Word: clay
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most achievement-oriented society, work is more than a source of income. It is also a source of status and selfesteem, a point of identification with the system, and a second social environment, which aids in diffusing the accumulated tensions of day-to-day life. Says Stanford University Historian Clay Carson, a black: "Permanency of jobs, stability in an economic situation, is important. Even if someone is only a janitor, his job still means stability." On the basis of studies, he adds: "Typically, those who can get established with a job in an urban environment can pass this stability...
There are ambitious mavericks in every field (Clay Felker of New York in magazines, Rupert Murdoch in newspapers) who know the expected limits of respectability in their craft, but choose to succeed by excess. Arledge is such a man. His conversation is full of proper responses ("A commentary mustn't fight the film," "The single biggest problem of television is that everyone talks so much," "The first law of football is that when the teams line up, you go to the play-by-play man"); yet it is he who stuffed the Monday night booth with three garrulous commentators...
Schmandt-Besserat, 43, a French-born assistant professor of art and an expert on the ancient uses of clay, bases her theory on studies started in 1969. For decades archaeologists had been puzzled by the great numbers of small, geometric clay tokens-some as old as 10,000 years-discovered in digs from Egypt to the Indus Valley. Several experts had speculated that these tokens were toys or pieces from a still undiscovered prehistoric game. In 1966 Pierre Amiet, curator of Near Eastern art at the Louvre, suggested that the tokens were an ancient recording system. Schmandt-Besserat agrees. After...
...diameter) cones, disks, spheres and pellets represented such commodities as sheep, jugs of oil, bread or clothing and were used by merchants and others in the Middle East to keep records. In the second stage, merchants shipping goods from one place to another began enclosing tokens in sealed clay balls known as bullae, which were broken open upon delivery so the shipment could be checked against the invoice; the bullae, in effect, were the first bills of lading. The third stage, which followed closely, began when merchants realized that cargoes could be checked without breaking open the bullae if each...
Once this stage was reached, the fourth step came quickly. Realizing that impressing their shapes on the bullae made enclosing the tokens unnecessary, people abandoned the counters and began keeping their records directly on clay tablets. The efficiency of that technique was immediately obvious, says Schmandt-Besserat, and could explain not only how written record keeping evolved but also why writing spread so rapidly along the trade routes and quickly took hold throughout the civilized world of that day. But even the development of writing did not lead to the disappearance of the tokens. The written word, after all, helps...