page_title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas
section_title: Writing systems
hierarchical_section_title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas / Culture / Writing systems
caption_attribution_description: Maya stucco glyphs diplayed in the museum at Palenque, Mexico.
context_page_description: The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian peoples of North, Central and South America and their descendants.
  Although some indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers—and many, especially in the Amazon basin, still are—many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture. The impact of their agricultural endowment to the world is a testament to their time and work in reshaping and cultivating the flora indigenous to the Americas. Although some societies depended heavily on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming, hunting and gathering. In some regions the indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, city-states, chiefdoms, states, kingdoms and empires. Among these are the Aztec, Inca and Maya states that until the 16th century were among the most politically and socially advanced nations in the world. They had a vast knowledge of engineering, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, writing, physics, medicine, planting and irrigation, geology, mining, sculpture and goldsmithing.
context_section_description: The development of writing is counted among the many achievements and innovations of pre-Columbian American cultures. Independent from the development of writing in other areas of the world, the Mesoamerican region produced several indigenous writing systems beginning in the 1st millennium BCE. What may be the earliest-known example in the Americas of an extensive text thought to be writing is by the Cascajal Block. The Olmec hieroglyphs tablet has been indirectly dated from ceramic shards found in the same context to approximately 900 BCE, around the time that Olmec occupation of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán began to wane.
  The Maya writing system was a combination of phonetic syllabic symbols and logograms—that is, it was a logosyllabic writing system. It is the only pre-Columbian writing system known to represent completely the spoken language of its community. In total, the script has more than one thousand different glyphs, although a few are variations of the same sign or meaning, and many appear only rarely or are confined to particular localities. At any one time, no more than about five hundred glyphs were in use, some two hundred of which (including variations) had a phonetic or syllabic interpretation.
  The Zapotec writing system is one of the earliest writing systems in the Americas. The oldest example of the Zapotec script is a monument discovered in San José Mogote, dating from around from 600 BCE. Zapotec writing was logographic and presumably syllabic. The remains of the Zapotec writing system are present in the monumental architecture. There are only a few extant inscriptions, making study of this writing system difficult.
  Aztec codices (singular codex) are books written by pre-Columbian and colonial-era Aztecs. These codices provide some of the best primary sources for Aztec culture. The pre-Columbian codices differ from European codices in that they are largely pictorial; they were not meant to symbolize spoken or written narratives. The colonial era codices contain not only Aztec pictograms, but also Classical Nahuatl (in the Latin alphabet), Spanish, and occasionally Latin.
  Spanish mendicants in the sixteenth century taught indigenous scribes in their communities to write their languages in Latin letters, and there are a large number of local-level documents in Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Yucatec Maya from the colonial era, many of which were part of lawsuits and other legal matters. Although Spaniards initially taught indigenous scribes alphabetic writing, the tradition became self-perpetuating at the local level. The Spanish crown gathered such documentation, and contemporary Spanish translations were made for legal cases. Scholars have translated and analyzed these documents in what is called the New Philology to write histories of indigenous peoples from indigenous viewpoints.
  The Wiigwaasabak, birch bark scrolls on which the Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) people wrote complex geometrical patterns and shapes, can also be considered a form of writing, as can Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics.
  Aboriginal syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of abugidas used to write some Aboriginal Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and Athabaskan language families.
caption: Maya glyphs in stucco at the Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico
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