Changes in ancient Egyptian mathematical artifacts from a cultural-historical activity theory perspective

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to analyze changes in artifacts used for mathematics and for mathematics education in ancient Egypt using Vygotskian theory and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Although CHAT often deemphasizes the historical evolution of artifacts, this evolution can be explained by contradictions within activity systems and between activity systems (such as schools and workplaces) and through the process of externalization. This analysis demonstrates that artifacts develop over historical and ontogenetic time, just as people and practices do. Implications for cultural psychology and for modern educational practices are discussed.

Keywords

Mathematical artifacts cultural-historical activity theory ancient Egypt

“History is always present in human activity. Layers of historically earlier forms of the activity can be both constraints and resources. They persist in practical routines, in ways of thinking, in material tools and rules.” (Sannino & Engeström, 2018, p. 47)

Cultural psychology (Cole, 1996) and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT; Engeström, 2001) remind us that the cultural practices in which we participate shift over time, sometimes rapidly and sometimes at glacial speeds. The focus of the present article is on how changes in artifacts used for mathematics and for mathematics education can be explained through Vygotskian and CHAT lenses. The evolution of practices may happen through tensions between activity systems relating to schools, occupations, and the state or through tensions with facets within activity systems (Sannino & Engeström, 2018). However, changes in the artifacts that are central to these practices are often neglected or backgrounded (Jovanović, 2015). Why should anyone care about changes in artifacts? First, an emphasis on artifacts reminds us that artifacts develop over (historical and ontogenetic) time, as do people and the activities in which both participate. Second, recognizing that artifacts are dynamic entities can help connect CHAT to other disciplines like process archeology (Gosden & Malafouris, 2015), actor-network theory (Akrich & Latour, 1992), and animist and neo-animist philosophies (Hornborg, 2006; Marenko, 2014; Strathern, 1988). Third, understanding the historical evolution of activities, like formal schooling, and the artifacts that drive them can offer ways to meet current societal challenges (e.g., in education; see Cole, 2010 and De Beer, 2019).

In the present article, I use examples from mathematics and mathematics education in ancient Egypt to demonstrate how CHAT can explain changes in artifacts and the activities in which they are enmeshed over long periods of time. The artifacts discussed below include numeral and writing systems, instructional texts, and writing surfaces, and the sources for my analyses were secondary sources which summarized and interpreted various texts and other artifacts that survive from ancient Egypt (since I cannot read the original texts myself). These changes may occur via contradictions within activity systems and between activity systems and through the process of externalization.

Mathematics is central to the sciences, everyday activities of daily living (e.g., paying bills and preparing meals), sports, and countless other practices (Lakshmi et al., 2017), and mathematics education allows us to participate in these activities and helps train students for jobs, especially high-tech ones, that rely on advanced mathematics (Gravemeijer et al., 2017). I chose to focus on ancient Egypt because (a) this affords an investigation into very long-term historical changes in artifacts within one cultural group and (b) there is extensive archeological evidence of mathematical artifacts and documentation of practices that survive from there. It should be noted that several researchers have analyzed mathematics education from CHAT perspectives already (David & Tomaz, 2012; Hardman, 2015; Roth, 2012; Williams, 2012; Williams & Wake, 2007), and there are important differences in how much artifact mediation, historicity, definitions of units of analysis, and other core CHAT concepts are emphasized among these scholars (Monaghan, 2016a). However, the contribution of this article is the focus on the history of artifacts, situated within activity, over millennia.

It also should be noted that there are a variety of terms used by scholars to describe the physical and nonphysical entities that mediate human behavior. Vygotsky (1978) distinguished between “tools” which mediate outward, physical activity, and “signs” which mediate inward, psychological activity. Others (e.g., Engeström, 2001; Nardi, 1996; Stetsenko, 1999) use “tools” in a more general way or write about “artifacts.” According to Nardi (1996), “Artifacts, broadly defined to include instruments, signs, language, and machines, mediate activity and are created by people to control their own behavior” (p. 38). In the present article, I will use “artifact,” following Nardi (1996) to describe algorithms, instructional texts, writing and numeral systems, writing surfaces, and other physical and psychological instruments for teaching and performing mathematical operations.

Centering history in CHAT

Acknowledging history has been a key feature of CHAT since its initial incarnation formulated by Vygotsky. Vygotsky thought of history on three different levels (Saxe, 2005; Scribner, 1985). The first is a level of “general history” which involved the progression from primitiveness to modernity based on the appearance of new forms of labor (see also, Vygotsky, 1994). These historical changes are what set us as humans apart from other animals; for Vygotsky (1994), humans are products of both biological evolution and historical forces which appeared after and superseded biological processes of change. The second level is “ontogeny”—that is, the personal history of individuals—and is related to the first level in that historical circumstances influence an individual’s development (Vygotsky, 1994; Vygotsky & Luria, 1993). The third level is the history of “higher psychological functions,” which can be separated from (but are still linked to) ontogeny and historical development. Mathematical reasoning, for example, has a history that we can examine, so the present article provides a detailed illustration of how this may be done. Scribner (1985) also suggested adding another level to examine the “the history of individual societies” (p. 139) to account for variations in how specific cultural groups change over time. This article seeks to accomplish this goal by exploring mathematics practices in ancient Egypt that shifted over several centuries.

In more recent iterations of CHAT, change occurs through the continual push and pull of the aspects within and between activity systems. These interactions may occur as what Sannino and Engeström (2018) call secondary contradictions, which involve tensions between different aspects within an activity system (also see, Engeström, 2015). For example, a contradiction may arise between an object (e.g., keeping track of commodities to be redistributed) and artifacts (e.g., mathematical or accounting operations). A dialectical push and pull can also occur in the interactions between different but related activity systems (Engeström, 2001). These are quaternary contradictions (Sannino & Engeström, 2018). If conflicting objects in mathematics education settings and in math-related occupational settings arise, this would create a quaternary contradiction which would need to be resolved. Below, I will offer suggestions for how to analyze changes in ancient Egyptian mathematics–related activity through the lens of these contradictions.

These ways of thinking about historical change do not explicitly explain how artifacts change, however, and this neglect dates to Vygotsky’s work (Jovanović, 2015). Jovanović suggests that “There is no reference to historical production of signs—they are just ‘found outside the organism.’” (p. 16) and that “…tools and signs are theoretically assumed as just existing over there, ready to fulfill their mediating function” (p. 17). This criticism is slightly inaccurate in that Vygotsky (1978) very briefly acknowledged historical changes in writing systems in his discussion of writing development at the ontogenetic level (Vygotsky, 1978) and in the use of objects as memory aides (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993). However, Jovanović correctly notes that Vygotsky emphasized internalization without acknowledging the importance of externalization (in general and as a mechanism for changing artifacts).

The intertwined processes of internalization and externalization provide another explanation for how artifacts evolve (Daniels, 2006; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006). Internalization happens when artifacts which are encountered during interpersonal contexts are adopted into one’s personal behavioral repertoire (Vygotsky, 1978). Externalization is the opposite process from internalization and happens when internalized operations need to be shared with multiple people (e.g., by drawing a map to help others find their way or by writing down steps in a recipe to help children remember a family recipe) or to facilitate internalized operations (e.g., writing out a math problem to aide in calculation) (Bødker, 1991; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006). Through this process of externalization, artifacts become “material object[s] in which are crystallized methods and operations” (Leontiev, 1978, p. 65) and “human productions that aim at meeting the needs of individuals at a certain historical time and place” (Moretti & Radford, 2016, p. 504; see also, Radford, 1997; Stetsenko, 1999). Thus, artifacts change as ways of solving problems accumulate (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006) and as the objects, or motives, that the artifacts help accomplish evolve over time.

Ancient Egyptian artifacts related to mathematics activity

Written language, number systems, and instructional artifacts all underwent significant developments over the approximately three millennia of ancient Egypt’s history.¹ The hieroglyphic system emerged first. Hieratic, a simplified, cursive form of writing, soon followed around 2600 BCE and Demotic (an even more cursive form) appeared around 600 BCE (Tovar et al., 2019). Generally, the Egyptians used Hieratic and Demotic scripts for book-keeping and literature, whereas hieroglyphs were used for monuments. In the Greco-Roman period (332 BCE–395 CE), Greek emerged as the primary written language for education and bureaucracy (Cribiore, 2009; Jones, 2009).

Number systems evolved in parallel with written language, and the Egyptians used different number systems for hieroglyphs and for Hieratic writing (Corry, 2015). The hieroglyphic system used one symbol for 1, another for 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000, and one million, and some of these symbols changed over time (Ifrah, 2000). Therefore, writing some numbers could involve many digits; for example, 345 would be written with three symbols for 100 plus four symbols for 10 plus five symbols for one. Ancient Egyptian number systems were non-positional, so the place of a digit in a number did not affect the value which that digit represented. This contrasts with the Arabic system that is common now, which is positional in that the position of a digit in a number tells us something about its value (Corry, 2015). Thus, a seven in the tens place refers to 70, whereas the same digit (seven) in the hundreds place refers to seven hundred.

In Hieratic, there were different symbols for 1 through 9, different symbols for 10–90, and different symbols for 100–900, and the visual appearance of these symbols shifted over the course of the pharaonic period (Ifrah, 2000). So, a five-digit number would only need five symbols with the order of digits being irrelevant. This made writing numbers in Hieratic much more efficient than writing them in hieroglyphs (Corry, 2015; Ifrah, 2000). However, Corry (2015) notes that simple arithmetic is facilitated by the hieroglyphic system in that one can add or subtract the number of symbols (e.g., 30–20 would be solved by subtracting two of the “10” symbols from a group of three of those symbols) but cannot do this in the Hieratic system. Numerals were written in with Demotic symbols later (Gillings, 2008) followed by Ionian letters during the Greco-Roman period (Jones, 2009).

Likewise, texts for teaching and aiding in mathematical activity evolved over the centuries. Very little survives from the Old Kingdom and earlier (Imhausen, 2016), except for diagrams that were used to calculate slopes for walls of mastaba tombs (which had slanted walls). Then, instructional texts on papyri appeared in the Middle Kingdom (Imhausen, 2016). Some of these may have been meant for students, and others may have helped scribes and other professionals with their computations (Imhausen, 2005, 2016), although it is not always clear for whom these texts were created (Newman, 1952).

These instructional texts typically stated a problem (e.g., finding the volume of a storage space), included specific data (e.g., the height of the storage space), and then outlined the procedures for solving the problem (Gillings, 2008). Sometimes, authors provided concrete examples with specific numbers (Gillings, 2008), and other times variables, representing unknown quantities, were included (Hind, 2013). Diagrams sometimes accompanied the text, as well (Imhausen, 2016). The most complete mathematical texts that survive are the Rhind Papyrus, written during the Second Intermediate Period (but may be a copy of a Middle Kingdom document), and the Moscow Papyrus, also written during the Middle Kingdom (Gillings, 2008; Imhausen, 2016; Newman, 1952). The problems in these and similar papyri typically covered practical issues (e.g., how to divide food and beer for disbursement or computing the volume a structure) but also covered more abstract, theoretical aspects (Imhausen, 2016). These papyri, along with ostraca (pieces of pottery repurposed as writing surfaces), also contained tables to facilitate multiplication, division, and solving problems with fractions (Gillings, 2008; Imhausen, 2005, 2016). Such tables were necessary since what we in our present era would consider relatively straightforward arithmetic procedures were not easily performed because of how numerals were written (Corry, 2015). Tables continued to be used for computation in a variety of cultural communities for several hundred years (Monaghan, 2016b).

Over time, the sophistication of Egyptian mathematical practices increased. The earliest surviving texts are concerned with arithmetic, then later documents added algorithms for solving geometric problems (Gillings, 2008). For example, the Rhind Papyrus contains an algorithm for figuring the volume of a space to hold grain, and the Moscow Papyrus has algorithms for finding the area of a hemisphere and the volume of a truncated pyramid. The Berlin Papyrus, from the Middle Kingdom, demonstrates how to use the Pythagorean theorem and contains problems with squared terms (Miatello, 2012). Some documents show how to solve problems that would likely not occur in the real world; for example, one Demotic papyrus from the Third Century BCE presents a hypothetical situation in which a square plot of land is converted into a circle and the student needs to calculate its diameter (Jones, 2009). Algebraic equations were added last to Egyptians’ repertoire (Gillings, 2008).

Last, the materials used for mathematics-related activity changed over time, as well. Numerals have been discovered on pots and tags in predynastic tombs, although little else survives regarding mathematical practices from then through the Old Kingdom (Imhausen, 2005). Teaching materials, receipts, and other records have been preserved on papyri and ostraca beginning in the Middle Kingdom (Gillings, 2008). School-related materials in the Greco-Roman period included papyri and ostraca, as well as wax tablets (which could be re-used) and parchment (Cribiore, 2009). These diverse artifacts arose within equally diverse activity settings, which are described below.

Activity settings for mathematics-related artifacts in ancient Egypt

In work settings

These mathematics-related practices can be analyzed in terms of activity systems (Engeström, 2001, 2015), in which subjects, artifacts, objects (i.e., purposes), division of labor, rules, and community are viewed as intertwined aspects of activity. The main subjects were the scribes trained in literacy and numeracy. The artifacts were the numeric systems, written language, tables, and algorithms described above (along with writing surfaces and implements). Hieroglyphic numerals usually appeared in stone carvings that were supposed to be permanent, whereas Hieratic and Demotic numerals appeared on papyri and ostraca which could be written on more efficiently (Imhausen, 2016).

There were many distinct but interrelated objects, or purposes, tied to mathematics. Numeracy and literacy were essential for architecture and record-keeping for the distribution of goods (Ezzamel, 2009; Lumpkin, 2002). In the New Kingdom, it was understood that the king and the state were responsible for maintaining ma’at—a principle that encompassed truth, harmony, balance, and order (Asante, 2009)—on societal and cosmic levels. Numeracy was key in this endeavor because it (a) helped ensure that everyone’s livelihoods were sustained through disbursing grain and land, (b) helped maintain temple resources, and (c) was needed to calculate the timing of festivals and other religious observances (Ezzamel, 2009). Ancient Egyptian did not make clear distinctions between the sacred and the secular (Teeter, 2011), so we should avoid viewing these objects as separate from one another. Thus, mathematical activity was instrumental in more than record-keeping; it was also instrumental in maintaining the power of the government (Imhausen, 2016).

Division of labor entailed scribes creating records for other workers who were likely illiterate (Imhausen, 2016). The rules of government and religion were the rules that constrained and enabled mathematical activity. The communities in which mathematical activity occurred were ancient Egyptian society at the broadest level and the organs of the state at a more specific level. Thus, numeracy and those who were able to use it were crucial in perpetuating a civilization that lasted for thousands of years.

In school settings

Very few individuals received formal education in ancient Egypt, but it provided a highly valued set of skills for those who participated in it. Schooling as activity was called sb3yt (“instruction”), whereas schools as places were referred to as pr-‛nḫ (“house of life”) (Lazaridis, 2010). Eventually, Greek-style schools, didaskaleia, also appeared, which may have been for non-native elites (Cribiore, 2009). Most people who participated in formal schooling were affluent, male, and trained to become scribes, priests, or other types of bureaucrats (Zinn, 2013); those in other occupations would have acquired skills and knowledge via apprenticeships or informal learning (Lazaridis, 2010). It should be noted that formal schooling—including mathematics instruction—existed in neighboring civilizations, like Mesopotamia (Høyrup, 1994; Trouche, 2016) around the same time, although this article focuses exclusively on Egypt.

Schooling practices evolved over the centuries, as the artifacts tied to mathematics evolved. Mathematics instruction may have been codified in instructional texts during the Middle Kingdom as “…part of the royal endeavor of the Middle Kingdom to regain and keep control over the country by organizing the mathematical training a scribe would obtain” (Imhausen, 2016, p. 8). Scribal education became even more formalized in the New Kingdom, especially during the 19th Dynasty (Imhausen, 2016). During the pharaonic period, students learned about ethics, literacy, and numeracy (Imhausen, 2005; Lazaridis, 2010), and schooling was divided into different levels during the Greco-Roman period. Students initially learned basic literacy and numeracy, then learned to read complex texts, and then learned more about oratory, poetry, and history (Cribiore, 2009). As noted above, written languages associated with formal education changed over time, as well. Students learned to write in Hieratic, then Demotic, and eventually Greek and Latin became the languages of the elite, foreign rulers (Lazaridis, 2010).

The formal schooling necessary for training scribes in literacy and numeracy constitutes a very different type of activity than that in which scribes engaged. According to Engeström (2015), the objects and outcomes of schooling activity diverge from those in work activity, and, even if the artifacts are the same as in work activity, those artifacts take on a different function. These distinctions are based on Wartofsky’s (1979) definitions of primary artifacts, which are used for production, and secondary artifacts, which are used for perpetuating and spreading ways of acting. Number systems, tables, formulae, and algorithms would be primary artifacts in professional settings, and instructional papyri (along with verbal instruction) would serve as secondary artifacts just as they would in accounting, construction, and so on. Reproducing the primary artifacts of work (e.g., numerals and computational tables) is the object of formal schooling activity (Engeström, 2015), whereas the objects of work entail accounting, construction, and other mathematical practices. Evidence from the New Kingdom (Imhausen, 2016) to the Greco-Roman period (Cribiore, 2009) shows that Egyptian students copied texts from teachers. Then, students’ learning materials become the primary artifacts of schooling activity (Engeström, 2015); these would be writing implements, ostraca, low-quality papyri, plaster-covered boards, and wax tablets in ancient Egypt (Cribiore, 2009; Zinn, 2013). If teachers used instructional texts (which is not clear as noted by Newman, 1952), these served as secondary artifacts in schools as they did in work activity.

Other facets of schooling activity systems differed from work activity systems, as well. For example, the subjects for schooling activity would be pupils and teachers. Division of labor would be organized so that teachers provide instruction verbally and through instructional texts, and students would learn through copying. The rules included attending school and paying close attention to teachers, as noted in the Papyrus Anastasi V from the New Kingdom (Imhausen, 2016). Last, the community would have included elite families, especially families with priests and scribes.

Explanations for the evolution of mathematics artifacts within activity systems

So, how can we explain the changes in the artifacts of mathematics for work and education over the history of ancient Egypt? One approach is to investigate the possible roles of secondary and quaternary contradictions (Engeström, 2015; Sannino & Engeström, 2018). Secondary contradictions arise from tensions among the parts (e.g., artifacts, divisions of labor, and objects) within a particular activity system. In work activity systems, this could have arisen from the absorption of Egypt into other empires (like the Macedonian and Roman Empires). As communities and rules changed with the arrival of a new ruling class, new languages and number systems needed to be added to the repertoire of Egyptian scribes. The emergence of new objects also spurred changes in artifacts—as the bureaucracy grew, the need to engage in record-keeping and the need for efficiency in record-keeping grew. This was associated with the creation and refinement of the Hieratic numeral system. As new objects arose, new types of mathematical operations and algorithms with geometric and algebraic operations building on arithmetic operations aroused, as well. It is unclear from the archeological record what those objects might have been. However, we can assume that they largely involved practical concerns since Egyptian mathematic activity tended to focus on everyday functioning of the state.

Secondary contradictions in school activity systems contributed to changes in artifacts over historical time, as well. Changes in community brought imported artifacts from other parts of the Hellenistic (and later, Roman) world, like wax tablets for students in Greco-Roman era. More theoretical math problems were blended into instruction during the same era as the new community members brought their interest in abstraction (Jones, 2009). Contradictions among types of artifacts could also drive changes in those artifacts. The evolution of number systems and mathematical operations (i.e., primary artifacts) would necessitate modifications to instructional texts (i.e., secondary artifacts).

Quaternary contradictions arise from tensions between activity systems that interact with one another. A contradiction may have arisen between the activity system of the political leadership and the activity system of the scribes. If there really were no instructional texts to codify mathematical practices, then the less uniform objects of scribes would work against the object of the leadership to impose uniformity and control. The production of instructional texts starting in the Middle Kingdom could help resolve the contradiction by regulating record-keeping, land management, architectural planning, and other scribal tasks.

In addition, the objects of work activities, like computing areas and volumes for land use and storage and accounting for keeping track of commodities ideally had to match what was taught in schools. Finally, the division of labor in work activity systems, with scribes helping other workers with calculations and recording information, would have created the need for schooling activity systems to create instructional texts and verbal instructional methods to produce more subjects who would become future scribes.

The process of externalization also can explain historical changes in mathematical artifacts. Externalization in part occurs to assist internalized operations. For example, written and carved numerals serve as tools to mediate quantitative reasoning and to help people remember quantitative information across time and space. Also, the tables for computing arithmetic operations arose because numeral systems, especial the Hieratic system, would have been impractical or extremely difficult without those artifacts. The increasing complexity of the state required new artifacts to mediate mathematical thinking, driving the emergence of algorithms, geometrical, and algebraic operations. Externalization also allows sharing internalized operations across subjects in an activity (or similar activities). So, instructional texts arose as conduits for knowledge created by previous generations of scribes to be conveyed to peers and to students.

Conclusion

Neither Vygotsky nor most post-Vygotskian scholars have spent much effort investigating the histories of specific activities or the histories of artifacts that mediate those activities (Jovanović, 2015). There are only a few published exceptions, including Vygotsky and Luria’s (1993) examination of artifacts, like ancient Peruvian knots, used for remembering in relation to more recent memory-related artifacts, Engeström and Engeström’s (1986) study of the contradictions between history of 20th-Century housecleaning practices and history of industrial-level cleaning shaping the practices in Finnish janitors, and Gutilla’s (2015) documentation of the evolution of recipes as a literary genre over historical time. In the domain of mathematics practices, Trouche (2016) documented changes in clay tokens as computational tools in Mesopotamia. Appreciating the history of practices is vital to fully understanding human development over ontogenetic and historical time. In his work on mathematical practices, Saxe (2005) notes, “The child is not only an ‘epistemic subject’ engaged in particular kinds of conceptual coordinations, but also an ‘historical subject’. Children engage in practices of quantification in particular communities with particular social histories; they participate in collective life in particular moments of historical time” (p. 247). This quotation focuses on children’s behavior, but the same could be said of adults’ behavior, as well.

The present article attempts to fill in the gaps in the CHAT literature by cultural-historical nature of mathematical activity in one of the longest-surviving civilizations. As described above, the artifacts of mathematics practices (including educational practices) changed over time from their hieroglyphic and Hieratic forms which continued though most of the Pharaonic age, to the Demotic and eventually Greek forms during the Greco-Roman period. Of course, there are limitations to applying a CHAT perspective to ancient Egyptian mathematical activity. A lot of material evidence from has been lost over the centuries, so the picture we have of mathematical activity is incomplete. We also do not know how mathematics-related artifacts figured into informal learning and apprenticeships. The surviving material evidence still can contribute to CHAT and to current mathematics education.

Analyzing ancient Egyptian mathematical activity informs our understanding of current mathematical practices and mathematics education. This reminds us that artifacts only make sense in context. Just as hieroglyphic numerals would not be used when writing on a papyrus or an ostracon in ancient times, we would not use a binary number system to teach numeracy to preschoolers, whereas their use in computer programming would be essential. This also reminds us that when the objects, rules, subjects, communities, division of labor changes, the artifacts will need to need to change to relieve the pressure of contradictions within activity systems.

The artifacts described in this paper can provide ways of enhancing modern math education, as well. Studying the history of mathematics can help educators understand the possibilities and limitations of classroom practices (Furinghetti, 2020; Moretti & Radford, 2016). Focusing heavily on decontextualized problems can suppress students’ motivation to learn math (Matthews & Graham, 2018) and initially hinder complex problem-solving by elementary school students (Choi & Hannafin, 1997). More emphasis on contextualized, real-world problems, like those in instructional papyri, could address these issues. In addition, many researchers have also suggested teaching students about ancient mathematics practices to spark students’ interest (Kasprik & Barros, 2020) and to demonstrate how math is the result of and a building block for cultural activity (Peck, 2018).

Artifacts are not static entities but ones that change continually in terms of their physical traits, their purposes and relationships with people and other things, in the view of process archeology (Alberti et al., 2011; Gosden & Malafouris, 2015). For example, the Rhind Papyrus is in a continual state of becoming from when started as the combination of ink and papyrus fibers processed as a writing surface. The text interacted with scribes and may be students in work and/or school environments, then eventually became an object kept in a museum collection. This process approach, along with actor-network theory’s notion of artifacts as non-human actors (Akrich & Latour, 1992) and animism’s “understanding spread of mind, intention, and agency beyond the human subject” (Peers, 2021, p. 3; see also, Brown & Walker, 2008), acknowledges the agency and “life” of artifacts that are downplayed or ignored in CHAT. Thus, artifacts collectively have histories and individually have ontogenies that should be acknowledged for a more complete understanding of human activity.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Gregory S Braswell

Note

Author Biography

Gregory S Braswell, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Illinois State University’s Department of Psychology. His research interests are in children’s interactions with adults, peers, and objects in museums, classrooms, and homes. He is also interested in the history of childhood and in adults’ beliefs about children’s development.

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