In the past few posts I have been focusing on clocks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The human desire to tell time runs very deeply, of course, and has an amazingly long history. It is also one of the central parts of the story of who we are and, I believe, how our minds developed. Tonight I just want to focus on one bit of it, as a way to focus attention on the importance of time in evolution of culture and cognition.
About thirty years ago, I became aware of the work of Alexander Marshack. Over a number of years, from the sixties to the nineties, he carefully researched and sought to explain a variety of artifacts, in bone or stone, showing careful groupings of markings. Because these had some aspects that indicated that they were more than mere tallies, that is there seemed to be some differentiation in the markings, he came to the conclusion that they might be numeric notations, almost certainly representing some sort of lunar calendars.
His thesis was controversial because of the age of these artifacts. Some of them date back almost 30,000 years. In other words if Marshack had it right, we have been keeping careful track of time for 300 centuries. Incidentally, it means that we could count well that far in the past.
Now let us pause for a moment and consider what this might mean. It inidcates that we have been aware of passing time, and must have had language for it, for about six times longer than we have had writing. Likewise, we have had some concept of numbers six times longer than we have been writing. There is in fact a school of thought, largely based on the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, that the earliest writing, cuneiform, arose out of an accounting system based on fired-clay tokens stored in clay envelopes. (Since the tokens could only be gotten too by breaking the envelopes she argues that it became common to make impressions of the tokens in the clay before they were placed inside and the envelope was fired. Later the tokens were replaced by markings made with a stylus. There are a lot of problems with all of this, and it may not be a full explanation of the origin of writing, but we do know that writing long remained largely a vehicle for taking inventories and settling debts.)
Around the time we began to alter our sense of time with the clock, Europeans were learning the concept of zero with the very slow spread of Hindu-Arabic numerals and changing their record keeping by developing double-entry bookkeeping. These are aspects of the information revolution that marked the years between 1300 and 1600 that we need to keep in mind. But, and here is the point to which I wish to direct your attention, and whose importance is only beginning to dawn on me, these represent changes in our cognition. I am not yet sure how large these changes were, nor am I sure how they fit into the larger pattern of changes wrought by technology, art, and humanism in those years; nevertheless, given what has followed, I think it worth pondering what changes to our minds were wrought by something as seemingly insignificant as the ticking of the clock and the notation of nothing (zero).
Further Reading:
There is a good, brief essay about Marshack's work by a friend and collaborator of his, Michael Hudson, from UMKC - "After the Ice Age: How Calendar-keeping shaped Early Social Structuring."
For Denise Schmandt-Besserat, see her web page at the University of Texas.
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