Saturno William A, Stuart David, Beltrán Boris
Department of Anthropology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, USA.
Science. 2006 Mar 3;311(5765):1281-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1121745. Epub 2006 Jan 5.
The ruins of San Bartolo, Guatemala, contain a sample of Maya hieroglyphic writing dating to the Late Preclassic period (400 B.C. to 200 A.D.). The writing appears on preserved painted walls and plaster fragments buried within the pyramidal structure known as "Las Pinturas," which was constructed in discrete phases over several centuries. Samples of carbonized wood that are closely associated with the writing have calibrated radiocarbon dates of 200 to 300 B.C. This early Maya writing implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica.
危地马拉圣巴托洛的遗址中保存着一些玛雅象形文字样本，其年代可追溯到前古典时期晚期（公元前400年至公元200年）。这些文字出现在被称为“拉斯平图拉斯”的金字塔结构内保存下来的彩绘墙壁和石膏碎片上，该金字塔结构历经几个世纪分阶段建造而成。与这些文字紧密相关的碳化木材样本经校准后的放射性碳年代测定为公元前200年至300年。这种早期玛雅文字表明，玛雅文字系统的发展比之前认为的要早几个世纪，大致相当于我们在中美洲其他地方看到最早文字的时期。
