The Cascajal Block
Sixty-two signs on a serpentine slab may be the earliest writing in the Americas.
- When
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Found by quarry workers in Veracruz and published in 2006, the block bears sixty-two incised signs in horizontal rows, some repeated, with the surface apparently scraped and reinscribed. Its style associates it with the San Lorenzo Olmec phase ending around 900 BCE, which would make it the oldest writing in the hemisphere by centuries. Its dating is contested because it was not found in a controlled excavation, and nobody can read it.