It's true that adjoining landowners can often be a great source of information. Years ago, I made a survey of a small parcel on Lake Austin that adjoined a lot owned by a couple with the somewhat unusual (by Texas-German standards) surname of Schmandt. I explained to Herr Schmandt, who had a distinctly Teutonic accent, why I had set a new marker to correctly mark the common property of his lot and asking his permission to remove a marker that had been erroneously set by others somewhat recently to replace the original stake that apparently had been washed out by the discharge from a culvert. He was obviously intelligent and reasonable, which was not exactly the expected combination in that neighborhood.
It never occurred to me to ask about Frau Schmandt, however, and if I had, probably the last thing I would have asked was "Did your wife, by chance discover the origins of writing?" So it is that more than ten years later, from an article in today's Austin American-Statesman, I discover who Frau Schmandt is.
Link to the newspaper article:
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/lifestyles/the-austinite-who-discovered-the-origins-of-writin/nrpPx/
Interesting. I wonder if native American writing followed a similar course of development.
I knocked on the door of an adjoiner in Jacksonville, Texas to ask permission to be in the back yard. The person who answered the door was Mr. McCorkle, RPS No. 88, who, got his walker and shuffled and showed me where the corner markers were. This was nearly 20 years ago and he was an OLD man then. I don't know when he passed but I heard it wasn't too long after our chance meeting. He was a super nice guy and I'm happy to have met him.
Most interesting Kent - especially "Schmandt-Besserat was not very good at school. "
Thanks for the post.
Jim in AZ, post: 380057, member: 249 wrote: Most interesting Kent - especially "Schmandt-Besserat was not very good at school. "
Thanks for the post.
Yes, part of Denise Schmandt-Besserat's genius lay in simply asking questions that it hadn't occurred to anyone else to take seriously, the "why?" instead of the "what?".
Kent McMillan, post: 379907, member: 3 wrote: Link to the newspaper article:
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/lifestyles/the-austinite-who-discovered-the-origins-of-writin/nrpPx/
That's quite a story. It's amazing who you meet out in the field.
It's surprising that Frau Schmandt-Besserat never received a Nobel or other major scientific prize. Perhaps her work didn't fit into any category. Who could have foreseen that someone would discover the origin of writing?
Curiously enough, I read about Schmandt-Besserat's discovery earlier this year in a book called "Double Entry," by Jane Gleeson-White. The book starts with the clay Sumerian counters and goes on to talk about the invention or discovery of double-entry bookkeeping in Italy about 1300 AD. Double-entry bookkeeping then became an important tool in the development of capitalism and modern civilization. The Sumerians weren't wrong in focusing on counting things first, and getting around to writing later.
Double-entry bookkeeping, the modern-day successor to the Sumerian counters, is an interesting and powerful system, by the way. If you do it manually, so that you can follow the process, getting the books to balance is as satisfying as getting a good traverse closure. With QuickBooks and the like, you don't get to see what's going on. More about this later on (in a separate thread) if anyone is interested.
