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Dinesh club

Posted: 18 Jun 2022

Taken: 18 Jun 2022

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this photo by Dinesh

Curious villagers surrounding the great Olmec head excavated in 1939 by archeologist Mathew Stirling in the Mexican state of Veracruz



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_colossal_heads
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
At Smithsonia
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
On January 16, 1939, Matthew W. Stirling took an early morning walk through the wet, buggy forest of Varacruz state, on the Gulf Coast sixe, of Mexico’s southern isthmus. Eighty years before his walk, a villager traipsing through the same woods had stumbled across a buried, six-foot-tall stone sculpture of a human head. Although the find was of obvious archaeological importance, the object was so big and heavy that in the intervening eight decades it had never been pulled out of the ground. Stirling, director of the Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology, had gone to Mexico the bear before in early 1938, to the head himself. He found it, sunk to the eye brows in mud, after an eight hour horseback ride from the nearest town. The head was in the midst of about fifty large, artificial earthen mounds -- the ruins, Sterling concluded with excitement, of previously unknown Maya civic center. He decided to assemble a research team and explore the area in more detail the next year, and persuaded the National geographic Society to foot the bill. While he returned to Cercruz, he and hi team cleared the dirt around the great head, admiring its fine, naturalistic workmanship, so unlike the stiff, stylized sculpture common elsewhere in Mesoamerica. Nearby they found a stela, its wide, flat face covered with bas-relief figures. Hoping to turn up others, Stirling was walking that January morning to the far end of the mounded area, where workman had noticed large, flat, partly submerged rock: a second stela.

Across the back of the stela were clumps of dots and bars, a notation familiar to Stirling for the Maya. The Maya used a dot to signify one and a horizontal bar to signify five; the number nineteen would thus be tree bars and four dots. Stirling copied the dots and bars and “hurried back to camp, where he settled down to decipher them” The inscription turned out to be a date: September 3, 32 B.C., in today’s calendar. ` Page 233
23 months ago. Edited 23 months ago.

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