A team led by Mary Pohl of Florida State University and funded primarily by the National Science Foundation has announced the discovery of written artifacts near La Venta in the Gulf Coast region of Tabasco, Mexico which are about 350 years older than the earliest specimens previously found. The writings were produced during the Olmec era, a pre-Mayan civilization, and are estimated to date from 650 B.C. The finding is described in the Dec. 6 edition of Science. What happened to the Olmecs? “It is unclear, but at least in the lowland region of the Tabascan coastal plain where we conducted our research, flooding due to changing courses of rivers over time led to the abandonment of the Olmec settlement at San Andres and probably other sites in this area. It is possible, too, that the Mayans increased their power and came to dominate, taking over trade routes, leading to the end of the Olmecs as we know it” says Pohl.

You don’t have to be a professional Indiana Jones and go to far-off exotic lands to do significant archeological work. As this article published two weeks ago shows, many
amateurs do just fine in their local library. Last spring, students at Brown University were able to
decode cuneiform clay tablets on display at their library from 4000 years ago.