic Maya glyph. Its position within this proto-

Maya text and the lack of accompanying numerals discourages the calendric reading kaban. In one of its common forms, this glyph can be read kab’, meaning land/earth (Coe

and Van Stone 2005: 127). Could the B6 composite glyph, then, record a proto-Maya reference to Olman? The Slate Disk text does include numerals and a possible calendric date at position A2; and what may be an early variant of Proskouriakoff’s (1960)

“upended frog glyph,” or the birth glyph, at B2. Perhaps, then, the composite glyph at B6 forms a part of a title sequence.

Parallels can also be drawn between the Olmec-style “T-shaped” and “lazy S”

(Reilly 1996) elements and proto-Maya glyphic elements. Karl Taube (2004) has interpreted the Olmec-style “T-shaped” motif as a breath element. The motif is inset in the mouths of some Olmec deity figures, and also appears on chest pectorals worn “over the heart and lungs” (Houston 2004, personal communication with Taube), as on, interestingly, the Isthmian-inscribed Tres Zapotes Stela C. This “T-shaped” element is also common in both proto and Classic Maya inscriptions – it can be seen in proto-Maya texts on the Jade Museum Plaque No. 2007 (glyph A10) and on the Jade Museum Jade

Spoon (glyph A5). In Classic Maya calendrical inscriptions, the T-shaped element is the primary component of the day-sign Ik’, and in non-calendrical texts can be read as

“wind.” The compelling, complementary relationship between the T-element’s Maya translation and inferred Olmec iconographic meaning must be approached with caution.

The T-shaped element is a fairly simple motif, and as of yet does not appear in any

Olmec-style glyphic inscriptions, only Olmec-style art. If the “breath” interpretation of the Olmec-style T-element is disproven, then its relationship with the Classic Maya

“wind” would crumble.

Kent Reilly’s (1996) so-called “lazy S” hypothesis must be read in this conservative light as well. The Lazy-S is seen most commonly at the Middle Formative

site of Chalcatzingo, and most clearly on Chalcatzingo Monument 31 [Figure 15].

Chalcatzingo is located outside of the Olmec heartland in the Mexican state of Morelos – some 600 kilometers west of the Middle Formative center at La Venta. The site contains dozens of monuments carved in the Olmec-style, as well as evidence of monumental architecture (Grove 1987). Unlike the T-shaped element described by Karl Taube, however, the Lazy-S is not a common Olmec-style element in Olman proper. Kent Reilly, however, sees San Lorenzo Monument 7 as “a dramatic example that the heartland

Olmec knew and used the Lazy-S” (1996: 2), but the case made for the Lazy-S on this monument is rather weak. The monument dates to the Early rather than Middle

Formative, the motif itself is obscured, and its appearance on a feline body does not directly correlate with its “sky/cloud” context on the Chalcatzingo monuments.

Figure 15: (A) Chalcatzingo Monument 31 (redrawn from Reilly 1996); (B) Cleveland Museum Pectoral glyph A1 (redrawn from Mora-Marin 2001) (C) muyal/T632 (redrawn from Thompson 1962: 248).

The Lazy-S does appear in proto-Classic Maya inscriptions (as on the Cleveland

Museum Jade Plaque, position A1) and is common in Classic Maya texts. This element has been translated using both phonetic and semantic controls as muyal, or “cloud”

(Houston and Stuart 1990). In the context of the Chalcatzingo bas-relief carvings, this

Classic Maya translation corresponds neatly to the Lazy-S’s role in Olmec-style art: as a cloud raining phallic drops down upon the monument’s central narrative scene (Reilly

1996). Even more so than the “T-shaped” element, then, the relationship between the

Lazy-S’s Olmec-style context and Classic Maya translation is surprisingly close.

It must be remembered, however, that the aforementioned Maya glyphic translations stem from the Classic Period inscriptions of 250 – 900 AD. Olmec-style iconographic elements and proto-Maya glyphs are separated by at least four centuries, and comparisons between the two must be made with caution. In comparison, the parallels drawn between Olmec-style elements and Classic translations span even greater gaps of time and distance. Furthermore, until the Lazy-S is found in a “cloud” context in

Olman, the Reilly theory should be held against the archaeological record and treated with caution. The relationship of “Olmec-style” sites beyond Olman – like Chalcatzingo in the west and Chalchuapa in the southeast – to La Venta remains a source of archaeological debate. Robert Sharer (1974) believed the distant southeastern site of

Chalchuapa was an Olmec trading outpost with strong local influences, pointing to the site’s slightly earlier chronology, monumental pyramid (El Trapiche Structure E3-1-2), one Olmec-style Monument (No. 12), and comparatively few Olmec-style ceramics. At the distant western site of Chalcatzingo, on the other hand, David Grove argued for an intensive relationship on the basis of monumental platform architecture, an extensive

corpus of Olmec-style rock carvings and sculpted pieces, and Olmec-style ceramics

(Grove 1987).

Chalcatzingo’s influence in Western Mexico in the Middle Formative period was great – it reached its height between 700 and 500 BC, covered 40 hectares, and was divided into two organized ritual and residential zones. The site’s rock art pantheon is expansive and executed in clear Olmec-style (Grove 2000) – elite figures seated in cave mouths (Monument 1), figures with characteristic Olmec-style mask facial features

(Monument 2), and gaping “Earth Monster” maws (Monument 9) decorate the outcropping. The carvings are clustered in small groups and appear to be arranged for a ritual-processional function (Grove 1999). Chalcatzingo’s regional status likely afforded the city’s rulers enough power and influence to commission Olmec sculptors from Olman itself to complete their monumental works (Diehl 2004: 175). The rock carving known as

“El Rey” (Diehl 2004: 177) depicts a Chalcatzingoan ruler surrounded by local indices of power not seen in Olman proper – i.e. the Lazy-S. The ruler sits on a S-shaped bench or altar-throne and holds a ceremonial bar carved with a Lazy-S. Clearly this element signaled immediate meaning for a knowledgeable local viewer, but did Chalcatzingo have enough influence to export a local ideological convention – the Lazy-S – to regions far distant? Was this element symbolically dense enough to traverse cosmographical space as an “open” iconic element and become lodged in a linguistically, ethnically, and religiously distinct cultural system? Perhaps, but also, likely not.

Although certain other parallels exist between Olmec-style iconography/glyphic forms and the proto-Maya system (such as the presence of the U-shaped bracket), these elements are more fruitfully explored in a discussion of the Isthmian system. Closing this

treatment of proto-Maya inscriptions, then, and transitioning into the Isthmian system requires addressing Kaminaljuyu Stela 10. Kaminaljuyu developed into an influential early Maya regional center in the Guatemalan highlands by 400 BC, and likely collapsed near the end of the Terminal Formative, around 200 AD (Sharer and Sedat 1987).

Kaminaljuyu Stela 10 bears the most extensive and revealing text of the site’s seven inscribed objects. Dates for Kaminaljuyu Stela 10 vary widely – from the extremes of

400 – 200 BC (Mora-Marin 2005: 66) to ca. 1 AD (Houston 2004: 301). The glyphic panels on Kaminaljuyu Stela 10 are unique among Formative inscriptions from the Maya area – so much so that some scholars have questioned whether the monument even depicts proto-Mayan (Coe 1976; Kaplan 1995; Kaufman and Justeson 2001). Most recently, David Mora-Marin (2005) argued that the script on Kaminaljuyu Stela 10 records a bilingual text in the Poqom and Ch’olan/Ch’olan-Tzeltalan Maya dialects.

Indeed, some have argued that after the fall of their city, Ch’olan speakers at

Kaminaljuyu migrated to Copán and replaced that site’s indigenous Maya population

(Campbell 1998; Viel and Hall 2000).

Yet despite years of epigraphic study, the vast majority of Kaminaljuyu Stela 10 text remains undeciphered, save for a handful of Classic period cognates. Only one proto-

Maya glyph is truly recognizable in the stela’s text – H1 appears to be the Classic Maya glyph read alternatively as winal (in calendrical inscriptions) and winik (in non- calendrical inscriptions, “person”) – but even it “does not appear in contexts that are obviously pertinent to this reading” (Houston 2004: 280). Not unlike the San Bartolo glyph block, however, the inscription on Kaminaljuyu Stela 10 does bear several clear similarities to the Isthmian system. Determining the extent of these similarities, however,

is difficult due conflicting documentation of the monument [Figure 16] (Houston 2004;

Mora-Marin 2005).

Figure 16: (A) Houston 2004, Fig. 10.3 (after a rubbing by Albert Davletshin); (B) David Mora- Marin (2005) (source unstated).

A B

Rendition (A) transcribes rounded glyphic forms with a bubble-like hand; rendition (B) depicts significantly more angular, geometricized glyphs. These dueling renditions make Kaminaljuyu Stela 10 look more “Maya” or more “Isthmian,” respectively. Some of the glyph-blocks are radically transformed between the drawings – including H1, G4, G8, J2, J4, I8, and I9. Glyphs H5, G10, and J7, furthermore, contain glyphic elements that appear distinctly more “Isthmian” in rendition (B). Inconsistencies such as this plague Mesoamerican epigraphic scholarship; and until high-resolution photographs, rubbings and studious drawings are used in concert, they will continue.

Despite this hurdle, it is clear that at least three Isthmian cognates appear on

Kaminaljuyu Stela 10 [Figure 17]: H2 is comparable to MS49; J2 (and possibly H10) to

MS101; and the superfix of J7 with MS129. G8 varies widely between recordings, but may be a form of MS46, and the complex geometricity of J3 is reminiscent of several different Isthmian glyphs. In both epigraphic renditions, the aforementioned T-shaped element appears in position J7. To complicate matters, the superfix atop J7 resembles both MS129 in the Isthmian system, which Justeson and Kaufman translate somewhat mysteriously as “royal accession,” and the Maya glyph T60 (Macri 1991: 20), which can code for the phonetic syllable che. Aside from a theoretical gloss based on Kaminaljuyu

Stela 10’s pictorial scene, a true translation of the script is not possible at this time. The mix of Isthmian and Maya glyphic elements, interspersed with unidentifiable, perhaps local glyphs, however, poses fruitful ground for future inquiry into the malleability of

Terminal Formative linguistic boundaries.

Figure 17: (A1) H2 and (A2) MS49; (B1) J2/H10 and (B2) MS101; (C1) J7, (C2) MS129, and (C3) T60.

Chapter 8: The Isthmian Writing System

After the Olmec-style script, the Isthmian writing system is perhaps the most controversial of all Middle Formative to Late Postclassic Mesoamerican writing systems.

With the exception of the obscure Preclassic system represented by El Baúl Monument

128 in the Guatemalan piedmont (Smith 1984; Chinchilla Mazariegos 2011: 45), Isthmian writing also has the smallest corpus of extant inscriptions. These inscribed objects (when provenienced) generally hail from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and the geographic region has given its name to the system (although the script has alternatively been called the

Tuxtla/Tuxtlatec script, the La Mojarra script, and the epi-Olmec script). Probably ten true Isthmian texts [see Table 3] have been recovered from the sites of Tres Zapotes, La

Mojarra, San Andres Tuxtla, Chiapa de Corzo, Cerro de las Mesas and El Sitio (Justeson and Kaufman 1993). Five of these objects bear substantial hieroglyphic passages – “the

Chiapa de Corzo sherd, Tres Zapotes Stela C, La Mojarra Stela, the Tuxtla Statuette,

Cerro de las Mesas Stela 6, the Teotihuacan-style or ‘Teo’ mask, and the O’Boyle

‘mask’” (Perez de Lara and Justeson 2006: 6). Of these, the Tuxtla Statuette, La Mojarra

Stela 1, and the Teotihuacan-style mask bear the most extensive inscriptions and, consequently, have received the most epigraphic attention.

28 The glyphic text on El Baúl Monument 1 is severely weathered, making it difficult to place in the greater context of Formative Era writing systems. The text clearly includes bar and dot numerals and displays a columnar format, and is stylistically quite distinct from the region’s Late Classic Cotzumalhuapa inscriptions. For a treatment of these less well-known and infrequently discussed systems, see Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos’ Cotzumalguapa: la ciudad arqueológica; El Baúl – Bilbao – El Castillo (2012).

Table 3: Objects with substantive Isthmian inscriptions.

Location Object La Mojarra Stela 1 Tres Zapotes Stela C Cerro de las Mesas Stela 6 Chapultepec Chapultepec Stone Chiapa de Corzo Chiapa de Corzo Sherd Unprovenienced Tuxtla Statuette The Teo Mask The O'Boyle Mask El Sitio Celt Alvarado Stela

The Isthmian system has a columnar arrangement, with a strong indication of a single-column writing format. Faces within Isthmian inscriptions can be oriented to the left or the right (or both, as on La Mojarra Stela 1), and a consistent reading order has yet to be securely determined. From a stylistic perspective, Isthmian glyphs are more angular than rounded and glyphic elements exhibit a distinct geometricity, with tendency toward open, linear forms. Martha Macri and Laura Stark published a signary of the Isthmian script29 in 1993, identifying at least 185 distinct glyphs, including bar and dot numerals, from the texts on the La Mojarra Stela and the Tuxtla Statuette. The Isthmian script is a complex and patently “closed” system with a high level of linguistic transparency. It had the ability to record long, complex passages, both with and without the accompaniment of visual aids, and recorded the first calendrical Long Count date known in Mesoamerica.

Isthmian glyphs share iconographic similarities with earlier Olmec-style glyphs and motifs [Figure 18], Zapotec [Figure 19] and proto-Maya glyphs [Figure 20], as well with later Izapan-style art (see Chapter 9).

The similarities between Isthmian glyphic elements and Olmec-style glyphs and motifs are numerous [Figure 18]. These parallels can be traced in a pronounced use of

29 Referred to as the “La Mojarra” script in Macri and Stark (1993).

the U-bracket (MS141) as a repeated suffix element and in the ubiquity of foliated subfixes that strongly resemble the subfix element on the San Andres Seal (MS97 and

MS98). One Isthmian glyph, MS72, and its possibly related forms MS73 and MS112, bears striking similarity to Cascajal Block glyphs CS19 and CS35 and Olmec-style altar/thrones. MS93 is reminiscent of Glyph A on the San Andres greenstone plaque; and the cross-bar motif (though simple) is central to the common Isthmian glyphs MS26,

MS27, MS28, and MS29.

Figure 18: Stylistic comparison of Isthmian glyphs and Olmec-style motifs. (A) MS141; (B1) MS97, (B2) MS98, and (B3) San Andres Seal foliated element; (C1) MS72 and (C2) CS35; (D1) MS93 and (D2) San Andres Greenstone Plaque Glyph A; (E1) MS26, (E2) MS27, (E3) MS28, and (E4) MS29.

Parallels can also be drawn, however, between Isthmian glyphs and Zapotec glyphs [Figure 19]. As aforementioned, MS55 (as well as MS53 and MS54) echo the stepped Zapotec “hill” glyph (Urcid Serrano 2001; Grove 2010). The Zapotec glyphs on

San José Mogote Monument 3 also bear some resemblance to Isthmian glyphs. The lower

glyph on Monument 3 is defined by a central U-bracket and is nestled in a “base” similar to MS104, a glyph Justeson and Kaufman translate as alternatively “twenty” or “moon”

(1993: 1707). Monument 3’s more complex uppermost glyph, furthermore, shares some stylistic traits with MS33, which Winfield Capitaine (1988) reads as “animal hide.” The ostensible “decipherment” of these two glyphs, however, varies greatly. Stylistic and possibly functional similarities can also be seen between Zapotec “finger glyphs” and the

Isthmian “finger glyphs,” MS111 and MS146. In both script systems, these glyphs appear to serve a counting function (Urcid Serrano 2001; Macri and Stark 1993:27) – although this similarity is more likely the result of parallel difference than direct meaning exchange.

Figure 19: Stylistic comparison of Isthmian and Zapotec glyphs. Zapotec hill glyph cognates (A1) MS53, (A2) MS54, (A3) MS55; (B1) MS104 and (B2) SJM Monument 3 lower glyph; (C1) MS33 and (C2) SJM Monument 3 top glyph; (D1) MS111, (D2) MS146, and (D3) Zapotec finger glyph from MA-D-139.

Even more stylistic parallels can be drawn between proto-Maya writing and the

Isthmian script [Figure 20]. Bearded human head glyphs on the Jade Museum Jade Spoon

(A4) and the Dumbarton Oaks Jade Pectoral (B2 and C1) are quite similar to bearded

Isthmian glyphs, like that on La Mojarra Stela 1 (P13). Foliated suffixes (similar in style to those that appear on the San Andres Seal) are common in Isthmian inscriptions and periodically appear in proto-Maya inscriptions as well, as on the Sub-V glyph block

(subfixes in pA2 and pA3; superfix in pA4 – see Chapter 7).

Figure 20: Stylistic comparison of Isthmian glyphs and proto-Maya glyphs. (A1) La Mojarra Stela 1 P13, (A2) Dumbarton Oaks Jade Pectoral C1, and (A3) Jade Museum Jade Spoon A4 (redrawn from Mora- Marín 2001); (B1) MS101, (B2) Dumbarton Oaks Jade Celt A1, and (B3) Dumbarton Oaks Jade Celt A2; (C1) MS97 and (C2) Dumbarton Oaks Jade Pectoral C4; (D1) MS98 and (D2) Cenote Tubular Jade Bead A5 (redrawn from Mora-Marín 2001); (E1) MS141 and (E2) Cenote Tubular Jade Bead A1; (E1) MS32 and (E2) Unprovenienced Jade Clamshell A3 (redrawn from Mora-Marín 2001).

Additional clear parallels of MS101 can be seen on the Dumbarton Oaks Jadeite

Celt (A1 and A2); of MS97 on the Dumbarton Oaks Jade Pectoral (C4); and of MS98 on

the Cenote Tubular Jade Bead (A5). The Cenote Bead inscription also includes a repeated

U-bracket motif in A1 (cf. MS141), and the Maya “Venus” glyph in A5 is remarkably similar to the Isthmian glyph MS32. That the Isthmian script and the proto-Maya script, thus, share a multitude of stylistic similarities is readily apparent. The source of this similarity, however, requires an analysis that delves beneath the surface of glyphic design to explore glyphic use and meaning.

Beyond identifying stylistic similarities and reconstructing loan-word lists, the ability to trace linguistic interaction and exchange in the Formative hieroglyphic record itself is growing. This approach is only just taking off, and is best exemplified by Søren

Wichmann’s work on a possible Mixe-Zoquean loanword in the North Wall of the San

Bartolo murals (Saturno et al. 2005; Wichmann 2006). The mural includes a recognizable phonetic Maya spelling of po-mo-ja, which Saturno et al. (2005) comment resembles the

Maya word for copal (pom), but does not match the typical synharmonic Maya hieroglyphic spelling of po-m(o). Wichmann (N.d.) argues, however, that the phonetic spelling “po-mo-ja is fully compatible with a reconstructed proto-Zoquean *pomoh (or a pre-proto-Zoquean *po:moh)” (2). Interestingly, the final ‘o’ on *po:m(o) is only fully re- constructible to the Zoquean branch; and the spelling pomoh is only retained today in the

Chiapas Zoque branch dialect of Copainalá. Further hieroglyphically grounded studies might be able to shed greater light, then, on the validity of Justeson and Kaufman’s

(1993, 1997) reliance on pre-proto-Zoquean, rather than pre-proto-Mixe-Zoquean, for their Isthmian translation schema.

The Tuxtla Statuette [Figure 21], the first known example of the Isthmian script, came to light at the turn of the 20th century (Holmes 1907). The nephrite figure was

discovered in a milpa in the San Andres Tuxtla district of Veracruz (Méluzin 1992). The

“duck-billed” Tuxtla statuette lacks archaeological context, but bears a lengthy inscription that can be analyzed grammatically (Justeson and Kaufman 1993: 259). Nine columns of text appear on the object: two on the obverse, two on the reverse, “three” on the proper right and two on the proper left. The inscription begins with an introductory glyph in A1, followed by a bar and dot Long Count date in A2 – A6, and what is likely a day number and glyph in A7. The Long Count of 8.6.2.4.18 dates the object to approximately 162 AD, or the end of the Terminal Formative period. Although the Tuxtla

Statuette and La Mojarra Stela 1 tend to mark the Isthmian script as a Terminal

Formative phenomenon (Pérez de Lara and Justeson 2006: 7), objects from the Late

Formative (the Chiapa de Corzo sherd) and the Classic Period (Cerro de las Mesas 5, 6,

8, and 15) exist as well.

Figure 21: The Tuxtla Statuette Inscription. Source: Dumbarton Oaks Archives: The Yuri Knorosov Papers. Accessed March 2013. Drawing by George Stuart, from the original.

The next Isthmian-inscribed object discovered, Tres Zapotes Stela C, bore the oldest Long Count date yet known in Mesoamerica30. As discussed in Chapter 2, Tres

Zapotes was occupied from the Early Formative, but by the time Tres Zapotes Stela C was carved the site is considered to be archaeologically “epi-Olmec.” The bottom half of

Tres Zapotes Stela C was discovered by Matthew Williams Stirling (1943), who, despite considerable resistance from contemporaneous Mayanists (Thompson 1943), correctly reconstructed the monument’s early Long Count date as 7.16.6.16.18 (ca. 31 BC). The discovery of the top half of Tres Zapotes Stela C verified the initial “7” coefficient and revealed a substantial non-calendrical glyphic column. This portion of the text is severely weathered, but at least a possible “introductory” glyph is recognizable in A3 – it appears to share a glyphic element (MS98) with other initial series introductory glyphs on La

Mojarra Stela 1 (MS95) and the Tuxtla Statuette (MS96).

The fact that Tres Zapotes Stela C bears one of Mesoamerica’s earliest Long

Count dates is intriguing; particularly when taken in conjunction with loan-word studies that indicate some counting forms, like the unit “20,” may have been shared from proto-

Mixe-Zoquean into other Mesoamerican languages. Although the early Long Count dates on Tres Zapotes Stela C and Chiapa de Corzo Stela 2 do not necessarily link the Olmec with the invention of the Long Count system, the sacred calendrical system was clearly in place in the Gulf Coast by the last decades of the first century BC. If early Long Count dates are found in the Maya region, the direction of influence can be called into question

30 The oldest fully recoverable Long Count date currently known comes from the Isthmian-inscribed wall panel “Chiapa de Corzo Stela 2.” It bears a reconstructed Long Count date of 7.16.3.2.13, and “dates to less than four years before Tres Zapotes Stela C” (Pérez de Lara and Justeson 2006: 9) at 36 BC (Bachand, Lowe, and Gallaga Murrieta N.d.). Chiapa de Corzo is located in the heart of the Mexican state of Chiapas, and Chiapas Zoque is spoken in the area today.

– but for now, it appears as though the Long Count may have (conservatively) originated with the epi-Olmec archaeological culture.

After three decades of quiet, the Isthmian-inscribed O’Boyle Mask appeared on the 1970s art market (Méluzin 1995). The ceramic “mask” bears seven columns of glyphs with a total of 23 glyphic units. Although the O’Boyle Mask’s glyphs “are small with their details often difficult to make out” (Pérez de Lara and Justeson 2006: 9), the object significantly bolstered the corpus of Isthmian texts. Like the Chiapa de Corzo sherd (see below), the glyphs on the O’Boyle Mask are somewhat more curvilinear than those on the Tuxtla Statuette, and the columns are less fastidiously aligned than those on La

Mojarra Stela 1. The lack of context for the O’Boyle Mask, however, makes it difficult to extrapolate whether these differences are the result of regional variation; the scribe’s individual hand; the function of the object (portable versus monumental); or simply the material used (clay versus stone). The O’Boyle Mask inscription was nevertheless the most substantial Isthmian text uncovered since the Tuxtla Statuette, and would remain the longest until the unveiling of La Mojarra Stela 1 in the 1980s.

The most substantial epi-Olmec inscription known to date appears on the incomparable La Mojarra Stela 1 [Figure 22]. The monument lacks a secure archaeological context, but does have an accurate find-spot. It was discovered eroding from a riverbank near the site of Tres Zapotes, and was removed and deposited in the

Museo de Antropología in Xalapa, Veracruz in 1986 (Winfield Capitaine 1988). La

Mojarra Stela 1 possesses one of the lengthiest Mesoamerican texts of any kind – particularly when compared with like inscriptions on stela, rather than hieroglyphic staircases, for example. The discovery of a “new” column of text on the object in 1995

(Justeson and Kaufman 1997) increased its length by 35 glyphs, for a total of over 500 glyphs on the object (Pérez de Lara and Justeson 2006). The text includes two Long

Count dates of 8.5.16.9.7 and 8.5.3.3.5 and is oriented in two different directions – the proper right half reads from right to left, into the gaze of the panel’s central figure, and the left side reads from left to right. After its discovery, the possibility of analyzing the grammatical structures of the Isthmian script could be explored for the first time.

Figure 22: La Mojarra Stela 1 (reproduced from Justeson and Kaufman 1993, original drawing by George Stuart).

Two notable attempts have been made to decipher the Isthmian script. In 1992

Sylvia Méluzin attempted a pseudo-bilingual reconstruction of the Isthmian system. She compared the calendric inscriptions from Isthmian texts with Maya hieroglyphics and, specifically, the Yucatec Maya dialect. By calling the script “Tuxtlatec,” Méluzin hoped to draw “attention to the probability that this language or dialect – as that of the Olmec, the hypothesized inventors of the Tuxtla script – may have been, along with the script, one of the few vestiges that most likely lingered for many centuries [sic: after] the eclipsed Olmec civilization” (1992: 286). Méluzin’s attempt, however, was undermined by an unproblematic lamination of Classic Maya epigraphy onto the temporally distant

Isthmian inscriptions. Furthermore, Méluzin’s choice of Yucatec, rather than Cholan

(Campbell 1984), as the language of Maya hieroglyphic analogy further complicates her interpretations – the reader will recall that the most recent hypothesis for the

Kaminaljuyu script, on the other hand, relies upon Cholan (Mora-Marín 2005).

Very little of Méluzin’s translation has import for the discussion of the Isthmian script today, but her attention to the possible “pseudo-bilingual” nature of the script is worth a second look. Méluzin hypothesizes that

the Tuxtla script in its projected millennium of use might have been the vehicle not just for the language of its inventors, but for several languages or dialects, some of which may not have been related to the inventors’ languages or which may now be extinct (Méluzin 1992: 294)

Méluzin uses this idea to argue that calendrical glyphs in Isthmian inscriptions might be variable loans from other languages, inserted by scribes that lacked “a sympathetic ear

(both culturally and personally) for non-Mayan languages” (294). While I do not agree with this particular interpretation, I do believe her multi-cultural, boundary-crossing hypothesis could speak eloquently to how the “openness” inherent to pars pro toto

Olmec-style art in the Early Formative may have translated into a “closed,” but importantly still mutable, Isthmian script in the Terminal Formative.

In 1993, John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman claimed to have deciphered the

Isthmian script through the application of a pre-proto-Zoquean linguistic base and epigraphic analysis of La Mojarra Stela 1 and the Tuxtla Statuette. The authors date La

Mojarra Stela 1 and the Tuxtla Statuette to AD 159 and AD 162, respectively, and argue the inscriptions on these two objects may in fact refer to the same person. Justeson and

Kaufman added to their corpus of Isthmian “translations” in 1997 with an analysis of a newly discovered text panel on La Mojarra Stela 1; and the two published an Isthmian lexicon in 2001. Their decipherment makes the “orthographic assumption [that Isthmian is] a logosyllabic script with minimally CV syllabograms” (Mora-Marín N.d.: 2), making phonetic sequences in which a consonant precedes a consonant or ends a word problematic31. Justeson and Kaufman further argue that the epi-Olmec script has a

Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) grammatical structure – a notable break from the Maya- centric understanding of Mesoamerican systems as Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) systems.

This is a controversial assignment, as the SOV structure is only truly attested for in

Isthmus Mixe (Dieterman 2010), although linguist Yoshiho Yasugi (1995) further stresses that ancestral “Mixe-Zoquean [in particular] is a good candidate for SOV” (158).

Justeson and Kaufman, unfortunately, do not acknowledge the potential biases in their unproblematized use of Mixe-Zoquean to decipher the Isthmian script (1993, 1997; see Chapter 5). The Mixe-Zoquean assumption is immediately integral to their analysis, as no truly bilingual texts are yet known in Mesoamerica, and even proper names are frequently translated when borrowed into local literature (1993: 1706). This glaring

31 See Justeson and Kaufman’s (1993) synharmonic reading of the Isthmian glyph mUk(U) below.

exclusion, in turn, has tarnished their translation work in the eyes of many Mesoamerican scholars. Furthermore, the authors simply state as fact that the writers of “epi-Olmec” likely spoke a pre-proto-Zoquean or ancestral proto-Zoquean language (1993: 1703), rather than a pre-proto/proto-Mixe-Zoquean language. There is little direct explication of why the “Mixe” branch was dropped from their ancestral reconstruction, although some of their proffered translations are circularly cited as “proof” of a Zoquean affiliation. The authors simply state

On the basis of the amount of basic vocabulary shared among various of these languages neither proto-Zoquean nor proto-Mixean split into multiple Zoquean or Mixean languages until about 400 years after our texts were inscribed. We therefore began decipherment entertaining pre-proto-Zoquean and pre-proto- Mixean as viable alternative hypotheses for the language or languages of the epi- Olmec texts. We conclude from the vocabulary of the inscriptions that the language of both texts is pre-proto-Zoquean (Justeson and Kaufman 1993: 1707 [emphasis added]).

Presumably this selection is traceable to Campbell and Kaufman’s (1976) over-reliance on proto-Zoquean loan-words for the original Mixe-Zoquean hypothesis. As mentioned in Chapter 5, however, a more balanced, conservative approach to loan-words does not negate a Mixe-Zoquean or even proto-Zoquean connection (Wichmann 1995; Cysouw et al. 2006); indeed, it might provide a more substantiated case.

In 2003, Stephen Houston and Michael Coe unveiled a ‘new’ artifact with an

Isthmian inscription – the striking greenstone Teotihuacan-style “Teo” Mask. The lengthy inscription on the back of this greenstone object is the second longest of any of the Isthmian inscriptions known to date, and contributes significantly to the corpus of

Isthmian literature. Once again, however, it must be remembered that this artifact lacks any archaeological context, and must be studied with a weary eye. In their Mexicon

article, Houston and Coe use the Teo Mask to “test” the Justeson and Kaufman decipherment. When the authors plugged in the epigraphic values provided by Justeson and Kaufman, they determined that the decipherment “tells us nothing new, unexpected, or even expected about this Isthmian text and the mask that displays it” (Houston and

Coe 2003: 160). Admirably, the authors also critique several subtle instances of Maya- centric interpretation in Justeson and Kaufman’s decipherment.

Although Houston and Coe make a convincing argument, they inadvertently, and unfortunately, make use of some of the very same practices and conceptual frameworks they criticize Justeson and Kaufman for employing. David Mora-Marín points out that there “has been limited response to Houston and Coe’s (2003) criticism of Justeson and

Kaufman” (N.d.: 13); and believes this silence is because Houston and Coe failed to address the key methodological and theoretical approaches taken by Justeson and

Kaufman. While I do not believe the Isthmian script has been deciphered anywhere nearly as definitely or fully as Justeson and Kaufman would argue, I also do not believe

Houston and Coe’s use of the Teo mask successfully “debunked” their work more broadly. A fresh approach to the Isthmian script – one that entertains the proto-Mixe-

Zoquean hypothesis but begins anew with branch assignment and glyphic analysis – is needed. An application of the Justeson and Kaufman schema to the Chiapa de Corzo sherd, in the meantime, reveals both the strides taken on the Isthmian script, as well as the work left to be completed.

Chiapa de Corzo is located in the Central Depression in the heart of Chiapas,

Mexico; today, it is surrounded by a zone of Chiapas Zoque speakers. The site was occupied from the Late Formative to the Classic (approximately 1200 BC to 600 AD);

and archaeological excavations at the site were re-opened in 2008 under the joint direction of INAH-Chiapas and Brigham Young University’s “New World

Archaeological Foundation.” Bruce Bachand and Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta (2008) uncovered Olmec-style materials at the site, including a hollow Olmec-style “baby” figurine that dates to the Middle Formative period (the Dili Phase at Chiapa de Corzo)

(2008: 38, Fig. 111) and caches of greenstone celts, including an axe incised with an

Olmec-style face (2008: Fig. 71). “The findings provide the best evidence to date of a strong ideological affiliation between Chiapa de Corzo and the late Middle Formative

Olmec centers of the Gulf Coast” (2008: 202).

The Chiapa de Corzo ceramic sherd bears a lengthy, clearly legible Isthmian text and, perhaps most significantly, an archaeological context. It is not the only evidence of

Isthmian writing at the site, either – a stamp from the Late to Terminal Formative

Francesa-Guanacaste Phase appears to be a glyph surrounded by repeated U-shaped brackets (Bachand and Gallaga Murrieta 2008, Fig. 114), and Chiapa de Corzo Stela 2 bears a Long Count date and half-missing day glyph. The Chiapa de Corzo sherd itself was recovered from intrusive fill in a burial and dates to the Francesa phase. Pérez de

Lara and Justeson (2006) state the Chiapa de Corzo sherd is “the oldest currently dateable epi-Olmec text” and date the object to 450 – 300 BC; however, the authors are apparently applying the Lowe (1962) chronological schema. According to the adjusted phase dating published in Bachand and Gallaga Murrieta (2008), the Francesa phase and the associated

Chiapa de Corzo sherd thus more likely date to 350 – 100 BC (129).

The Chiapa de Corzo (CD) sherd [Figure 23] displays three columns of text – one missing and only just visible (A), and two clear columns (B and C). It is unknown how

much of the total inscription is lost, or how many individual glyphs are missing from text columns B and C. Column B retains five complete glyphs, and Column C retains six.

Seven of the CD glyphs are recognizable from Macri and Stark’s Isthmian signary –

MS124 (possibly B132 and C5), MS20 (B2 and C5), MS100 (B5 and C2), and MS93

(C4). The four remaining glyphs (B3, B4, C1, and C6) are either unique among extant

Isthmian inscriptions or unrecognizable in their current form. Three of the CD glyphs, furthermore, are a part of Justeson and Kaufman’s proposed “epi-Olmec” syllabary and decipherment schema (MS124, MS20, and MS93). Using the Justeson and Kaufman decipherment and focusing on the longest recognizable CD passage – glyphs C2 through

C5 – two potential (and broad) readings of the text are possible.

Figure 23: The Chiapa de Corzo sherd inscription (redrawn from Méluzin 1992, Figure 3).

32 Although Macri and Stark read both CD B1 and CD C5 as variants of MS124, it is possible CD B1 might be a different glyph. All other recognizable occurrences of MS124 (La Mojarra Stela glyphs K2, P25, P37, Q21, R16, and T22) have three small parallel dots, like CD C5, rather than one open oval, like CD B1.

First, it is notable that the combination of MS100, MS20 and MS93 is seen elsewhere in Isthmian writing. In the Tuxtla Statuette inscription, MS100 and MS93 are superimposed into one glyphic element at positions F7 and G6 and immediately followed by MS20 at F8 and G7, respectively. In the Tuxtla Statuette context, this sequence neatly coincides with the interpretation of MS20 as a “clause-ending” glyph (Ayala 1983: 197) and an independent completive suffix for verbs (Justeson and Kaufman 1993: 1708). On the Chiapa de Corzo sherd, however, MS20 precedes MS93 and seems unlikely to be clause terminal. In the Justeson and Kaufman decipherment MS20 can, alternatively, be read as wU, a relativizing enclitic for nouns and adjectives (1993: 1708). A titular phrase culminating in this reading of MS20 would then be glossed in English as “she/he who is

[title].” Such a reading would indicate CD glyphs C1 – C3 constitute a subject, and depending upon whether the passage is transitive or intransitive, C4 – C6 should constitute, respectively, an object and a verb or just a verb.

MS93 immediately follows MS20 on the Chiapa de Corzo sherd. It is interesting to note that, on this oldest of the confirmed Isthmian inscriptions, MS93 most closely resembles glyph A from the San Andres greenstone plaque fragments. Justeson and

Kaufman propose that MS93 is the syllabogram tu, and read the similar MS51 somewhat over-enthusiastically as an Olmec-style “knuckle-duster” like those depicted on the

Cascajal Block in positions 28 and 58. At this point, the meaning of MS93 on the Chiapa de Corzo sherd is unclear. While it could be a logogram and thus function as the object of the passage, it may also be a syllabogram to be read in conjunction with the immediately following MS124.

Justeson and Kaufman translate MS124 as kU’, an inceptive or inchoate suffix that alters the active tense of a verb. This reading could work in the Chiapa de Corzo context if the undeciphered glyph in C6 is, in fact, a verb. In this case, the passage would thus record an action that was beginning to happen. Alternatively, but extremely cautiously, MS93 and MS124 could be read together as the reconstructed proto-Mixe-

Zoquean verb *tuk, to happen (or tuk(U’)) in an intransitive passage. Although this type of parallel vowel suppression is characteristic of Maya hieroglyphic writing33, Justeson and Kaufman apply the same schema to their reading of the consonant-ending mUk(U) in a “bloodletting” passage on La Mojarra Stela 1 (1993: 1706, Figure 6J). Fleetingly, CD

C6 – the unidentified terminal glyph – does have some resemblance to MS107, a logogram that Justeson and Kaufman (1993) read as “penis” in the aforementioned bloodletting passage.

Could the Chiapa de Corzo sherd, then, record the bloodletting ritual of an

Isthmian elite? Unlike Justeson and Kaufman, I do not think we have reached that level of decipherment. Indeed, I join the ranks of those incredulous of the authoritative and extremely detailed narrative they claim to be able to read off of La Mojarra Stela 1 and the Tuxtla Statuette. On the other hand, the theoretical aspects of their work do shed some light on, at the very least, the Chiapa de Corzo text. Although I agree with Houston and Coe (2003) that the Justeson and Kaufman decipherment did not produce a significant “insight” into the true meaning of the Chiapa de Corzo text, it certainly offered a conceptual schema from which to work, and perhaps most importantly, pursue

33 This is yet another example of the lamination of Maya hieroglyphic writing principles onto other glyphic systems – a trait the author admittedly continues in this passage. That these interpretations continue to slip into epigraphic work (often without acknowledgement) is further evidence that more, fresh work is needed on the Isthmian system.

questions. As evidenced by Wichmann’s study of the San Bartolo murals (N.d.), it may even turn out that the Isthmian script does indeed encode a pre-proto-Zoquean language, rather than pre-proto-Mixe-Zoquean. Questions still far outnumber answers with the

Isthmian script, however, and although more work remains to be completed, we should not throw Justeson and Kaufman’s baby out with the bathwater. That individual glyphs and glyph sequences from Terminal Formative Isthmian inscriptions are clearly recognizable on the Late Formative Chiapa de Corzo sherd, furthermore, indicates a high level of system stability – a connection Justeson and Kaufman’s work has further illuminated. This early stability, combined with the precocious appearance of extensive, elaborate Isthmian inscriptions, seems to allude to even more ancient origin for the

Isthmian script among the Olmec of the Middle and Early Formative eras.

Chapter 9: Iconoglyphic Elements at Izapa

In the variegated landscape of Formative Mesoamerica, writing systems can be as notable for their conspicuous “absence” as for their precocious presence. This is perhaps most true for the Middle to Late Formative center of Izapa in the Pacific Coast piedmont, near the border of modern Chiapas and Guatemala. Despite archaeological excavations at the site under Philip Drucker (1951) and Gareth Lowe (Lowe et al. 1982), Izapa’s chronology remains frustratingly muddled34. It is clear that by the Middle Formative, the

Soconusco region broadly was undergoing a substantive shift in settlement from sites in the coastal plain to inland sites like Izapa in the piedmont (Clark 2000). Izapa is believed to have reached its height – complete with monumental architecture, open plazas, and distinctive carved stone monuments – by the Late Formative Guillén phase (350 – 100 cal. BC) (Lowe et al. 1982). Much has been said about Izapa as a densely populated urban center, “but in reality virtually nothing has been documented about these topics”

(Rosenswig et al. 2013: 1495). The site has even been described as “a major center associated with the Isthmian tradition” (Sharer and Traxler 2006: 227), although

Isthmian-style writing has not been uncovered from the site. By the end of the Late

Formative and beginning of the Terminal Formative, Izapa ceased to produce new monumental architecture, and likely underwent a collapse35 (Lowe et al. 1982).

So-called “Izapa-style” stelae, altars and carved monuments can be found throughout the region, as well as at the nearby sites of Takalik Abaj and Kaminaljuyu,

34 A team from SUNY-Albany recently completed a LIDAR mapping project, ground reconnaissance survey, and surface collection at the site (Rosenswig et al. 2013). Excavation is still at least one field season off (Rosenswig, personal communication), but the results are eagerly awaited. 35 The site experienced some level of human activity and/or occupation through the Late Classic – including the movement and replacing of Formative era stone monuments (Lowe et al. 1982: 307).

two urban centers more commonly discussed in an early Maya context (Guernsey 2006).

Many Izapa-style monuments are narrative in their pictorial content, but none bear clear evidence of hieroglyphic writing. While clearly a unique, indigenous iconographic tradition, the Izapa-style, furthermore, bears residual traces of both Olmec-style and

Maya-style art. This blended visual vocabulary and the site’s chronology have prompted many scholars to place Izapa on a developmental continuum between the Olmec and the

Maya – a transitional regional style nestled between two more clearly delineated artistic traditions (Lowe et al. 1982; Smith 1984; Clark and Pye 2000; Pool 2007). Consequently, work on the Izapa-style has drawn heavily upon Maya scholarship (Quirarte 1973; Lowe,

Lee and Martínez Espoinos 1982; Parsons 1986; Schele and Freidel 1990), and in particular its apparent resonance with the creation narrative of the Quiche Maya, the

Popol Vuh. I believe it is time this interpretive practice underwent a revision, and accordingly, so too should our understanding of writing at the site.

Izapa is located at somewhat of a crossroads between the afore-discussed Zapotec,

Isthmian, and proto-Maya writing systems. The linguistic affiliation of ancient Izapa is unknown – however, if glottochronological estimates are to be believed, proto-Mixe-

Zoquean speaking populations to the northwest and proto-Maya speakers to the northeast likely surrounded the site. Even ignoring the directionality and intensity of influence and interaction between these regions, it is very likely the people of Izapa had at least some degree of exposure to closed, linguistically transparent writing systems. And yet, no extensive texts have been found on Izapa-style monuments.

In this way, the Izapa case is at least superficially similar to that of the massive

Early Classic site of Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan interacted with both the Zapotec and

Maya regions, but until recently the city appeared not to have developed its own writing system. Epigraphic work by Karl Taube (2000; 2011), however, indicates Teotihuacanos may have employed a more subtle, open glyphic system that fit their far-reaching, multi- cultural needs. Although Izapa did not have the same reach and intensity of influence as

Teotihuacan, its distinctive art style was successfully exported across the immediate landscape. A text independent communicative strategy, rather than a closed writing system, may have better fit the Izapa community’s needs. Julia Guernsey (2006) argues

this option by elites at Izapa to communicate with images rather than hieroglyphic texts provided a solution, and should not be dismissed as an evolutionary blunder or ignorant mistake: it afforded a widespread, accessible, and presumably successful nonverbal system of communication (15).

Embedded in these Izapa-style monuments36, furthermore, are some iconographic elements that are distinctly glyph-like. These iconoglyphic elements are embedded within narrative scenes – often on the ground-line or embedded within costume elements or headdresses – and are repeated in similar contexts across monuments. While the meaning of these iconoglyphs is unknown, they certainly signaled something for viewers conversant in Izapan visual culture. Thus, a few of these iconoglyphic elements demand discussion in the greater context of Formative era writing systems – specifically, as they relate to the Isthmian hieroglyphic system [Figure 24].

Generally, cross-bar motifs, U-brackets and a foliated iconoglyph that strongly resemble the now familiar MS97 and MS98 are common across Izapa-style monuments.

A ground-line element that resembles the “key” motif of MS44 appears on many Izapa- style monuments, including Stela 4 and Stela 18, and has been interpreted as an earth fang referent (Grove 2000). Cartouched iconoglyphs are visible on Stela 25, Stela 60 and

36 Published drawings of Izapa-style monuments vary in their accuracy. To control for that variability in this analysis, I primarily consulted Garth Norman’s traced black and white photographs (Norman 1973).

Altar 60. On Stela 25, the cartouched iconoglyph is embedded in the wing of the stela’s central bird figure, and thus might function in some sort of a naming capacity. A small figure in the sky-line of Izapa Stela 1 appears to be accompanied by two iconoglyphic elements. The inset miniature scene features a network of four dots (cf. MS122, but quite possibly a numeral element) and a fairly generic element that resembles step-like Zapotec glyphs and the throne-like CS36 of the Cascajal Block. Interestingly, Justeson and

Kaufman read the dot glyph MS122 as the phonetic syllable po (Macri and Stark 1993:

23) – the first syllable of pom, the Mixe-Zoquean word for copal and a possible loan- word in the proto-Maya San Bartolo wall murals (Wichmann N.d.). Figures on other

Izapa-style monuments, like the central figure on Izapa Stela 3, furthermore, appear to be holding axes that resemble Cascajal Block glyphs 34 and 61 (Guernsey 2006: 65).

Figure 24: Olmec-style and Isthmian glyphs with Izapan visual cognates. (A1) MS44 and (A2) Detail from Izapa Stela 18; (B1) MS122, (B2) CS36, and (B3) Detail from Izapa Stela 1; (C1) CS34 and (C2) Detail from Izapa Stela 3; (D1) MS28, (D2) MS29, and (D3) Detail from Izapa Stela 2; (E) Detail of Izapa Stela 60 (all Izapa Stela details drawn from Norman 1976).

Even stronger evidence of Izapan iconoglyphic elements appears on Izapa Stelae

2, 4, and 60. Izapa Stela 2 and 4 contain a foliated crossed-bar motif that bears a strong resemblance to MS28 and MS29 [Figure 23]. On both Stela 2 and Stela 4, the foliated cross-bar iconoglyph is embedded in the wings of human-bird composite figures. On

Stela 4, furthermore, this iconoglyph is inset into the central human figure’s costume. The cartouched cross-bar iconoglyph appears on several other Izapa-style monuments, just without this attached foliated element – including Stela 11, where the iconoglyph is embedded in the body of a crocodilian figure. Lastly, an iconoglyphic element that echoes the E-element of Olmec-style art and writing can be seen in various orientations across Izapa-style monuments. On Izapa Stela 12, for example, an E-element-esque motif that strongly resembles the detail on San Lorenzo Monument 9 is repeated across the monument’s ground-line. On Izapa Stela 60, a single, large, and downward oriented E- element occupies a central position in the object’s ground-line. Although it is impossible to say the Olmec-style E-element carried a uniform meaning across time, space, and cultural boundaries, the similarity between this Izapa-style iconoglyph and the Olmec- style E-element is provocative.

The inclusion of Izapa-style iconoglyphs in this study is not intended to muddy the already turbulent waters of Formative writing analysis. Rather, a consideration of the open, linguistically-unbounded Izapa system may shed greater light on the origins of writing in Mesoamerica. The Olmec-style pars pro toto tradition may have functioned in a very similar way to Izapan iconoglyphs – traversing cultural and linguistic boundaries to signal meaning across time and space. This method of signaling may have been particularly useful in the Early Formative period, as San Lorenzo’s influence extended

out across the cosmographical landscape of Mesoamerica. Iconicity is apparent in the structure and design of the Cascajal Block text; but by the Middle Formative, a more closed system, as evidenced perhaps by the San Andres Seal and La Venta Monument 13, likely arose to serve an altered cultural function.

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Chapter 10: Conclusion

By the Terminal Formative era, cultures across Mesoamerica were experimenting with, wielding, manipulating, and, in some cases, foregoing hieroglyphic writing systems.

With the exception of Izapan-style iconoglyphs, these systems were patently closed – they concretized the sounds of language, marked time in a meaningful way, and both complimented and stood apart from visual art practices. From a stylistic viewpoint, there are similarities both across and between the Zapotec, Isthmian and proto-Maya hieroglyphic systems. Elements present in the Isthmian system can be traced to both

Zapotec and proto-Maya inscriptions, and characteristically Olmec-style motifs are traced perhaps most strongly in the Isthmian signary. The repetition of the U-bracket, the addition of foliated superfixes and suffixes, the integration of shared glyphic cognates, and, very likely, the invention of the Long Count are all tied into the Isthmian tradition.

The extensive, highly linguistically dependent Terminal Formative inscriptions of the

Isthmus of Tehuantepec, then, hint at a longer temporal pedigree.

Recent archaeological evidence indicates that the peoples of Olman were engaging in signaling practices even before the San Lorenzo Horizon (Cyphers and Di

Castro 2009). The Olmec distilled a rich, elaborate visual vocabulary into a pars pro toto signaling tradition; and carried, traded and exchanged this “open” practice across hundreds of miles of Formative era landscape. The truncated motifs and recurrent patterns of this open system were primed to carry a great cosmological weight, and signaled distinct, abstract ideas in much the same way as, or perhaps even more so than,

Mesoamerica’s subsequent closed hieroglyphic systems. The linear inscriptions of the

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Cascajal Block, the San Andres Seal and La Venta Monument 13 indicate this signifier/signified tradition was codified into a closed, true writing system by at least the beginning of the Middle Formative period. That this enigmatic Olmec-style hieroglyphic writing system led to the Isthmian script is likely, and that it had an impact on

Mesoamerica more broadly is undeniable.

Much work remains to be done in the field of Formative epigraphy: the Mixe-

Zoquean linguistic application must be approached anew, excavations that reach down to

Formative era occupations must be encouraged, and systematic, comparative studies must be undertaken. All too often, scholars become enmeshed in one region, one hieroglyphic system, or one heady desire – to crack the decipherment barrier. If any substantive advance is to be made in the field of Formative epigraphy, however, this must change.

Only then can we begin to ask the questions that will allow us to “crack” these systems in a meaningful way. Formative hieroglyphic writing systems must be understood as mutable experiments in closed signaling, each, in its own way, likely descendant of the open, meaningfully-constituted signaling practices born desde la matriz de Olman.

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