Denise Schmandt-Besserat

Denise Schmandt-Besserat (born August 10, 1933 in Ay, Marne, France) is a French-American archaeologist and retired professor of art and archaeology of the ancient Near East.

[2][3] The controversies, as detailed below, concern the interpretation of early tokens, particularly the complex ones; however, the idea that writing emerged out of the counting, cataloging, management, and transactions of agricultural produce has been largely accepted.

Her family evacuated to southern France during World War II, after which she attended a Catholic boarding school at Reims.

She applied for a fellowship at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, to study the origins of the use of clay as a writing material in the Middle East.

[1] In those articles Schmandt-Besserat explained her methodology and reviewed the history of archeological discoveries of clay counting tokens found at the main sites in the Asia.

But, after writing, conventions of the Mesopotamian script, such as the semantic use of form, size, order and placement of signs on a tablet was applied to images resulting in complex visual narratives.

Schmandt-Besserat's present interest is the cognitive aspects of the token system that functioned as an extension of the human brain to collect, manipulate, store and retrieve data.

As noted by the Assyriologist Robert K. Englund in 1998, "a general consensus of opinion in the field tends to support" the argument that the plain tokens were "the precursors of the impressed proto-cuneiform signs used for numerical and metrological notations in the earliest texts to represent numbers and measures of products of a redistributive archaic economy"[18]: 258 Although Schmandt-Besserat gave credit to the work of her predecessors in the field, she has often been singled out as the discoverer of these correspondences.