A Newly Discovered Column in the Hieroglyphic Text on La Mojarra Stela 1: A Test of the Epi-Olmec Decipherment

Abstract

A badly weathered column of hieroglyphs was discovered in November 1995 on the side of Stela 1 from La Mojarra in southern Veracruz, Mexico. Most of the signs in this column have now been identified by nighttime examination under artificial lighting, making possible a nearly complete transcription and translation of this column. This data expands the modest corpus of epi-Olmec hieroglyphic texts and confirms various aspects of the decipherment of the epi-Olmec script.