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Originally Posted by bluecuracao
I bet there are more of tablets--maybe they were used in a mail system.
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"Writing" from that part of the world was not correspondence. There was no such thing as "literacy", there were just rulers-artisans-workers. Very few people could even understand what was on the monuments, hence the elaborate portrayals of the ruler who errected it. Like the Egyptians, their writing was phonetic-based heiroglyphics, no script. Calendar dates were an obsession because they believed that any given day was an oracle, they counted and calculated everything. Until the time of the Aztecs, I don't believe the Maya made up any portable writings (codexes), and nothing in that form survives from Olmec and other earlier costal civilizations. The monuments they left are in stone which weighs tons or are frescoed onto plaster, in praise of certain events and the rulers who pulled them off. It was like "I did this" writing. The Maya also might put long inscriptions on some of their pottery masterpieces, but do not seem to have made the connection with painting and baking clay into a tablet record, as was developed very early in the Mesopotamian civilizations. Until a reasonable knowledge in reading the glyphs was reached by researchers, barely a decade ago, we did not know even the names of the cities where these monuments had been erected, the collapse of Maya knowledge and the disappearance of the physical evidence of it had been so complete. I'm not all that sure these archaeologists have really discovered "a whole new form of writing", and will not be surprised if ultimately they decide it is "sketch" of an inscription that an early Olmec ruler in the area wanted to erect somewhere.