1491 ... if you have never read it was very eye opening as to how badass all these civilizations were. Their loss today would be similar to as if we suddenly lost 99% of all China.
[0] One example:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006...
One of the questions sometimes posed to the ancestors on the Oracle Bone inscriptions (the earliest known form of Chinese writing) are questions like: is today an auspicious day to sacrifice the prisoners?
> A sizable portion of the oracle bones uncovered in Shang archaeological sites contain script specifically concerning human sacrifice (see figure 2 above).These written records are also corroborated by the discovery of numerous sacrificial mass-graves in those sites. In most Shang sacrificial rituals, only animals and valuable chattels (such as bronze wares) would be used as offerings. There were only two exceptional circumstances where human sacrifices were made: xunzang 殉葬 and renji 人祭. Xunzang 殉葬 (lit. “burial sacrifice”) refers to the practice in which personal slaves and servants of Shang king, upon their master’s death, were expected to commit ritual suicide or to “volunteer” themselves to be buried alive alongside with their master. While the practice of committing ritual suicide upon the master’s death has lingered throughout Chinese history, the second type of human sacrifice, renji 人祭 (lit. “human offering sacrifice) is practiced only during the Shang dynasty period, and also the most massive in scale in terms of number of people killed in a typical renji ceremony. The demographic pattern of Shang sacrificial victims is also quite interesting. Xunzang victims (or “volunteers”) were mostly personal slaves (i.e. house servants), and therefore in xunzang burial sites we could find a pretty even mix of male and female human remains. Renji victims, on the other hand, appears to be predominately male. [0]
For one thing, the Maya are just one group of peoples in the region. There are and were other peoples in the region.
There are a handful of fragmentary inscriptions - only three or four from two or three sites - in a script that isn't Maya [0]. It has a similar logogram + syllable structure to Maya. Stylistically it has the whole glowering angry sideways faces thing going on too.
It is obviously culturally related. No one can confidently decode it, at least partly due to the limited fragmentary nature of the corpus. But if you read it like it phonetically were Maya based on the subset of common glyphs -- it does seem a lot like it might be a Mixe-Zoque language. Or more accurately, something distantly related to the ancestor of the modern Mixe-Zoque languages.
While no one can read the text, one of the fragments has a date in the same long count calendar the Maya used which we can read: 7.16.6.16.18 -- September 1 32 BC. This aligns well with the context in which it was found, about 2000 years old.
There are yet another set of these head symbol glyphs associated with yet another site (Teotihuacan [1]) and yet another extinct culture (the area had long been controlled by the Aztecs by the time the Spanish arrived). It seems to be the writing system of another people who were prominent and ruled a large area from Teotihuacan at their peak around perhaps 100 - 500 AD. The language it encodes is not the Nahuatl of the Aztec. But it may be a distant relative of the ancestor of Nahuatl. There was an attempt at deciphering it published just earlier this year [2]
There are a few fragments of glyphs associated with the Olmec [3] which some think bear a resemblance to elements of the Isthmian script and the Mayan script and also the Teotihuacan angry head script. Olmec cultural elements seem to have worked their way into all the cultures of those who came after. We're now as far back as 1500 BC or so.
The scope and span! At least three different writing systems. Related. But associated with probably three different spoken language families. And this is over a span of two thousand or more years. Different cultures formed literate empires and city-building civilizations which lasted hundreds, even thousands of years, rising and falling, repeatedly.
The Long Count calendar is sophisticated and reckons an exact count of days from its epoch (generally agreed [4] to be August 11, 3114 BC). It was used regularly for some thousand or more years. It was possibly used by more than one culture / language group at the same time (Maya and whoever made the Isthmian inscriptions). The use of the Long Count is internally consistent: the astronomical observations and archaeological dating by other means generally all is in accord. Only people of the modern era have been so precise and consistent in their time keeping. And not as for long yet.
Getting a bit looser with it: I get an ever-growing feeling that the Mesoamerican civilizations had an intense sense of history and understanding of their own place in time from very early on.
Aside from just finding many more texts, the Holy Grail today would be to discover a bilingual text. Even a tiny fragment would, if nothing else, further confirm the depth of the cultural world that once existed.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamojarra-inscriptio...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/world/americas/teotihuaca...
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cascajal-text.svg
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calend...