Okay, my fault for skipping a lot of stuff in the middle, but a question began to burn in my mind. They have determined the full inscription, calculated the Olmec date, and correlated it to our Gregorian reckoning. The end of the article says:
So, while 32 BC seemed awfully early for the Olmecs to carve this stone, there’s no way they could have done it later. (Or earlier, for that matter.)
But I am not sure if this resolves the burning question: what makes everyone believe that the inscription corresponded to the current date? Certainly, that is a common custom when erecting a monument, but what if Olmec logic said "let us commemorate this auspicious event that occurred 300 years ago!" or "Let us anticipate the far future in 5,000 years from now!" for example.
Now that piques my interest. Could you be more specific?
Using Stellarium, set the location to Tres Zapotes, but not knowing how far off the calendar's reckoning would be, the closest I have come is a partial solar eclipse, after 9pm on September 1, -23.
Stellarium literally indicates a "Year 0" so BC years could be off-by-one, or off-by-Julian-and-equinox-precession, I just have no idea.
Wikipedia doesn't list any [Lunar/Solar] that are anywhere near 32 BC.
“Il a été proposé qu’elle puisse commémorer une éclipse lunaire qui a précédé une éclipse solaire de deux semaines.”
>”It was proposed that it could commemorate a lunar eclipse preceding a solar eclipse by two weeks”
I was very lazy in my search, so I didn’t check anything about this page.
I wondered this as well. Asking claude, it poses the following arguments.
- Archaeological context. The style of the monument, the associated stratigraphy, and other artifacts found at Tres Zapotes are consistent with the Late Formative period (roughly the 1st century BCE), which matches the inscribed date. If the date referred to some distant past event, you'd expect a mismatch between the monument's physical/archaeological dating and the inscribed date — but they align.
- Unlike the Maya creation date on Quiriguá's Stela C, there's no indication that 7.16.6.16.18 is a cosmologically significant anchor date. It doesn't fall on a period ending or a round number. It looks like a "regular" date — the kind you'd use to record a contemporary event.
- Comparison with other Mesoamerican monuments. When stelae record mythological deep-time dates, they tend to be dramatically ancient and often fall on calendrically significant positions. A date just a few baktuns back doesn't fit that pattern.
- The other side of the stela. The reverse side depicts a figure, likely a ruler. Commemorating a ruler alongside a date strongly suggests the date marks something in that ruler's lifetime — a dedication, accession, or victory.
In case anyone couldn't be bothered to Wiki, a baktun is 394.26 tropical years (aka years!). So 'a few bactuns back' might sound like a jiffy but could in fact be a millennium or more!
Im still unclear how they determined the constant to convert from long mesoamerican to GMT. What common reference event could allow syncing these calendars to a +/- 3 day precision? I would guess some solar eclipse pattern visible from both sides of the Atlantic?
They knew about and could identify solstices, which gives you day of the year. So then it’s just a matter of matching years, which can be done on the basis of things like comets.
Supernovae could also play a factor. Or using tree rings to identify years mentioned as having droughts or floods.
Probably a bunch of other things we haven’t thought of.
For those confused like me: the line drawing shows both halves of the stela, including the ‘7’ (-..) just above the break. The bottom half was found 30 years before the top.
Okay, my fault for skipping a lot of stuff in the middle, but a question began to burn in my mind. They have determined the full inscription, calculated the Olmec date, and correlated it to our Gregorian reckoning. The end of the article says:
But I am not sure if this resolves the burning question: what makes everyone believe that the inscription corresponded to the current date? Certainly, that is a common custom when erecting a monument, but what if Olmec logic said "let us commemorate this auspicious event that occurred 300 years ago!" or "Let us anticipate the far future in 5,000 years from now!" for example.Seems to be an eclipse at that date, if they weren’t able to predict them, they had to have seen it.
Now that piques my interest. Could you be more specific?
Using Stellarium, set the location to Tres Zapotes, but not knowing how far off the calendar's reckoning would be, the closest I have come is a partial solar eclipse, after 9pm on September 1, -23.
Stellarium literally indicates a "Year 0" so BC years could be off-by-one, or off-by-Julian-and-equinox-precession, I just have no idea.
Wikipedia doesn't list any [Lunar/Solar] that are anywhere near 32 BC.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922610
Sorry that was in French
https://peuplesautochtones.wordpress.com/2022/05/21/sites-ar...
“Il a été proposé qu’elle puisse commémorer une éclipse lunaire qui a précédé une éclipse solaire de deux semaines.” >”It was proposed that it could commemorate a lunar eclipse preceding a solar eclipse by two weeks”
I was very lazy in my search, so I didn’t check anything about this page.
I wondered this as well. Asking claude, it poses the following arguments.
- Archaeological context. The style of the monument, the associated stratigraphy, and other artifacts found at Tres Zapotes are consistent with the Late Formative period (roughly the 1st century BCE), which matches the inscribed date. If the date referred to some distant past event, you'd expect a mismatch between the monument's physical/archaeological dating and the inscribed date — but they align.
- Unlike the Maya creation date on Quiriguá's Stela C, there's no indication that 7.16.6.16.18 is a cosmologically significant anchor date. It doesn't fall on a period ending or a round number. It looks like a "regular" date — the kind you'd use to record a contemporary event.
- Comparison with other Mesoamerican monuments. When stelae record mythological deep-time dates, they tend to be dramatically ancient and often fall on calendrically significant positions. A date just a few baktuns back doesn't fit that pattern.
- The other side of the stela. The reverse side depicts a figure, likely a ruler. Commemorating a ruler alongside a date strongly suggests the date marks something in that ruler's lifetime — a dedication, accession, or victory.
In case anyone couldn't be bothered to Wiki, a baktun is 394.26 tropical years (aka years!). So 'a few bactuns back' might sound like a jiffy but could in fact be a millennium or more!
Well good work, you insightful claude!
Im still unclear how they determined the constant to convert from long mesoamerican to GMT. What common reference event could allow syncing these calendars to a +/- 3 day precision? I would guess some solar eclipse pattern visible from both sides of the Atlantic?
The Wikipedia page linked in the article [0] has a plausible-sounding explanation.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calend...
I guess in modern time we can compute eclipses from the past?
They knew about and could identify solstices, which gives you day of the year. So then it’s just a matter of matching years, which can be done on the basis of things like comets.
Supernovae could also play a factor. Or using tree rings to identify years mentioned as having droughts or floods.
Probably a bunch of other things we haven’t thought of.
For those confused like me: the line drawing shows both halves of the stela, including the ‘7’ (-..) just above the break. The bottom half was found 30 years before the top.