A SLAB inscribed with the oldest writing yet discovered in the New World nearly wound up as landfill in a Mexican road. The archaeologists that salvaged it say the writing dates back nearly 3000 years to the height of the Olmec period, Meso-America’s first civilisation.
The slab is the first solid evidence of a true written Olmec language, says Stephen Houston of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who helped analyse it. Distinct from the writing of later cultures, the hieroglyphic script is also the first new writing system to be discovered in decades. “We’re talking about something that happens…
