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ARCHEOLOGY: The Roots of Civilization: The

Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art,
Symbol and Notation. Alexander Marshack.
Article in American Anthropologist December 1993
Impact Factor: 1.49 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1993.95.4.02a00350

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Iain Davidson
University of New England (Australia)
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The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation
by Alexander Marshack
Review by: Iain Davidson
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 1027-1028
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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ARCHEOLOGY

search tool that succeeds in transcending the

limits of school, nation, and mother tongue.
For example, that part of the bibliography
dealing with archeological methodology contains about 300 titles, only 65 percent of
which are in French. The other 35 percent
are in English (mostly), German, Russian,
Spanish, Italian, Swedish, and Portuguese.
For American anthropologists who read
French, La prihistoiredans le mondeshould be
a valuable reference work for the entire Old
World. On the pre-Neolithic prehistory of
Europe, it provides the sort of authoritative
summary of recentwork that probably cannot
be found elsewhere in a single book. Even as
the book ages, its bibliography will remain a
lasting resource (I still consult my copy of
Leroi-Gourhan's 1965 volume several times a
year, usually to find a reference quickly and
easily).
The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation. Alexander Marshack. Revised and
expanded edition. New York: Moyer Bell,
1991. 446 pp.
IAINDAVIDSON

Universityof New England, Australia

The work of Alexander Marshack is an
enigma. Since his earliest publications in archeology (1964) he has consistently asked
questions that challenge archeologists to go
beyond their usual range of concerns. This
book is a lightly amended reprint of a work,
originally published in 1972, in which Marshack moved from an observation that there
was detail to be observed in the marks on
some bone objects of the European Upper
Paleolithic to a description of how these
might have been a notation of lunar phases,
and on to an extended discussion of"time-factoring" in human evolution. The initial work
on marked bone objects was closely linked to
a monograph on some of the material, published only in French (Marshack 1970). The
claim about time-factoring is itself very important, yet Marshack's work has, until the work
of d'Errico (e.g., 1989a, 1989b), not been
afforded the compliment of detailed critique
by professional archeologists. Not that it has
been without criticism. Indeed, in reviewing
a book as lightly amended as this, it is difficult
to go beyond the often trenchant criticisms
of the original reviewers (e.g., King 1973;
Rosenfeld 1971). From my own point of view
(e.g., Davidson and Noble 1989, 1993; Noble

1027

and Davidson 1991, 1993), Marshack's work

(e.g., 1976) has been one of the stimuli in the
current explosion of interest in language origins. It is disappointing, therefore, that the
discussion of this issue in this book, though it
points with unerring insight at many of the
key issues, now seems veryfirmly anchored in
the concerns of the 1960s and does not reflect
the ferment of excitement that has been generated recently.
The revision of this book might have
been an opportunity to correct that state of
affairs, but the opportunity has not been
taken. The book remains a fascinating collection of observations presented in a style
reflecting Marshack's earlier career injournalism, with copious examples of his own
brilliant photographs of details of marks
upon the surfaces of objects and visually
striking photographs of whole pieces from
the late Pleistocene of Europe. For the nonscholarly person, the quirky text is frequently exciting (though tending to have
too much of the detail of Marshack's personal involvement in his quest) and the
sumptuous photographs make this work a
continuing delight.
What, then, is the problem?
The issue, really, is one of analysis. No
one doubts Marshack's fundamental insight that there is something to be observed
at high magnification in the marks on some
bone objects from the Upper Paleolithic of
Europe. What is at issue is whether the story
that he tells can be supported by the observations he makes. Professional archeologists are all familiar with the difficulties of
turning the observations we make into data
about the past. Marshack, to his credit, has
also spent a lot of time talking with a selection of scholars from other disciplines and
reading their works. When such people
read what he writes they see in there a
reflection of themselves. And they no doubt
assume that Marshack has mastered the
problem of interpreting the archeological
record.
Part of Marshack's argument is that the
marks he photographs so well are a notation, and that what is being noted are
phases of the moon. I would have hoped in
a revision of the book that he would have
dealt with the sort of criticism that was
made when the argument was put in the
past (by such as Rosenfeld, King, and others). I think that what is needed is to take
the sequences of numbers that Marshack's
observations provide and analyze them to
see whether there is any patterning in them.

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1028

AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST

The analysis should not confine itself to the

search for pattern but might test whether
there is a case for lunar notation. If you start
at a particular point, is there a likelihood
that there is a break consistently,and in a way
that is patternedat some point that indicates
a strong link to the lunar phases? Any attempt to do this must come to grips with the
statistics of the situation where so many of
the groupings of marks are in very small
numbers, together with the wide tolerance
Marshack allows for hitting a target phase.
I do not think that the sort of pattern
matching for individual objects that is Marshack's method is suitable for establishing
the case. It may work for objects known to
be calendars (Marshack 1985), but the issue of establishing that the prehistoric objects are analogous requires more subtle
methods. I think there is an interesting
contrast with Thom's work on megalithic
stone circles, where the observations have
been subjected to exhaustive statistical
analysis in the search for pattern.
In short, while there is still much to interest general readers in this book, they, and
Marshack, have not been well served by the
reprinting. Marshack should have been
asked to do a thorough revision, bringing
it up to date and answering the severe criticisms the work received in the past. That
would have been a very interesting book.
References Cited
Davidson, lain, and William Noble
1989 The Archaeology of Perception:
Traces of Depiction and Language. Current Anthropology 30:125-158.
1993 Tools and Language in Human Evolution. In Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution. K. Gibson and
T. Ingold, eds. Pp. 363-348. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
d'Errico, F.
1989a Palaeolithic Lunar Calendars: A
Case of Wishful Thinking? Current Anthropology 30:117-119.
1989b Reply to Marshack. Current Anthropology 30:494-500.
King, A. R.
1973 Reviewof The Roots of Civilization
and Notation dans les gravures du
American Anthropaleolithiquesupe,rieur.
pologist 75:1897-1900.
Marshack,Alexander
1964 Lunar Notation on Upper Paleolithic
Remains. Science 146:743-745.

[95, 1993]

1970 Notation dans les gravures du

paleolithique superieur. Publications de
l'Institut de Prehistoire de l'Universit6
de Bordeaux, Memoire No 8. Bordeaux:
Imprimerie Delmas.
1972 The Roots of Civilization. NewYork:
McGrawHill.
1976 Some Implications of the Paleolithic
Symbolic Evidence for the Origins of
Language. Current Anthropology
17:274-282.
1985 A Lunar-Solar Year Calendar Stick
from North America. American Antiquity 50:27-51.
Noble, William, and lain Davidson
1991 The Evolutionary Emergence of
Modern Human Behaviour: Language
and Its Archaeology. Man:Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 26:223253.
1993 Tracing the Emergence of Modern
Human Behaviour: Methodological Pitfalls, and a Theoretical Path. Journal of
Anthropological Research 12.
Rosenfeld, Andree
1971 Reviewof Notationdans lesgravuresdu
paleolithiquesuperieur.Antiquity 45:317319.

Space, Time, and Archaeological Landscapes. Jacqueline Rossignol and LuAnn

Wandsnider, eds. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. New York: Plenum
Press, 1992. 314 pp.
DAVIDB. MADSEN

State Archeologist
UtahDivision of StateHistory
There has been an increasing effort to
steer archeological research away from the
artifact and the site as primary units of
analysis and toward the larger environmental settings in which human populations played out their lives. This volume of
12 papers, edited by Jacqueline Rossignol
and LuAnn Wandsnider, draws on much of
that work and attempts to provide a framework for regional data recovery and analysis. In the past, phrases such as "nonsite" or
"offsite" archeology have been used to identify this approach, but here participants use
"archeological landscapes" to describe this
perspective. They do so explicitly and explain that this "embodies the view that the
distribution of archaeological artifacts and
features relative to elements of the landscape ... provide insight into social and

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