La Mojarra Stela 1: an Epi-Olmec text dated 156

The four-tonne limestone slab, about 2 m high and 1.4 m wide, was pulled from the Acula River near La Mojarra in 1986, not far from the Epi-Olmec centre of Tres Zapotes. On one side stands a man in an elaborate costume and a headdress in the form of a supernatural bird topped by a shark, which has been tentatively interpreted as a symbol of rulership; above and beside him run twenty columns of glyphs, twelve short and eight long. Among them are two Long Count dates, corresponding to May 143 and July 156 (8.5.16.9.7), and the monument is dated by the later one. It is an early example of the kind of stela, commemorating a ruler with calendar dates, that later became common in the Classic Maya cities. The stela is kept in the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, where in 1995 another, eroded column of glyphs was noticed on one of its sides.

The Isthmian, or Epi-Olmec, script was used around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec from perhaps 500 BC to AD 500; the stela is one of its longest texts, and the Tuxtla Statuette, found some 70 km away, bears a Long Count date only six years apart from the stela’s. In 1993 John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman proposed a decipherment that read the language as Zoquean and the text as the story of a ruler they called “Harvester Mountain Lord”: his accession, a solar eclipse, appearances of Venus, war, an attempted usurpation, a sacrifice and his own bloodletting. Stephen Houston and Michael Coe tried and failed to apply the system to another Isthmian text, on a Teotihuacan-style mask, and the decipherment remains unproven.