Abstract:

Context The cultural evolution of quantification systems is a recent phenomenon traced back to the Neolithic. Yet, research shows that basic mathematical ideas are part of human core knowledge and likely developed early in evolution. How such core knowledge gave way to complex, culturally diverse mathematical ideas is not fully understood. Purpose This paper focuses on the potential mathematics implicit in material culture, including finished artefacts, the production of tools, and processing of materials, using fibre technologies as a prime example of how material culture preserves, transmits, and transforms mathematical knowledge. Methods A comparative approach linking the ethnomathematics of fibre technologies to cognitive research and relevant archaeological evidence of string, basketry, and weaving, provides a way of testing hypotheses on the origins and development of mathematics in the remote past. Key results Results support the premise that weaving practices contain and afford operations such as geometry, measurement, ordering, grouping, and counting. Fibre technologies likely provided a context for the development of mathematical ideas over the past 100,000 years, intensifying during the Upper Palaeolithic. Implications Archaeological material culture is an underused resource that can inform about the development of mathematical knowledge prior to the emergence of formal systems of quantification.

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