In science, much is made of the “Eureka!” moment. Perhaps too much.

Scientist X, knee-deep in the mire of an archeological dig, brushes away years of misunderstanding and finally finds that missing piece that proves a long-held hypothesis. Eureka!

Real science is rarely like that. Many more times, scientists go out into the field looking for one thing and dig up something completely different.

This is exactly what happened to FSU anthropologist Mary Pohl.

She spent several successful years searching for evidence of ancient agriculture, as practiced by the ancestors of a little-known group of people—the Olmecs—who lived on the Gulf coast of Mexico some 7,000 years ago. What she and her team discovered has stirred up a spirited rethinking of the origins of one of civilization's most profound achievements—the ability to write.

The mysterious Olmec flourished between 1300 and 400 B.C., Pohl said. Their society predates both the Maya and the Aztec cultures, and they are widely held to have originated the first-ever civilization in this part of the world. Discoveries reveal that the Olmec may have developed the New World's first calendar—a sacred, detailed, 260-day, 13-month calendar that later cultures adopted and elaborated on.

But where the newer Maya and Aztec civilizations left behind a relative wealth of materials giving clues to how they lived, Olmec society seems to have sprung up out of nowhere, Pohl said. Very few materials survive to tell us how or why they built pyramids, ingeniously planned cities or artistically carved stone heads from boulders as tall as a person.

Scientists aren't even sure what they called themselves-the word “Olmec” is a made-up term, derived from the Aztec language Nahuatl. Loosely translated, it means “people from the land of the rubber trees.”

Olmec art was discovered by accident in 1862 by plantation farmhands who were readying a field for corn in Veracruz, Mexico. Their shovels hit what they first thought was an iron cauldron buried upside down, eventually uncovering a giant basalt boulder carved into the shape of a head.

Today, 17 enormous basalt carvings have been discovered. Researchers think they depict Olmec rulers or sacred ancestors. Beyond that, not much more is known about them.

Pohl's team includes geomorphologist Kevin O. Pope of Geo Eco Arc Research and ceramics expert Christopher von Nagy of the Desert Research Institute. In the spring of 1998, these archaeologists were looking for background information at San Andrés, in the state of Tabasco, Mexico, digging for clues to how this civilization got from small farming villages to the creation of giant artifacts.

“We were trying to look at early agriculture, to see how things developed,” she explained. The task required a lot of digging— the earliest materials and artifacts are almost always on the bottom of layers of relics from later years.

Digging in a low, wet area-a place that appeared to be a dumping ground with bones and ceramic platters suggesting the remnants of ritual feasting—researchers made a curious find. They beheld a fist-sized, ceramic cylinder and fragments of elaborately carved plaques made out of greenstone, a highly prized rock found in the region. To the beholders, the engravings looked for all the world like some form of writing.

After carbon-dating analysis established the site's ceramic chronology, the researchers soon reached consensus—Pohl's team had stumbled upon what may be the earliest known example of writing ever found in the New World. Pohl's find dated to about 650 B.C.

Pohl's paper documenting her findings was immediately accepted by Science and picked up by more than 200 popular news outlets. And that's when the trouble started.

“The findings were controversial,” Pohl admits. “When we published our paper, a lot of people said, 'Is this writing? We don't know that this is anything more than iconography.'”

While they didn't use an alphabet per se, the Olmecs used glyphs, or pictures representing an entire idea or concept. So at first glance, these pieces don't have a lot in common with what we know as writing, until you consider the meaning of these glyphs, Pohl said.

The small, ceramic roller stamp, for instance, is carved with the figure of a bird. The ancient people of the region (known as Mesoamerica to scholars) had an enormous affinity for birds, believing them able to carry messages to their gods and often using them in iconography. At the end of the bird's beak are signs for a confirmed date in the Olmec calendar—“3 Ajaw.”

When it is dipped into ink and rolled out—either onto cloth or onto the human body like a tattoo—the roller stamp works like a tiny printing press, researchers discovered. The image clearly shows the bird and what looks a lot like a cartoon dialogue balloon. Next to that are the glyphs reading “3 Ajaw.” The bird is shown “speaking” the symbols. In Pohl's view, the notations clearly represent spoken words that are “written.” When interpreted in this way, the bird on the stamp gives the name of a day in the Olmec's 260-day ritual calendar.

“If you look at these things up close, you'll see that they are very purposive,” Pohl notes. “These people knew what they were doing.”

The greenstone pieces, probably bits of deliberately destroyed jewelry, featured glyphs resembling what later became the Mayan sign for a hieroglyphic book and the calendar day sign known as muluk.

Since Pohl's findings were published (in December 2002), the debate over their relevance to writing's origins in the New World so far hasn't yielded any new information.

Yale's Maya expert Michael Coe said that so little is known of the Olmecs, it's too soon to tell whether these findings represent writing or they don't.

“When we write English, there's no question that that's English,” Coe told NPR last year in an “All Things Considered” story on Pohl's work. “With these very, very early scraps and examples, you don't know what the language is, and you can't be 100 percent sure that it's tied into a specific language.”

As for whether or not her findings can be called writing, Pohl points out that since she focuses on a largely unknown culture's early efforts at depicting speech, arguments about whether these conform to our 20th century definition of writing miss the point.

The Olmec findings are logographs, or pictures, that stand for words or ideas, and are part of a larger picture. One of the greenstone shards is engraved with two glyphs, one on top of the other, suggesting later Maya columns of glyphs. Pohl has suggested that this transition between iconography and logographs should be recognized for what it is: the very earliest beginnings of writing.

“The question 'is it writing or not' is really a false dichotomy,” Pohl explains. “We're looking at the emergence of writing-the first stages. We're looking at the transition between things that were iconography and things that were symbols for words.”

Among the scholars who've studied Pohl's finding is her FSU colleague, Katherine Josserand, a well-known Maya researcher and linguist.

“There is a technical point that can be argued about whether Pohl's writing is fully-developed writing or evidence of a developing writing system,” Josserand said. “Are the signs carved on Chinese bones used in divination, which we know are the origin of Chinese writing, not writing just because they write words and not whole sentences? In the Mediterranean area, tokens were attached to shipments to identify the contents. Isn't this writing? It certainly develops into writing, so where do you draw the line?”

Regardless of how or if Pohl's findings fall into the category of writing, her team's discovery stands as an unqualified boon for understanding these previously little-known people, and poses intriguing new questions.

Why was precious greenstone jewelry inscribed with probably sacred glyphs-long thought to be the province of Olmec rulers alone-broken up and ritually deposited in a watery place at the edge of a floodplain settlement so far outside the city center?

Why were the oversized platters of food and containers of maize destroyed and left in this pre-Columbian garbage heap, and what does this begin to tell us about how the people of this first New World civilization lived?

These questions are helping shape Pohl's future research investigations, shifting them away from agriculture in 5000 B.C. to an in-depth look at the evolution of human relations in Olmec society during this later period, closer to 700 B.C.

“You do sort of have to go with what you find,” notes Pohl.

“We're now looking at the origins of civilization and of social hierarchy, and seeing how the people out on the periphery were interacting with the people in the center to support their power,” Pohl says. “The writing is only a part of that story.”