Tuxtla Statuette
composition: secure
witness: the statuette itself, under Smithsonian stewardship since 1904; found in disturbed agricultural context rather than controlled excavation, but its inscribed Long Count date is independently legible
A small jadeite figurine of a man in a bird costume, its mask resembling a boat-billed heron's bill, found by a farmhand plowing a field near Tres Zapotes in 1902 and in Smithsonian custody since 1904, carries about 75 incised epi-Olmec (Isthmian) glyphs by decipherers John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman's count, including a Long Count date corresponding to AD 162, making it one of only about a dozen known epi-Olmec texts and the object whose extensive, well-preserved inscription first opened the script to modern decipherment work.
- about 75 incised epi-Olmec (Isthmian) glyphs (count per decipherers Justeson and Kaufman) on a small jadeite figurine
- carries a Long Count date corresponding to AD 162
- found by a farmhand plowing near Tres Zapotes in 1902, not a controlled excavation
- one of only about a dozen known epi-Olmec texts, central to later decipherment attempts
Carved from jadeite diopside and standing 15.4 by 9.3 centimeters, the Tuxtla Statuette depicts a man wearing a bird costume: wings, bird legs, and a mask resembling the bill of a boat-billed heron, per the Smithsonian's own exhibit label (an earlier Smithsonian legacy note instead calls it simply a 'duck bill mask'). Incised glyphs cover all sides of the figure in the epi-Olmec, or Isthmian, script, a writing system used in the isthmus of Tehuantepec region in the centuries after the Olmec era proper. Among the columns of text is a Long Count calendar date corresponding to AD 162, one of the earliest secure Long Count dates known from any Mesoamerican object. Archival research published in 2020 traced the statuette's original findspot to the environs of Tres Zapotes, an epi-Olmec regional center, rather than to a location further away as earlier accounts had suggested. Because it preserves one of the longest and best-documented epi-Olmec texts known, the statuette became the primary evidentiary base for later proposed decipherments of the script.
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