Article: Ancient American text gets new reading. (La Mojarra stone, La Mojarra, Mexico)

Workers building a riverside dock near the southeastern Mexico settlement of La Mojarra in November 1986 literally stumbled upon a huge rock that they dragged from its muddy bed. The roughly 6 1/2-foot-high, 4 1/2-foot-wide slab displays a carving of a standing man sporting an elaborate headdress and costume, bordered on the top and one side by 21 columns of hieroglyphic writing.

Two investigators now report that they have deciphered much of the story on the four-ton stone, making it the earliest known readable text in the Americas.

The language of the ancient inscription, which dates to A.D. 159, served as the ancestral tongue of four closely related ...

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