Cascajal Block

The Cascajal - stone is a stone block from the Mexican state of Veracruz, which is attributed to the archaeological Olmec culture and dated to the first millennium BC. On a concave carved side characters are carved, which may belong to a hitherto unknown script. This would be the earliest of the pre-Columbian Americas.

Find situation

The stone with the suspected inscriptions became known in 1999. He comes from a small hitherto uninvestigated archaeological zone in Tacamichapa (Municipio de Morelos Jáltipan ) and was not in original storage, but in the rubble of an artificial hill from the Klassikum quarried for road building material for some time. The dating is done on ceramic fragments together with the stone block found by the road workers, and belong mostly to the San Lorenzo phase of the neighboring locality of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan.

Description

The twelve- pound block of stone serpentine (36 cm × 21 cm × 13 cm) bears on one side to 62 characters, the surface shows clear traces of weathering. We can distinguish 28 different characters. They are available in horizontal lines, which are not precisely observed and often interrupted. The small number of signs could indicate structural reasons to alphabetic writing, however, is not possible to determine how many characters the font suspected he possessed, which were not used on the stone. Individual characters seem to be derived from the representation of objects.

Lack of deciphering

The seriousness of the suspected font for the development of writing in Mesoamerica is still difficult to define. The sign inventory bears no resemblance to the better known Isthmian script, which existed in the larger region in the time of Christ's birth, and could therefore be an isolated development. It is not possible to determine to what language the suspected signature could include, so the chance for a reading is very low.

According to the findings of archaeologists Carmen Rodríguez Martínez, Ponciano to Ortíz Ceballos by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia is an unknown olmekisches writing system, which can be dated to about 900 BC and has all the characteristics of a true writing system. Even Hardcover language the scientists want to have recognized it. The fact that the machined surface of the stone is concave, points to the unprecedented technology that Written knocked off several times and the stone was re- labeled.

Criticism

Critics have pointed to the Fund unclear circumstances and therefore unsecured dating and left open the possibility of a modern forgery.