Connecting the Dots: Counting, Writing, and the Beginnings of Civilization
The Secret Lives of Clay Tokens: A Memoir
By (author) Denise Schmandt-Besserat
Paperback (Published)
(July 2026)
ISBN: 9781805833307
6.85 x 9.69 inches
Price: $35.00
In stock
This memoir recounts Denise Schmandt‑Besserat’s pioneering research into Neolithic clay tokens, proposed as precursors to writing. Blending personal experiences with archaeological discovery, it traces her decades of fieldwork and presents her influential argument that early accounting practices helped give rise to writing and 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.
List of Figures and Tables
Foreword – Marcella Frangipane
A Note from a Student – Michael Erard
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Longing for a Challenge. Paris, 1959–1965
Chapter 2: Becoming American. Boston, Massachusetts, 1965–1971
Chapter 3: The Right Place at the Right Time. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965–1971
Chapter 4: Excavating Museums. The Middle East, 1971
Chapter 5: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Texas, 1972
Chapter 6: Making a Splash. The University of Texas at Austin, 1972–2004
Chapter 7: Something Unexpected
Chapter 8: Tokens Revolutionize Neolithic Symbolism
Chapter 9: Paradigm Shift
Chapter 10: Bringing Order to Chaos
Chapter 11: Eureka!
Chapter 12: The Data Revolution
Denise Schmandt-Besserat Publications
Index
Denise Schmandt-Besserat is Professor Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin. She is best known for introducing tokens to archaeology. Working alone, she documented that the artifacts were used continuously between 7500 and 3000 BC in a vast area of the ancient Middle East, extending from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. She created the token typology of 16 types and over 300 subtypes, showing an evolution from plain-faced in the Neolithic, to bearing complex markings in the Bronze Age. Crucially, she identified the function of tokens as concrete counters used in a one-to-one correspondence, ultimately determining that the sketches of tokens on tablets contributed to history by becoming pictographs in the cuneiform script, the world’s first writing.
- By (author) Denise Schmandt-Besserat
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