Alexander Marshack (April 4, 1918 – December 20, 2004) was an American

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and Paleolithic archaeologist. He was born in

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and earned a

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from City College of New York, and worked for many years for ''

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'' magazine.

Archaeology career

Despite lacking a PhD, Marshack became a research associate at the

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is a museum affiliated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums focusing on anthropological material, with ...

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in 1963 with the support of Hallam L. Movius, giving him access to state and university archaeological collections that he would not otherwise have been able to view. He rose to public prominence after the publication of ''The Roots of Civilization'' in 1972, where he proposed the controversial theory that notches and lines carved on certain

Upper Paleolithic The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coin ...

bone plaques were in fact notation systems, specifically lunar

calendars A calendar is a system of organizing days. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a ph ...

notating the passage of

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. Using microscopic analysis, Marshack suggested that seemingly random or meaningless notches on bone were sometimes interpretable as structured series of numbers. For instance, Marshack hypothesized that notches on the bone plaque from the Grotte de Thaïs in southern

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(which dates to approximately 12,000 BP) were structured in subsets of 29 notches, thus suggesting that they were used to mark the duration between two lunations. Prior to Marshack's work, many Paleolithic archaeologists focused their work on art such as the cave drawings at

Lascaux Lascaux ( , ; french: Grotte de Lascaux , "Lascaux Cave") is a network of caves near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne in southwestern France. Over 600 parietal wall paintings cover the interior walls and ceilings of ...

, but paid little attention to the abstract notches and marks on plaques and other artifacts found at these sites. Marshack's work has been criticized as having over-interpreted many artifacts, finding numerical and calendrical patterns where none exist. Nonetheless, his work had a major impact on the study of Paleolithic art. In 2010 a book was published in his honor with contributions from many in the field.Bahn, Paul, ed. 2010. An Enquiring Mind: Studies in Honor of Alexander Marshack. American School of Prehistoric Research Monograph. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Following a stroke in 2003, his health was in decline, and he died in December 2004.

References

*Bahn, Paul G., ed. 2009 An Enquiring Mind: Studies in Honor of Alexander Marshack. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

External links

*
Obituary - San Diego Union TribuneObituary - Times OnlinePeabody Museum homepageAn Enquiring Mind: Studies in Honor of Alexander MarshackBooks by Alexander Marshack
{{DEFAULTSORT:Marshack, Alexander 1918 births 2004 deaths 20th-century American archaeologists Harvard University staff