The Legacy of Mesoamerica History and Culture of a Native American Civilization, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 11 LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES OF MESOAMERICA 429

Figure 11.3 Arroyo

Pesquero Celts. After Peter

David Joralemon, “The

Olmec Dragon: A Study in

Pre-Columbian Iconography,”

in Origins of Religious Art

and Iconography in Preclassic

Mesoamerica,ed. H. B.

Nicholson. Los Angeles, CA:

UCLA Latin American Center

Publications and Ethnic Arts

Council of Los Angeles, 1976,

p. 41, fig. 8 e and f.

well. Some of these symbols seem relatively abstract, as is often true of status sym-
bols, whereas others seem to be depictions of something directly related to the con-
cept; for example, weapons may indicate warrior status or battles. Thus, a subset of
celt iconography uses separate symbols for the kinds of concepts that are represented
by the nonphonetic conventions of later Mesoamerican writing, yet their source in
standard celt iconography is apparent. The iconography of ceremonial celts is there-
fore a plausible precursor of writing in Mesoamerica.
It might be thought that the earliest writing resembled the Mixtec and Aztec sys-
tems, which have the most limited forms of representation of language. However,
these latter systems seem to have actually developed ultimately from the Zapotec sys-
tem, which was originally a more textual tradition. They contain no traces of syllabic
or other phonetic spelling, except for rebus, although syllabic spelling was used in
Zapotec texts. It may be that the difficulty in deciphering these early texts lies pre-
cisely in the scarcity of simple phonetic spelling, but the problem is only now being
addressed with the necessary linguistic framework for analysis.
As a result of our limited knowledge of Middle Formative writing (900–400 B.C.),
the nature of the earliest Mesoamerican writing systems—those from which the better-
known systems emerged—is largely a matter of conjecture. It is generally thought that