1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [231]
Olmec appearance: Bernal 1969:76–79.
Mirrors: Heizer and Gullberg 1981.
Destruction of sculptures: Grove 1981.
La Venta: Rust and Sharer 1988. A succinct description is in Bernal 1969:35–43.
“not only engendered,” “established the pattern”: Bernal 1969:188. A well-argued contemporary version of this view is Diehl 2005.
Competitive interaction in Mesoamerica: Flannery and Marcus 2000 (“chiefdoms in the Basin,” 33). I thank Joyce Marcus for walking me through these ideas.
Zapotec rise: Blanton et al. 1999; Marcus and Flannery 1996; Flannery and Marcus 2003 (“virtually unoccupied,” 11802; radiocarbon dates, 11804); Spencer 2003.
Oldest writing: Marcus pers. comm. (750 B.C.), 1976 (glyphs and translation); Flannery and Marcus 2003. See also, Serrano 2002. The reason I have called the temple carving the first “securely” dated writing is that two other candidates for the title of first written text exist, but neither can be dated accurately because their archaeological context is unknown. Both are from the Tlatilco culture north of present-day Mexico City; they may have been made as early as 1000 B.C. One seal shows three glyphs that some think resemble Olmec writing. The other, a true mystery, bears what look like letters in a script of which there are no other extant examples (Kelley 1966). A third candidate for earliest Olmec writing exists. In the 1990s a team led by Mary Pohl of the University of Florida discovered a cylindrical greenstone seal two miles from La Venta. Dated to 650 B.C., the seal bears a bas-relief bird with a comic-book speech bubble bursting from its mouth. Pohl and two colleagues identified the glyphs in the bubble as precursors to the Mayan glyphs for the date 3-Ajaw (Pohl, Pope, and von Nagy 2002; Stokstad 2002). The identification is controversial. The text cannot be Mayan, they say, because Maya civilization was not firmly set in place until centuries later. Nor can it be Olmec, because other Olmec texts seem not to be related to Maya glyphs. According to John Justeson, a linguistic anthropologist at the State University of New York in Albany who has deciphered other Olmec texts, “Although many accept the greenstone glyphs as plausibly being writing, what [Pohl’s team] read as a ritual calendar date on the ceramic is scarcely accepted by anyone” (email to author).
Inanna temple example: Urton 2003:15–16.
Zero as number: Teresi 2002:79–87 (GPA example, 80).
Tres Zapotes date: In fact, the initial 7 (the baktun figure) was missing, because the stela was broken. Stirling guessed that it was a 7, a supposition that was proven correct in 1972, when the other part of the stela was discovered (Cohn 1972).
Tentative assignation: In The Olmec World, for instance, Bernal never directly says that the Olmec invented zero. He merely describes the Long Count, remarking that it “necessarily implies knowledge of the zero” (Bernal 1969:114).
More than a dozen systems of writing: Coe 1976a:110ff. Coe lists thirteen forms, but does not include Olmec and whatever is on the Tlatilco seals.
Deciphered Olmec stela: Stuart 1993a, 1993b; Justeson and Kaufman 1993; 1997; 2001 (Chiapas potsherd translation, 286).
Monte Albán dispute: I have borrowed the formulation in Zeitlin 1990. Some argue that not enough data exist to resolve the question (O’Brien and Lewarch 1992).
Slabs as slain enemies: Marcus 1983:106–08, 355–60.
Fight with Tilcajete: Spencer and Redmond 2001.
N ˜udzahui marriage politics: Spores 1974.
8-Deer’s story: Pohl 2002; Byland and Pohl 1994:119–60, 241–44; Caso 1977–79 (vol. 1):69–83, (vol. 2):169–84; Smith 1962; Clark 1912.
Wheeled toys: Stirling 1940b:310–11, 314; Charnay 1967:178–86.
Egypt and wheel: Wright 2005:46.
Moldboard plow: Temple 1998 (“so inefficient,” 16). I am grateful to Dick Teresi for directing me to this book and example (“as if Henry Ford”: e-mail,