Connecting the Dots: Counting, Writing, and the Beginnings of Civilization

In 1978, Scientific American caught the world by surprise with an article about the miniature clay cones, spheres, disks, tetrahedrons, and other geometric-shaped artifacts recovered by archaeologists from most Neolithic (c. 7500 bc) trenches dug in the Middle East—but hitherto ignored. The small artifacts, now called tokens, were daringly presented as possible precursors of writing by a Franco-American archaeologist, Denise Schmandt-Besserat.

Almost fifty years later, in Connecting the Dots, Denise Schmandt-Besserat takes stock of her life and work: how she singlehandedly pursued her research, traveling alone through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran to locate the present whereabouts of tokens from scientifically excavated sites, subsequently spending long hours measuring, sketching, and taking notes on thousands of examples in dark attics or basements of museums, before enjoying the exotic Middle Eastern souks or bazaars.

Above all, as the last in the long series of Schmandt-Besserat’s publications, including Before Writing and How Writing Came About, Connecting the Dots is the capstone of her theory that the need for agricultural recordkeeping by the earliest farmers gave rise to counting, writing and, yes, civilization.