AR90. 27 April 2005.
Copyright © 2005 by Leslie Van Gelder and Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
To appear in the International Newsletter
on Rock Art.
by
Leslie Van Gelder
Walden University, Minneapolis, Minnesota
lvangeld@waldenu.edu
and
Kevin Sharpe
Graduate College, Union Institute and
University, Cincinnati, Ohio
Harris Manchester College, Oxford University
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
www.ksharpe.com
The last time we saw Alex Marshack was in the autumn of 2004 at his and his wife Elaine’s Greenwich Village apartment in New York’s Lower Manhattan. He had survived a stroke and a difficult period of healing, but his mind was as sharp as ever. ‘Let me see that thing,’ he gestured to Leslie’s camera. Alex and she had first become friends over their mutual love for photography and archaeology; they had to ‘talk shop’ about photography before we could get to talking about research. This was the ritual.
Alexander Marshack died in New York on 20 December 2004 at the age of 86. A man of boundless energy, he came to archaeology in the early 1960s while investigating a book for the U.S. Space Agency, NASA. His work lead him to wonder why humanity had been able to put people into space, and to satisfy his wonderment he went further and further back into human history. He found himself ‘appalled at what seemed the inadequacy of the record’ because ‘nothing as complex as the space program, or as complex as modern civilization or modern [humanity], could have derived from the incomplete and primitive creature imagined and documented in the scientific journals’ (Marshack 1972: 11).
A chance reading of a Scientific American article that describes the discovery of a 6,500-year-old bone fragment in Ishango later helped him glimpse an answer and lead him to formulate his first ideas on notational calendar systems. Fuelled by his questions on this possibility, he consulted with Hallum Movius, Jr., of Harvard University, who became a life-long friend and supporter. Hallam encouraged him to go to France to verify his theory. While there, Alex came across a grooved bone fragment from Abri Blachard, stored in a dusty corner of an old museum. ‘Unraveling the mystery of the bone fragment with its lunar notation was the first step in a fascinating research project that has occupied me ever since’ (Marshack 1975: 66). He wrote this over three decades ago. That mystery engaged him until the day he died.
His approach, unlike any before, was to look scientifically at the artifacts, in a manner he called ‘internal analysis.’ Placing portable items beneath his microscope, he could ascertain the temporal order of the construction of lines and, in a time sequence, give attribution to the various creators of a particular artifact. His work also shed light on the artifacts’ purpose and use. He later combined his systematic method of internal analysis with his background in photography to use infrared photography and a variety of specialized filters in analyses of painted panels in Franco-Cantabrian caves (most notably the horse panel of Pech Merle, as well as panels in Niaux and Gargas). He was able to show the temporal order in the construction of the paintings as well as their layered materials.
A prodigious writer, he published two books and over 200 articles and book chapters during the last 40 years of his life. His 1972 book on his theory of portable lunar calendars, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol, and Notation, became a cultural and professional milestone in understanding our ancestors.
Alex’s great contributions ultimately are probably not his discoveries so much as his willingness to see and advocate to both public and academic audiences that Paleolithic peoples were individuals with active minds, systems of symbols and writing, and lives as complex as our own. Nothing fascinated him more than the minds of our ancestors and the implications of them for our future. ‘What seems to be emerging from these new studies is a view of early [humans’] way of thinking as being exceedingly complex and surprisingly modern,’ he wrote.
In this culture of early Homo sapiens, the real and the symbolic worlds were intertwined, and there was a continuity and sequence in [people]’s ritual and ceremonial relationship to that world. Art, image, and notation were means of expressing that complex reality, of recognizing and participating in it….No more profound question exists than that of when and how this capacity began and where, eventually, it will take us (Marshack 1975: 89).
Nature writer Peter Matthiessen once said that the world seemed to have only a few dinosaurs left. He saw dinosaurs as people who, though surrounded by niche-driven pressures, were still able to see the big picture and put together ideas that could cross both time and disciplines. When we received a note from Elaine telling us of Alex’s passing, we immediately thought that the world had lost one of its great dinosaurs. Ian Tattersall, from the American Museum of Natural History, echoed this in the New York Times, saying that Alex is ‘one of the giants on whose shoulders the current generation of researchers stands’ (Bayot 2004: 6).
Surrounded by piles of papers and pictures, a microscope on the dining table, and the view of the Manhattan skyline from the window, Alex shared with us his latest research, his ideas, but most of all the spirit to ask the questions no one else is willing to ask.
‘It’s all in the questions,’ he told us each time we saw him. ‘What do you think?’
Alexander Marshack,
4 April 1918-20 December 2004.
Marshack, Alexander. 1972. The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol, and Notation. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
_________. 1975. Exploring the Mind of Ice-Age Man. National Geographic 147 (1): 62-89.
Bayot, Jennifer. 2004. Alexander Marshack, 86; Studied Stone Age Innovations. New York Times 28 December, p. B6.