Subject: [HM] notched bone
Author: Alexander Marshack <
[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:48:43 -0500 (EST)
Julio Gonzalez Cabillon:
The incised bone from Ishango, Africa, was merely the first
example of early notation studied and published. This was fully thirty
years ago. Since then a series of such "notational" forms of record
-keeping have been published from far early dates.
I suggest your correspondents check:
Alexander Marshack, THE ROOTS OF CIVILIZATION, 1991, New York:
Moyer Bell Ltd.
Alexander Marshack, The Tai Plaque and Calendrical Notation in
the Upper Palaeolithic, CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL, Vol 1, No 1,
1991.
Alexander Marshack, 1997. Paleolithic Image Making and Symbolling
in Europe and the Middle East: A Comparative Review. In BEYOND ART:
PLEISTOCENE IMAGE AND SYMBOL. Conkey, Soffer, Jablonski (eds.) California
Academy of Sciences. Via University of California Press.
Formal writing begins with record keeping of the developing
agricultural cultures in the Near East, and then develops in other
agricultural cultures around the world. But pre-agricultural
record-keeping and notations were of a different type, and were not
"linguistic" or arithmetic in the same manner. They were records of
elapsed time, of the periodicities observed in nature, including the
months and seasons. There is evidence for a capacity for counting, but
not of a formal arithmetical system for summing and counting large sums.
There is a huge developing literature on the capacity for non-arithmetical
counting and summing among early cultures, human children, and even
primates. This research has been appearing in a number of disciplines.
My own work has documented such forms of pre-writing, pre-arithmetical
forms of notation and record keeping for almost three decades. The only
systematic effort to disprove these studies, by F. D'Errico, of France,
recently admitted that his more recent studies had confirmed the presence of notation in the Upper Paleolithic, though he does not as yet know why they should have been kept or what the mode of notation consists of.
I suggest that your readers read Stanislas Dehaene, 1997, THE
NUMBER SENSE: HOW THE MIND CREATES MATHEMATICS, Oxford University Press.
Dehaene discusses the neurological and ontological basis for numeracy,
whether or not there is a system of arithmetical counting. I would be
shy of accepting any presumptions about early record-keeping or writing
by those who have not studied the materials and problems at first hand.
The problem of writing, like the problem of language origins, is
extraordinarily complex and should not be left to assumption and
presumption.
Let me know if there are more questions.
Alexander Marshack
