The Materiality of Numbers
Emergence and Elaboration from Prehistory to Present

This book addresses the material devices used to represent and manipulate numerical concepts.

Karenleigh A. Overmann (Author), Tom Wynn (Foreword by)

9781009361248, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 2023

350 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.762 kg

This is a book about numbers – what they are as concepts and how and why they originate – as viewed through the material devices used to represent and manipulate them. Fingers, tallies, tokens, and written notations, invented in both ancestral and contemporary societies, explain what numbers are, why they are the way they are, and how we get them. Overmann is the first to explore how material devices contribute to numerical thinking, initially by helping us to visualize and manipulate the perceptual experience of quantity that we share with other species. She explores how and why numbers are conceptualized and then elaborated, as well as the central role that material objects play in both processes. Overmann's volume thus offers a view of numerical cognition that is based on an alternative set of assumptions about numbers, their material component, and the nature of the human mind and thinking.

1. Numbers in a nutshell
2. Converging perspectives on numbers
3. The brain in numbers
4. Bodies and behaviors
5. Language in numbers
6. Global and regional patterns
7. Materiality in numbers
8. Materiality in cognition
9. Making quantity tangible and manipulable
10. Tallies and other devices that accumulate
11. Interpreting prehistoric artifacts
12. Devices that accumulate and group
13. Handwritten notations
14. The materiality of numbers.

Subject Areas: Prehistoric archaeology [HDDA]