What was the Cascajal Block, the 62-sign stone from Veracruz?
TL;DR — A serpentine block with 62 incised signs, dug from a Veracruz gravel quarry and reported in Science in 2006 as the oldest writing in the Americas.
On September 15, 2006, the journal Science carried “Oldest Writing in the New World,” a report by seven researchers on a serpentine block with 62 incised signs from Veracruz, Mexico. It turned up at El Cascajal, near the Olmec center of San Lorenzo, in debris from a mound quarried for road gravel, cut off from the layer it had lain in. The authors dated it to about 900 BC by the pottery found around it and argued that the signs were writing. Martha Macri, in 2006, and John Justeson, in 2012, raised irregularities in the way the signs combine. In 2020 David F. Mora-Marín of the University of North Carolina answered that those irregularities fit how logosyllabic scripts spell words.
Quick facts
- When
- early 1990s (find, as Archaeology magazine dates it) or 1999 (the year given by Mesoweb and by Caterina Magni) · April 1999 (Jáltipan authorities ask INAH to inspect the quarry) · September 15, 2006 (report in Science) · about 900 BC (the authors' date, from associated pottery) · 2006, 2012 (Macri and Justeson on sign order) · February 17, 2020 (Mora-Marín's reply published online)
- Where
- El Cascajal, four mounds in the ejido of Lomas de Tacamichapa, municipality of Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico, within sight of the Olmec center of San Lorenzo
- Who
- María del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez and Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos (INAH, Veracruz), with Michael D. Coe, Richard A. Diehl, Stephen D. Houston, Karl A. Taube and Alfredo Delgado Calderón; Martha Macri; John Justeson; David F. Mora-Marín
- Outcome
- The authors counted 62 signs made up of 28 distinct ones and dated the block to about 900 BC by the pottery found with it. Macri (2006) and Justeson (2012) raised irregularities in how the signs combine; Mora-Marín (2020) argued those irregularities fit the spelling of a logosyllabic script
El Cascajal: a mound dug for road gravel
Published accounts disagree on when the block was found. Archaeology, the magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America, wrote in January/February 2007 that villagers in Veracruz “found a scratched-up block of stone while building a road in the early 1990s.” Joel Skidmore’s 2006 account for Mesoweb begins in April 1999, when local authorities in the municipality of Jáltipan asked Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) to inspect objects from a local gravel quarry. The inspectors were María del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez and Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos, who became the first two authors of the 2006 report. Caterina Magni of the University of Paris-Sorbonne, writing in 2008, put the find itself in a gravel quarry in 1999.
The quarry, worked for several years for road-building material, proved to be an archaeological site, El Cascajal. Its four mounds stand in the ejido, a communal landholding, of Lomas de Tacamichapa, within sight of the salt dome that carries San Lorenzo. The mounds date to the late first millennium AD but cover a much older occupation.
The block lay in a heap of debris left when much of one mound was cut away, down to a depth of 2.5 meters. Workers picked up pottery sherds, figurine fragments and broken ground-stone tools from the same spoil. Magni wrote that the block “was not exhumed by reliable scientific excavation”; its date rests on the objects found with it.
September 15, 2006: the case for writing
Rodríguez Martínez and Ortíz Ceballos wrote the Science paper with Michael D. Coe, Richard A. Diehl, Stephen D. Houston, Karl A. Taube and Alfredo Delgado Calderón; Skidmore’s report quotes it at length. Roughly 75 percent of the material from the spoil heap belonged to the Formative period, and nearly all of that to the San Lorenzo phase, which the paper gave as 1200 to 900 BC in uncalibrated radiocarbon years. As quoted by Skidmore, the authors concluded that “the block, and its incising, can be dated to the San Lorenzo phase, perhaps towards the end of San Lorenzo B,” which they put at about 900 BC.
On forgery, the authors wrote that high-resolution photographs showed “unmistakable weathering, including pitting over incisions, with mineralization around the pits and inside the carved lines, a secure sign of ancient surface alteration.” Magni named the INAH geologists who tested the stone, Ricardo Sánchez and Jasinto Robles.
The stone is 36 by 21 by 13 centimeters, by Magni’s figures. Archaeology gave 14 1/8 by 8 1/4 by 5 1/8 inches and a weight of 26 pounds 7 ounces. The signs cover its one flat face. The authors reduced the 62 signs to 28 distinct ones: three appear four times, six appear three times, 12 appear twice and seven only once. They argued that repeated short sequences and a consistent reading order met the test for writing. Houston, one of the authors, said in Archaeology that it “knocks you on the head that it is writing and not just iconography or a sequence of symbols.”
Skidmore reported that the authors were not sure of the reading direction or even which way up the text ran, and that the chances of decipherment were slim unless more texts turned up.
Sign order under question, 2006 to 2020
Martha Macri wrote “The Cascajal Block: Sign Ordering” in 2006, and John Justeson discussed the block in “Early Mesoamerican Writing Systems,” his chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology, published in 2012. Mora-Marín’s 2020 abstract summarizes their point as “certain irregularities in the patterns of sign co-occurrence.”
The find context weighs on that argument, because the block has to be read largely on its own. Apart from it, the 2006 authors pointed only to two long-known Olmec celts, from Tlaltenco and Humboldt, as probable and possible examples of the same script. Magni wrote in 2008 that she read Olmec signs as pictographic and ideographic, with no solid proof yet of a phonogram, a sign standing for a sound.
Mora-Marín, of the Linguistics Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, made a new line drawing of the block and a distributional analysis of its signs. His abstract dates the text to about 1000 to 900 BC and states that the irregularities Macri and Justeson raised “are consistent with spelling practices in logosyllabic scripts, showing that the script is linguistically motivated.” Cambridge University Press published the paper online on February 17, 2020, in Ancient Mesoamerica, volume 31.
Key facts
- On September 15, 2006, Science reported the block in “Oldest Writing in the New World,” by Rodríguez Martínez, Ortíz Ceballos, Coe, Diehl, Houston, Taube and Delgado Calderón (Mesoweb).
- Archaeology magazine places the find in the early 1990s, during road-building; Mesoweb begins with an INAH inspection requested in April 1999, and Magni dates the find to 1999.
- The block came from spoil left when a mound at El Cascajal was quarried to a depth of 2.5 meters, and it was dated to about 900 BC by the pottery found with it (Mesoweb).
- It is serpentine, 36 by 21 by 13 centimeters (Magni), and weighs 26 pounds 7 ounces (Archaeology).
- Its 62 signs reduce to 28 distinct ones; Macri (2006) and Justeson (2012) raised irregularities in how they combine, and Mora-Marín (2020) argued the irregularities fit logosyllabic spelling.
FAQ
Where was the Cascajal Block found?
At El Cascajal, a group of four mounds in Lomas de Tacamichapa, in the municipality of Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico. The site lies within sight of the Olmec center of San Lorenzo, and the block came out of a mound being quarried for gravel.
How old is the Cascajal Block?
The 2006 authors dated it to about 900 BC, at the end of the San Lorenzo phase, from the pottery found in the same debris. No layer survived to date it directly; Mora-Marín's 2020 abstract gives about 1000 to 900 BC.
Has the Cascajal Block been deciphered?
Not as of 2020. The 2006 authors judged decipherment unlikely unless more texts in the script were found, and Mora-Marín's abstract of that year describes his work on paired signs as groundwork "needed for any attempt at decipherment."
Sources
- Joel Skidmore, "The Cascajal Block: The Earliest Precolumbian Writing," Mesoweb Reports (Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, 2006): the Science report, the April 1999 inspection, the find context, the pottery dating and the passages quoted from Rodríguez Martínez et al. 2006.
- "What We Learn: The Cascajal Block," Archaeology 60, no. 1 (Archaeological Institute of America, January/February 2007): the early-1990s road-building find, dimensions and weight, and Stephen Houston's comment.
- Caterina Magni (University of Paris-Sorbonne), "Olmec Writing. The Cascajal Block: New Perspectives," Arts & Cultures 9 (2008): 64–81, FAMSI reprint compiled 2012: the 1999 find, the absence of a controlled excavation, the metric dimensions and the INAH geologists.
- David F. Mora-Marín (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "The Cascajal Block: New Line Drawing, Distributional Analysis, and Orthographic Patterns," Ancient Mesoamerica 31, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 210–229, Cambridge University Press, abstract and reference list.
Cite this article
- APA
- LETTER. (2026, September 28). What was the Cascajal Block, the 62-sign stone from Veracruz? Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/americas/ancient/cascajal-block-veracruz-62-signs-science-2006/
- Chicago
- LETTER. “What was the Cascajal Block, the 62-sign stone from Veracruz?” Our Earth's History, September 28, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/americas/ancient/cascajal-block-veracruz-62-signs-science-2006/.
- MLA
- LETTER. “What was the Cascajal Block, the 62-sign stone from Veracruz?” Our Earth's History, 28 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/americas/ancient/cascajal-block-veracruz-62-signs-science-2006/.
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