The Lazy-S: A Formative Period Iconographic Loan to Maya Hieroglyphic Writing

discovered Monument 31 from the highland site of Chalcatzingo demonstrates for the first time that at least by the Middle Formative Period (900-500 B.C.), the Lazy-S motif, like its Classic Maya counterpart, was associated with both clouds and bloodletting. Although the Lazy-S motif figures prominently in the iconographic corpus at Chalcatzingo, until the analysis of Monument 31 no context existed for its meanings. The monument depicts raindrops falling from the motif, hence a strong support for a cloud identification. Immediately below the Lazy-S cloud, a carved feline rips a victim apart, surely a strong argument for a bloodletting association. With Monument 31’s close iconographic association between clouds and bloodletting, we find not only one of the longest persisting clusters of symbolic communication in the history of Mesoamerica, but further evidence of the Classic Maya’s meaningful use of the Formative Period legacy. In their ground breaking article “A Decipherment of Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing,” Justeson and Kaufman demonstrated that the recently identified Epi-Olmec or Isthmian hieroglyphic script inscribed on La Mojarra Stela 1 was the writing system of a Late Formative Period Mixe-Zoquean speaking population. The authors also stated that “the script may itself descend from an Olmec hieroglyphic system, but too little of the Olmec script has been recovered to confirm or disprove a connection (1993:1703).” However, if evidence supporting the existence of an Olmec writing system is limited, evidence for the Olmec symbol system that would be the precursor to such a writing system is abundant. More specifically, even though 700 years separates the demise of Olmec culture from that of the Classic Period Maya civilization (A. D. 200–900), the central relationship of Olmec symbols to the art and writing of the Maya and other later Mesoamerican cultures has been recognized by researchers since Covarrubias (1946). Certainly, iconographic investigations of specific elements of the Olmec symbol system have shown them to be directly ancestral to major elements in the symbol system of the Classic Period Maya (Coe 1965,1976; Joralemon 1971, 1976; V. Fields 1989, 1991; Reilly 1990, 1991). However, it is with the recent discovery of Monument 31, a Middle Formative Period sculpture from the highland site of Chalcatzingo that, for the first time, an element of the Olmec symbol system can be shown to convey a meaning almost identical to that of a Classic Maya hieroglyph T632, (fig. 1a). The central curly-Q or Lazy-S that comprises the main element of T632 was originally interpreted by Stuart as a blood scroll (1988: 203-204). More recently Stone (personal commu-