Accounting and the invention of writing

In Vol. 3, No. 2 The Accounting Historians Notebook (Fall, 1980) Professor Louis Goldberg expressed the wish to know whether the view that accounting antedated writing would now represent a generally accepted attitude among present day archaeologists and prehistorians. An earlier issue of the Notebook mentioned the work of Professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the University of Texas at Austin, who has made significant discoveries in this field. (See, for example, Reckoning before Writing , Archaeology, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1979), pp. 23-31, and The Earliest Precursor of Writing , Scientific American, Vol. 238, No. 6, (June 1968)