Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Mathematical cognition is often studied through formal systems or experimental tasks, leaving open how abstract numerical concepts emerge from everyday practices. This paper reviews ethnographic and ethnomathematical studies of weaving crafts, arguing that these practices minimally and systematically recruit a set of cognitive capacities that are central to quantification: grouping, ordering, pairing, memory, exhaustion detection, and cardinality. Across cultures and technologies, weaving stabilizes these capacities through material constraints, procedural regularity, and visual structure, affording the emergence of geometric and numerical knowledge. Therefore, weaving is put forward as a model system for studying the embodied and culturally scaffolded origins of mathematical abstraction, with implications for theories of numerical cognition and material engagement.