What Came Before the Abacus?

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What Came Before the Abacus? · 1:22 · Intellect Plus

In short: From notched bones to clay tokens to pebbles on ruled lines, a short look at how people counted with objects before the abacus, how the earliest abacuses grew from that habit, and what remains uncertain.

A 1:22 short film in the series “From Fingers to Qubits”, narrated by intellect_voice_01.

Sources used in this film: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History (Human Origins Program), “Ishango Bone”; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Royal Society), hosted on PubMed Central by the US National Library of Medicine; article by Francesco d'Errico et al., 2018, “From number sense to number symbols. An archaeological perspective”; Denise Schmandt-Besserat (University of Texas at Austin faculty site), “From Accounting to Writing | Denise Schmandt-Besserat”; Denise Schmandt-Besserat (personal research site hosted by The University of Texas at Austin), “Tokens: their Significance for the Origin of Counting and Writing”; Denise Schmandt-Besserat, University of Texas at Austin (sites.utexas.edu), “Tokens and Writing: The Cognitive Development”; Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, “Salamis Counting Table (replica)”; Computer History Museum, “Computer History Museum”; Loyola University Chicago (Loyola eCommons), hosting Maher & Makowski, 'Literary Evidence for Roman Arithmetic with Fractions', Classical Philology 96(4), 2001, University of Chicago Press, “Literary Evidence for Roman Arithmetic with Fractions”; Visible Language (journal), hosted by University of Cincinnati Journals; article by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “4240”; Computer History Museum, “Computer History Museum”; arXiv (preprint by Jenny Baur), “Evidence for Intentional Arithmetic Design in the Upper Palaeolithic?”; arXiv preprint by Vladimir Pletser (European Space Research and Technology Centre, European Space Agency), “DOES THE ISHANGO BONE INDICATE A KNOWLEDGE OF THE BASE 12”; Visible Language journal (1986), article by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, The University of Texas at Austin; hosted on a University of Texas site, “New-Tokens-FactsandInterpretationVisibleLanguage.pdf”; Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal (University of Warwick); a 2017 conversation by Denise Wilding, Clare Rowan, Bill Maurer and Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “WRAP-tokens-writing-(ac)counting-conversation-Denise-Schmandt-Besserat-Bill-Maurer-Rowan-2017.pdf”.

Sources used in this film

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