Piotr Michalowski 1951

Tokenism.
A review article of Schmandt–Besserat 1992, Before Writing.
American Anthropologist 95 (1993), pp. 996–999.

A critical assessment of Schmandt–Besserat’s work, it raises especially two major concerns. (1) Given the crucial importance of repeatability [i.e., distributional patterns] in establishing a semiotic system, it is difficult to so conceive the vast assemblage of tokens, which is too highly differentiated and spread over too wide a geographical area and too broad a temporal span. (2) The argument in favour of writing developing directly from tokens, and “literacy from numeracy” is not convincing: “The complex social and political changes […] toward the end of the fourth millennium represent a quantum leap of unprecedented dimensions and not a gradual evolutionary historical development. The invention of writing was part of this punctuated metamorphosis; while the inventor, or inventors, relied on earlier communication systems, […] proto–cuneiform writing was materially and structurally a completely new semiotic form.”