Following the example of Paolo Rossi and Francis Yates’ work, several generations of researchers have devoted considerable effort to the history of the art of memory and the memorization practices typical of the European tradition. Very few studies have been dedicated to the art of memory and the practises of memorization known and practised by other cultures, however. Setting up such a study is the goal of this undertaking. Our work will be developed around two axis. The first entails analyzing the existing ethnographic work on memorization techniques in non-Western societies, namely in the American Indian and Oceanic regions. The second must be developed in parallel and concerns the history of studies that have been conducted in anthropology and other fields on the question, particularly the origin of drawing, the history of writing and what was called for nearly a century in Europe and the United States the biology of imaging.