•  574
    A cognitive archaeology of writing: Concepts, models, goals
    In Philip Boyes, Philippa Steele & Natalia Elvira Astoreca (eds.), The social and cultural contexts of historic writing practices, Oxbow. pp. 55-72. 2021.
    Complex systems like literacy and numeracy emerge through multigenerational interactions of brains, behaviors, and material forms. In such systems, material forms – writing for language and notations for numbers – become increasingly refined to elicit specific behavioral and psychological responses in newly indoctrinated individuals. These material forms, however, differ fundamentally in things like semiotic function: language signifies, while numbers instantiate. This makes writing for language…Read more
  •  326
    This inquiry seeks to understand how the original form of writing in Mesopotamia—the small pictures and conventions of protocuneiform—became cuneiform, a script that could not be read without acquiring the neurological and behavioral reorganizations understood today as literacy. The process is described as involving small neurological and behavioral changes realized, accumulated, and distributed to new users through interactions with and concomitant incremental changes in the material form of wr…Read more