The tokens
Traditional archaeology aims at reconstructing the culture, economy and technology of past societies. In recent years cognitive archaeology has added a new dimension to the investigation of antiquity by focusing upon artifacts documenting the development of cognitive skills (see Schmandt-Besserat).
Once learned the subtle distinction between cardinal and ordinal aspects, our ancestors came to have a different attitude towards traditional "numbering tools" such as pebbles, shells, sticks, strings of beads, or points of the body.
Those Prehistoric tokens and the earliest archaic tablets exemplify the gradual mastery of the power of abstraction necessary to achieve numeracy and literacy.
Tokens indicate that counting was first done concretely in one-to-one correspondence.
Tallies made by carving notches in wood, bone, and stone were used for at least forty thousand years (Ifrah, 2000).
The clay tokens, that appeared in the Near East about 7500 BC, abstracted the goods they represented. The fundamental principle of the token system was the substitution of a small clay counter for each unit of goods to be counted. As a result, merchandise could easily be counted and accounted for because the tokens abstracted goods from reality.
The earliest tokens now known are those from two sites in the Zagros region of Iran: Tepe Asiab and Ganj-i-Dareh Tepe.
To sum up, the invention of tokens in the Near East, about 7500 BC, provided a useful tool to manage communal goods. There can be no doubt that people acquired new cognitive skills by using tokens over 4500 years to count and recount sheep and baskets of grain in abstraction. When these cognitive skills had been internalized for several millennia, the human mind was ready for new strides in abstraction. Concrete counting with tokens was the necessary foundation for the invention of writing.
