ABSTRACT
In simple societies, tally sticks and clay tokens served adequately for thousands of years to represent and record objects counted. As the number of these objects increased, however, various methods appeared to group the notches on sticks or bones or to designate tokens of higher orders in order to facilitate the process of counting and recording. With the advent of agriculture and the division of labor, increased population growth, and the formation of centralized bureaucracies, simple tools like tally sticks and clay tokens no longer sufficed.
