Denise Schmandt-Besserat (born August 10, 1933) is a French-American archaeologist and retired professor of art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 and archaeology of the ancient Near East

Ancient Near East

The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia , ancient Egypt, ancient Iran The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia...

.

Career

Schmandt-Besserat has worked on the origin of writing

Writing

Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...

 and counting

Counting

Counting is the action of finding the number of elements of a finite set of objects. The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a counter by a unit for every element of the set, in some order, while marking those elements to avoid visiting the same element more than once,...

, and the nature of information management

Information management

Information management is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. This sometimes involves those who have a stake in, or a right to that information...

 systems in oral

Orality

Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition...

 societies. Her publications on these subjects include:

• Before Writing (2 vols), University of Texas Press 1992;
• How Writing Came About, University of Texas Press 1996;
• The History of Counting, Morrow Jr. 1999;
• When Writing Met Art (University of Texas Press, 2007); and
• numerous articles in major scholarly and popular journals among them Science, Scientific American, Archaeology, American Journal of Archaeology, and Archaeology Odyssey.

Her work has been widely reported in the public media (Scientific American, Time, Life, New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor.) She was featured in several television programs such as Out of the Past (Discovery Channel), Discover (Disney Channel); The Nature of Things

The Nature of Things

The Nature of Things is a Canadian television series of documentary programs. It debuted on the CBC on November 6, 1960. Many of the programs document nature and the effect that humans have on it. The program was one of the first to explore environmental issues, such as clear-cut logging...

(CBC), Search for Solutions (PBS), and Tell the Truth (NBC).

She retired in 2004 as Professor of Art and Middle Eastern Studies

Middle Eastern studies

Middle Eastern studies is a name given to a number of academic programs associated with the study of the history, culture, politics, economies, and geography of the Middle East, an area that is generally interpreted to cover a range of nations extending from North Africa in the west to the Chinese...

 at the University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...

.

In her most recent book, When Writing Met Art (2007), Schmandt-Besserat investigated the impact of literacy on visual art. She showed that, before writing, art of the ancient Near East mostly consisted of repetitive motifs. But, after writing, conventions of the Mesopotamian script

Cuneiform script

Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...

, 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. She also shows how, reciprocally, art played a crucial role in the evolution of writing from a mere accounting system to literature when funerary and votive inscriptions started to be featured on art monuments.

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. She studies how processing an increasing volume of data over thousands of years brought people to think in greater abstraction. She also continues her research on Neolithic symbolism at the site of 'Ain Ghazal

'Ain Ghazal

Ain Ghazal is a Neolithic site located in North-Western Jordan, on the outskirts of Amman. It dates as far back as 7250 BC, and was inhabited until 5000 BC...

, near Amman

Amman

Amman is the capital of Jordan. It is the country's political, cultural and commercial centre and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The Greater Amman area has a population of 2,842,629 as of 2010. The population of Amman is expected to jump from 2.8 million to almost...

, Jordan

Jordan

Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...

.

Awards and honors

Schmandt-Besserat has received the Walter J. Ong

Walter J. Ong

Father Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. , was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness...

 Award for Career Achievement; the Holloway teaching award; the Eugene Kayden Press Book Award and the Hamilton book Award. She been cited Outstanding Woman in the Humanities by the American Association of University Women

American Association of University Women

The American Association of University Women advances equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, and research. It was founded in 1882 by Ellen Swallow Richards and Marion Talbot...

.

Her book, How Writing Came About, was listed by American Scientist

American Scientist

American Scientist is the bimonthly science and technology magazine published since 1913 by Sigma Xi. Each issue includes four to five feature articles written by scientists and engineers. These authors review research in all fields of science...

as one of the 100 books that shaped science in the 20th century.

She is listed in Who's Who in America.

At the 180th Commencement of Kenyon College she received an honorary degree.

External links

• Denise Schmandt-Besserat Home page at the University of Texas at Austin
• 'Ain Ghazal. Hosted by MENIC, The Middle East Network Information Center, a public service of The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
• Signs of Life. Archaeology Odyssey magazine, January/February 2002.
• Research Impact: 1, 2, 3 leads to A, B, C
• The Case of the Missing Vase
• The origins of writing and numbers: uncovered
• The Numerals Project, hosted by Linguistics Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
• The Earliest Precursor of Writing
• Two Precursors of Writing: Plain and Complex Tokens
• Reckoning Before Writing