This book offers the first detailed comparative study of the seven best-documented early civilizations: ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Shang China, the Aztecs and adjacent peoples in the Valley of Mexico, the Classic Maya, the Inka, and the Yoruba. Unlike previous studies, equal attention is paid to similarities and differences in their sociopolitical organization, economic systems, religion, and culture. Many of this study's findings are surprising and provocative. Agricultural systems, technologies, and economic behaviour turn out to have been far more diverse than was expected. These findings and many others challenge not only current understandings of early civilizations but also the theoretical foundations of modern archaeology and anthropology. The key to understanding early civilizations lies not in their historical connections but in what they can tell us about similarities and differences in human behaviour.

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam034/2002074052.pdf

Understanding early civilizations : a comparative study

Models, Mental Models, and Representations. Model-Based Reasoning in Conceptual Change N.J. Nersessian. Tracing the Development of Models in the Philosophy of Science D.M. Bailer-Jones. Using Models to Represent Reality R.N. Giere. Models and Diagrams within the Cognitive Field K.J. Knoespel. Theories, Models, and Representations M. Suarez. How Scientists Build Models In Vivo Science as a Window on the Scientific Mind K. Dunbar. Discovery Processes and Mechanisms. A Simulation of Model-Based Reasoning about Disparate Phenomena D.C. Gooding, T.R. Addis. Scientific Discovery and Technological Innovation: Ulcers, Dinosaur Extinction, and the Programming Language Java P. Thagard, D. Croft. A Hierarchy of Models and Electron Microscopy T. Harris. Expansion and Justification of Models: the Exemplary Case of Galileo Galilei V. Raisis. Simplifying Bayesian Inference: the General Case S. Krauss, L. Martignon, U. Hoffrage. Complexity versus Complex Systems: A New Approach to Scientific Discovery F.T. Arecchi. Creative Inferences and Abduction. Model-Based Reasoning in Creative Processes J. Meheus. Model-Based Creative Abduction L. Magnani. Abduction and Geometrical Analysis. Notes on Charles S. Peirce and Edgar Allan Poe I. Niiniluoto. The Hierarchy of Models in Simulation E. Winsberg. Abducting Explanation V.F. Hendricks, J. Faye. Fictionalism and the Logic of 'As If' Conditionals C. Pizzi. Scientific Modeling: A Multilevel Feedback Process J.M. Zytkow. Author Index. Subject Index.

Model-based reasoning in scientific discovery

Chapter 1 Understanding and Meaning: Understanding Meaning. Chapter 2 Components and Conditions of an Act of Understanding: What could be an act of understanding? Components of an act of understanding Psychological conditions of an act of understanding What understanding is not. Chapter 3 Processes of Understanding: The process of understanding Reasonings Explanation and understanding Figures of speech in understanding The role of activity in understanding. Chapter 4 Good Understanding The relativity of "Good Understanding" Models of understanding "Good Understanding" in the historico-empirical approach - significant acts of understanding The philosophy of epistemological obstacles The notion of epistemological obstacle as a category of thought in mathematics education - problems of definition. Chapter 5 Developmental and Cultural Constraints of Understanding: The relationship between development and culture The genesis of understanding and the developmental roots of epistemological obstacles The cultural roots of epistemological obstacles.

Understanding in Mathematics

In this ground-breaking work, Norman Yoffee shatters the prevailing myths underpinning our understanding of the evolution of early civilisations. He counters the emphasis in traditional scholarship on the rule of 'godly' and despotic male leaders and challenges the conventional view that early states were uniformly constituted bureaucratic and regional entities. Instead, by illuminating the role of slaves and soldiers, priests and priestesses, peasants and prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen, Yoffee depicts an evolutionary process centred on the concerns of everyday life. Drawing on evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica, the author explores the variety of trajectories followed by ancient states, from birth to collapse, and explores the social processes that shape any account of the human past. This book offers a bold new interpretation of social evolutionary theory, and as such it is essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in the emergence of complex society.

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Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations

For more than a century, archaeologists have frequently been drawn to understand the human past in broadly evolutionary terms, applying Darwinian thinking to the development of human societies. The unilinear models of human development that often result typically regard the state as the culmination of human progress, the end-point of a journey through intervening stages of bands, tribes and chiefdoms. Neo-evolutionary thinking was especially prevalent from the 1940s onwards, in the work of Julian Steward and others writing on the origins of the state. In the volume reviewed, Norman Yoffee challenges the former dominance of the neo-evolutionary approach, arguing that over the past half century it has stifled rather than stimulated our understanding of early state development.Yoffee contests the idea that states develop through a series of programmatic stages from less complex kinds of society. Instead, he stresses the diversity of the archaic state, drawing heavily on his specialist knowledge (drawn from texts as well as archaeology) of early Mesopotamia. Here we see city-state societies in which heterarchies play a role alongside hierarchies, and in which the varieties of lived experience varied considerably from place to place, even though all may at some level be considered to have been part of a shared Mesopotamian civilization.Yoffee's book is not, however, concerned solely with Mesopotamia; far from it, he draws comparative evidence from Egypt, South and East Asia and Central and South America to demonstrate the diversity and fluidity of the entities he is describing. Few of them conform to models that might be drawn from ethnography, and each state may in many ways be considered unique. Yet in a broader perspective, all states arise through a widespread pattern of change that has taken place in human society since the end of the Pleistocene in which individuals and groups have competed for control of resources.Yoffee concludes that ‘The central myth about the study of the earliest states ... is that there was something that could be called the archaic state, and that all of the earliest states were simply variations on this model’. The methodological alternative is to consider each society (of whatever type) as individual and unique, and constantly in a state of flux. In this review feature we invite a series of archaeologists specializing in the study of early states to address this and other issues raised by this important book. We begin, however, with an opening statement from the author himself.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0959774305000120

Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations , by Norman Yoffee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-81837-0 hardback £45 & US$75; ISBN 0-521-52156-4 paperback £19.99 & US$34.99, 291 pp.

This work brings together current scholarship on the earliest true writing system in human history. Invented by the Babylonians at the end of the fourth millennium BC, this script, called proto-cuneiform, survives in the form of clay tablets that have until now posed formidable barriers to interpretation. Many tablets, excavated in fragments from ancient dump sites, lack a clear context. In addition, the purpose of the earliest tablets was not to record language but to monitor the administration of local economies by means of a numerical system. Using the latest philological research and new methods of computer analysis, the authors have deciphered much of the numerical information. In reconstructing both the social context and the function of the notation, they consider how the development of our earliest written records affected patterns of thought, the concept of number and the administration of household economies. "Archaic Bookkeeping" should interest specialists in Near Eastern civilizations, ancient history, the history of silence and mathematics, and cognitive psychology.

Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East

/pdf/exploring-the-limits-of-preclassical-mechanics-2tub8yk8s7.pdf

Exploring the limits of preclassical mechanics

It must be stated at the very outset that the topic of mathematics education and society is not an essential part of the prevailing discourse in education.’ Those who design and plan mathematics education usually do not at the same time give serious thought to the circumstances that determine the domain of the educational efforts. Therefore I do not feel obliged to discuss primarily the “state of research,” to delineate “approaches,” and to cite “investigations” when presenting the facts relevant to the topic. This would presuppose a consistent or, at the very least, a coherent, albeit possibly controversial, educational discourse on this subject.

Mathematics Education and Society

We present a number of findings concerning Galileo's major discoveries which question both the methods and the results of dating his achievements by common historiographic criteria. The dating of Galileo's discoveries is, however, not our primary concern. This paper is intended to contribute to a critical reexamination of the notion of discovery from the point of view of historical epistemology. We claim that the puzzling course of Galileo's discoveries is not an exceptional comedy of errors but rather illustrates the normal way in which scientific progress is achieved. We argue that scientific knowledge generally develops not as a sequence of independent discoveries accumulating to a new body of knowledge but rather as a network of interdependent activities which only as a whole makes the individual steps understandable as meaningful “discoveries.”

/pdf/hunting-the-white-elephant-when-and-how-did-galileo-discover-29w4nywhap.pdf

Peter Damerow

Papers

Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East

Exploring the limits of preclassical mechanics

Mathematics Education and Society

Hunting the White Elephant: When and How did Galileo Discover the Law of Fall?

Archaic Bookkeeping: Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East