Denise Schmandt-Besserat

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.