Lectures & Seminars

 




Samples of my lectures:



August or July 2016:

The topic, date & time will be announced soon

Aquinnah Public Library


August 5th or 6th, 2016:

The Magic Trumpeter:
An exceptional BaKongo statue
& its links with World War I

(Two hours with the Q&A)
Oak Bluffs Public Library

in the context of the Oak Bluffs African-American Literature & Culture Festival

For info contact Nathan Luce,

Program Coordinator, Oak Bluffs Public Library

56R School Street, Oak Bluffs, MA 02557

508.693.9433 x142


All of August 2016:

Ted Joans’ collages - 

Dr. Rotapep’s Teducation in life, poetry

& totem animals

(Curated by Duncan Caldwell)

Oak Bluffs Public Library

in the context of the Oak Bluffs African-American Literature & Culture Festival

(I’ll probably give a brief reading & homage to my friend at the opening.)


All of July 2016:

Susanna & Duncan Caldwell’s Art

(A brother & sister show)

Oak Bluffs Public Library

(This art show will probably be accompanied by a few words of introduction at the opening.)


April 19, 2016:

Un trompettiste magicien :

Une mystérieuse statue

Kongo et ses liens avec la 1ère guerre mondiale

(in French with English slides)

2h00-4h00 PM, Détours des Mondes,

EPSS, 139 Bd. du Montparnasse, Paris


Jan. 18, 2016:

Réétudier les collections muséales de Préhistoire : pourquoi ?

10 - 11:30 AM, Musée de l’Homme, Salle Leroi Gourhan, entresol 1, 17 Place du Trocadéro, 75016 Paris, France.

Module d’Ecole Doctorale, 

Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle,

Département “Homme, Nature, Société”

Unité de recherche: UMR-CNRS 7194, Département: Préhistoire MNHN, Information: Bureau 321.


Feb. 19, 2015:

Réétudier les collections muséales de Préhistoire : pourquoi ?

3:30 - 5 PM Musée de l’Homme: Salle Denise Paulme, entresol 2; 17 Place du Trocadéro
75016
Paris, France.

Module d’Ecole Doctorale, 

Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle,

Département “Homme, Nature, Société”.


Aug. 14, 2014:

Prehistoric Rock Art near Paris - Glories, New Discoveries & Controversies

5 - 6:30 PM, Old Town Hall for the Aquinnah Public Library (tel 508-645-2314)

Aquinnah, Massachusetts


April 17, 2014:

Re-examining Museum Prehistory Collections in Search of Fresh Perspectives

Module d’Ecole Doctorale, 

Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle,

Département “Homme, Nature, Société”,

3:30 - 5 PM, Amphitheater, 57, rue Cuvier, Jardin des Plantes; 75005 Paris, France.


January 30, 2014:

La datation des pétroglyphes de la forêt de Fontainebleau” / “The ‘Prehistoric’ Petroglyphs of the Massif de Fontainebleau & their Dating”

SAGA (Société Amicale des Géologues Amateurs)

6:30 - 7:30 PM, Salle de conférence,

Bâtiment de géologie,

Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle.

43 rue Buffon, Paris, France

(In French)


Dec. 12, 2013:

Designing Time Machines:

Reflections on the creation of archaeology & ethnology museums.

10:15 AM - 12:45 PM

Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture  (Nantes)

(In English)


Oct. 3, 2013:

Decoding the Adena Tablets:

New Interpretations of the "Mound Builder" Tablets

University Seminar on the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

7-8:30 PM

Columbia University


Aug. 8, 2013:

The Birth of the Human Genus: 

The tool that changed us from head to foot

5 - 6:30 PM

Aquinnah Public Library

Aquinnah, Massachusetts


July 27, 2013:

Digging into Deep Time

For children (of all ages)

2 - 3 PM

Aquinnah Public Library

Aquinnah, Massachusetts


May 31, 2013:

Recent megalithic discoveries in the Massif de Fontainebleau

8:00-8:30 AM

International Rock Art Congress

International Federation of Rock Art Organizations (IFRAO) & American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA)

Marriott Pyramid Hotel

Albuquerque, New Mexico


May 20, 2013:

The Saharan Origins of Ancient Egyptian Royal Symbols

7:00 - 8:30 PM

The Explorers Club

46 East 70th Street,

between Park and Madison Avenues

Upper East Side of Manhattan

(Tickets on sale from 6PM / Reservations (212) 628-8383).

(Here’s a video of the lecture. It’s too blurry to read the slides, but the Explorers Club plans to send a sharper copy. I also misspoke at one point and said that the New Kingdom was 1200 BP, when I meant BC. Sorry about that.)


May 11, 2013:

Western Saharan Sculptural Families and the Possible Origins of the  Osiris-Horus Cycle

Musée National de Préhistoire

Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, Dordogne

3h00 -3h30 PM

Assemblée générale de l'Association Lithos

(In French)


May 3, 2013:

Re-examining Museum Prehistory Collections in Search of Fresh Perspectives / Réétudier les collections muséales de préhistoire : pourquoi ?

Module d’Ecole Doctorale, 

Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle,

Département “Homme, Nature, Société”,

Institut de Paléontologie Humaine (I.P.H.) 3h30 - 5h00 Amphitheater

1 Rue René Panhard 

75013 Paris, France.

(In French)


Aug. 7, 2012:

The Place of Testing: The Epic Expedition that Solved the Last Mystery of King Tut's Tomb.

Martha’s Vineyard Museum

5:30 PM

Edgartown, Massachusetts


Sept. 8, 2011:

Voyage to the Sun: How the Egyptians Retrieved Solid Sunlight for Tutankhamun’s Tomb

Special event in the Planetarium.

6:30 PM

California Academy of Sciences,

San Francisco, California.


Sept. 6, 2011:

The Mirage of Simplicity in Paleolithic Art

San José State University (SJSU) Graduate School of Art + Design

San José, California.


Aug. 11, 2011:

Correcting Neanderthal Reconstructions

5:00 - 6:15 PM

Aquinnah Public Library,

Aquinnah, Massachusetts.



Contact info for ordering lectures


caldwellnd(at)aol.com

Back-up email: paleothought(at)yahoo.com


Intermediary contact numbers:

Nov. through June: +33-14804-0356 (Paris)

July through Oct.:  +1-508-645-2009 (USA)





Recent lecture topics:


Introduction: Although all my lectures are based on my peer-reviewed research, they go much further, since they are profusely illustrated, and give audiences enough background information to perceive both the grandeur and high stakes of the problems being addressed. Once I’ve given listeners enough information to get their bearings and become excited by the ride ahead, the lectures take off like roller-coasters with tremendous momentum, surprising shifts and dramatic views. Every point is illustrated with memorable images and contributes towards the plot, which leads us to a powerful end.


1) Secret Symbols of the Early Mound-Builders of the Ohio Valley:

Decoding the Adena Tablets

Places that have booked this lecture or its variants: Columbia University, New York; Vineyard Haven Public Library, Martha’s Vineyard; L'Institut du Tout-Monde, Paris


This lecture, which I was asked to present as the University Seminar on the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at Columbia University in October 2013 is much broader in scope than the underlying scholarly article*, which will be in the next issue of RES - Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, since it starts by astonishing the audience with the extreme age, precision and size of the huge earthworks erected by prehistoric Americans. After showing complexes in the Ohio Valley that stretch up to 60 miles, the lecture zooms into the equally well-constructed engravings that the same geomancer-architects designed more than 2,000 years ago. We see how one revelation led to another when I suddenly recognized a series of heads in one of them - the McKensie Tablet, which served as my Rosetta Stone. This led to the identification of new motifs, structures and themes on the other Adena tablets, although they had resisted decipherment for over a century.

 

But the lecture goes beyond discovering the keys to the iconography which set the template for Eastern Woodland beliefs from the building of the first huge ceremonial complexes along the Ohio until contact with Europeans, since it shows how the recursive graphic techniques employed in the tablets – which range from mirroring to radial re-orientation of motifs like Escher to the embedding of symbols within each other – provide a case study in how imagery can grow so allusive that it can encrypt and sustain the twists and turns of a complex ideology – in this case, the one that gave meaning to life over almost half the continent for centuries.


  1. *A New Typological Ordering of Adena Tablets Based on a Deeper Reading of the McKensie Tablet (RES - Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics. 2014/2015 joint edition. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology & Art Museum, Harvard University). 


*****


2) Mother Caves? The implications of a Paleolithic frieze.

For a typical reaction contact the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.


This provocative lecture about prehistoric feminine imagery is based on so many of my peer-reviewed papers* that it is unusually lavish in its implications and imagery. After showing how Paleolithic “venuses” have often been glibly interpreted as pornography, it makes a case based a huge assemblage of images from Paleolithic art caves, including some that I found myself, and an equally rich compendium of ethnographic observations from around the Arctic that the truth is more surprising.


Several polar cultures believe that women form the supernatural crux of a triad between hunters with their prey. Among the Koryak and Nootka, for example, “whale-wives” become virtual partners in the hunt by entering trances in which they put themselves in the place of a whale, which they direct towards their husbands’ harpoons. When the men finally return with their prey, the women “feed” the carcass and invite its spirit to return where it came from as a new cetacean.

 

Similar beliefs in women’s maternal capacity to morph into, control and generate socially important prey species seem to have inspired Paleolithic images of gravid women with zoomorphic features and vulvas that are umbilically linked to horses, mammoths and bison. The implications of such previously unobserved details give the first artists’ journeys into caves a revolutionary new twist and lead to a “Prey-Mother” Hypothesis.


* The lecture is based on the following articles:

I)“Palaeolithic Whistles or Figurines? A preliminary survey of pre-historic phalangeal figurines (Rock Art Research, 2009, Vol. 26, No. 1: 65-82)

II)Supernatural Pregancies” (Arts & Cultures, 2010. Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva. pp. 52-75).

III)“Identification of a possible engraved Venus from Předmostí, Czech Republic Co-authored with Francesco d’Errico (Université de Bordeaux and the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand) & Martina Lázničková-Galetová (Moravian Museum). (Journal of Archaeological Science, 2011, n° 38, Issue 3 / March: 672-683)

 

*****


3) “Correcting Neanderthal Reconstructions”


This profusely illustrated presentation is based on my peer-reviewed article, “Are Neanderthal Portraits Wrong?”, which appeared in Rock Art Research (2008. Vol. 25, No. 1. pp. 101-116), and its sequel, Afterthoughts about the Neanderthal insulation hypothesis (AURA Newsletter, 2008, Vol. 25, No. 2). The papers re-interpreted Neanderthals from A to Z, starting with clues left in the 1920s by a woman hatter about an odd distribution of hand-axes in Burgundy, and ending with revolutionary explanations of what Neanderthals looked like and finally died from. The story unfolds like a mystery in which the common verdict is suddenly overturned by a flurry of new evidence from Neanderthal sites in Finland and the Arctic Circle – more than 700 miles farther north than previously known ones. The ramifications of the solution are so broad that they unveil some of the likely reasons for both the greatest success story and tragedy in the history of competition between two human species.  

 

*****


4) The Birth of the Human Genus: The tool that changed us from head to foot

Please contact the Aquinnah Public Library to learn how the public perceived this lecture and how the presentation broke attendance records.


This richly illustrated lecture is based on a peer-reviewed paper entitled Hair Distribution, Immuno-resistance and Adaptations to the First Baby Slings, which was published by Anthropologie - International Journal of Human Diversity and Evolution (2013. Volume 51, Issue 3: 349-374). The lecture uses an onslaught of surprising imagery and new information to persuade the audience that the root cause of the human genus may have been rapid biological adaptations to a micro-environment inside one of our ancestors’ first inventions. The under-lying essay uses differences between the chimp and human genomes to argue that infectious and parasitic conditions in the first baby-carrying devices selected for changes in juvenile hair distribution and immuno-resistance around 2.7 million years ago, and created a founder’s effect, which largely explains the speciation that led to the first human species, Homo habilis. In short, it postulates that the entire group of human species ultimately owes its existence to the most significant invention of all time, the baby sling, and its initially hostile micro-environment, which caused massive selective infant mortality by thrusting babies into warmer, moister, and more infectious conditions than they had ever experienced.

 

The paper also explores evidence from such domains as milk chemistry, which suggests that the slings gradually forced adults to focus on the kind of nutrition needed by more slowly maturing infant brains by making their babies more altricial – in others words as needy and helpless as baby songbirds. This could have triggered more scavenging, hunting, and feedback mechanisms that slowly extended the new juvenile hair distribution to adults as part of a whole-body cooling system based on sweat and body baldness while contributing to the evolution of Homo erectus.

 

*****


5) The Saharan Origins of Ancient Egyptian Royal Symbols

Please contact the chair of the Explorers Club’s Public Lecture Committee, Bob Ashton, to learn more about this lecture to a packed house, which was the subject of the Club’s first live broadcast.


This copiously illustrated lecture is based on a peer-reviewed article calledWestern Saharan Sculptural Families and the Possible Origins of the Osiris-Horus Cycle, which was published by Rock Art Research (2013. Vol. 30, No. 2 / November: 174-196). After letting the audience know what is at stake by telling them the surprising conclusion that the presentation will try to prove, the lecture backs up and provides all the steps in its argument. Along the way, we get an education in cultural flows across the length and breadth of the Sahara during the early Neolithic and formative years of Egyptian civilization. Once the audience has situated itself in that vast space and time, the lecture zooms in on an anomaly, which consists of two sets of symbols that seem so similar, isolated at the eastern and western ends of the Sahara, and unlikely to result from parallel evolution, because of the variety and intimate association of the symbols in the sets, that the similarities might indicate a link. The presentation shows that the sets’ ages overlap at the beginning of the 4th millennium BC, when the first towns were forming along the Nile, and weighs the probability of a westward versus an eastward connection around that time. Finally, it shows that one of the possible explanations for the similarities is the arrival in the Nile Valley of refugees from over 3000 kilometers away, who fled increasing aridity by retracing the steps of pastoral ancestors. If this scenario is correct, some of the elements of Egyptian theology that became the prerogatives of royalty and rationale for kingship, including the Horus-Osiris cycle, arrived from the other end of the desert as the result of an exodus caused by climate change.


Please click on this icon to watch The Saharan Origins of Ancient Egyptian Royal Symbols”. I gave this version of the lecture at The Explorers Club in New York on May 20, 2013. In passing, I apologize for mis-speaking at one point and saying that the New Kingdom was 1200 BP, when I meant BC.


*****

 

6) The Place of Testing: The Epic Expedition that Solved the Last Mystery of King Tut's Tomb. 


This presentation in the planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences (among other places) unraveled one of the last mysteries of Tutankhamun’s tomb by explaining how the Egyptians of his dynasty obtained a piece of meteoritic glass from a zone that had already become the closest thing to Mars on Earth. A place so hostile that they couldn’t reach it even if they had camels. 

 

Which they didn’t: all the ancient Egyptians had was donkeys. Nobody has ever been able to explain – and prove – how Tut’s jewelers obtained the world’s purest natural glass, which they used to make the scarab in the middle of one of his breastplates - glass so strange that it is filled with nano-diamonds and other evidence of a brush with a comet's tail or colossal impact.

 

Until now.

 

The lecture revealed the discoveries of the expedition, which I organized to solve the mystery. As it progressed ever deeper into the desert, descending along the Libyan Frontier with Egypt, it discovered prehistoric frescoes and thousands of scintillating nodules of glass, but the missing links we were looking for kept eluding us. So we pushed on, until we'd gone so far that we used up our last diesel in unexpected rescue operations, stranding three out of four vehicles hundreds of miles from the nearest track during a solar eclipse. But that disaster gave us one last opportunity to prospect for a site that could solve the mystery, while hoping for rescue.

 

The discovery we found that day, coming on top of all the others, answered the last major riddle of Tut's tomb while opening a new chapter in the study of the entire Sahara. 

 

And yet our greatest discovery still hasn't been revealed.


*****


7) Prehistoric Rock Art near Paris - Glories, New Discoveries & Controversies

Please contact the Aquinnah Public Library to learn how the public perceived this lecture and how the presentation broke attendance records.


The talk takes us into the richest concentration of rock art near a major city in the world, around 1400 sites just outside Paris with paintings and engravings spanning tens of thousands of years. Although most of the motifs are in caves and rock shelters, some of the most newly discovered and complex iconography, which date to the early Neolithic, was in plain sight on gigantic raised stones and vertical boulders. As we scramble through the boulder-scapes and burrow underground during the virtual tour, we’ll try to solve enigmas ranging from the ages of the styles to the motivations of their makers.


The lavishly illustrated presentation on this little known art complex is based on a multitude of my discoveries and peer-reviewed papers, including:

 

A)“An historic sign, possible Mesolithic menhir, DStretch, and problems in dating rock art to the Sauveterrian in the Massif de Fontainebleau (Journal of Archaeological Science. 2014. Vol. 42 / Feb.: 140-151). This controversial article eliminates the only chronological marker for dating the largest concentration of supposed Mesolithic rock art in Europe – the “classic” schematic engravings in the Massif de Fontainebleau – by showing that part of an incised and painted boulder, which was thought to have lain undisturbed for over 7,000 years, actually bears medieval vulvas and historic letters. But it goes on to find a silver lining by demonstrating that the monolith could be the oldest known menhir in France, which suggests that western European megalithism might have begun in the Massif, before spreading to such places as Brittany, Portugal, and the British Isles. It also represents the tip of an iceberg, since I've found several major art sites nearby, which I’ve described elsewhere.

B) “Observations et hypothèses sur le site du Paly : Milly-la-Forêt (Essonne) / Observations and Hypotheses Concerning the Megalithic Site of Paly: Milly-la-Forêt (Essonne)” (Art Rupestre, Bulletin du GERSAR, 2013, 63 / January: pp. 29-32).

C)    “Le Visage Gravé du Closeau 12 et ses Implications. Nanteau-Sur-Essonne (Seine-et-Marne) / The Engraved Face of Closeau 12 and its Implications, Nanteau-Sur-Essonne (Seine-et-Marne)” (Art Rupestre, Bulletin du GERSAR, 2013, n° 64 / July: 37-46)

D)“A discovery of exceptional Neolithic engravings in Buthiers, Seine-et-Marne, France (Antiquity. 2014. Vol. 88, issue 340 / June). This report describes a newly discovered frieze, which includes, from left to right, an early Neolithic, Bégude-type prestige axe from the Italian Alps, an anthropomorph coifed with ten “plumes”, and two of the oldest images of boats known in Western Europe. The larger one, which has high angular extremities and a hook that looks like a steering oar or beak, appears to illustrate a complex vessel made of planks, rather than the kind of simple dug-out canoes that have usually been associated with the period. The likelihood that the motif illustrates a boat like a Haida war canoe fundamentally changes our conception of what Europe’s early Neolithic people could do and build, making it much more likely, for example, that they engaged in extensive trade and even whaling.

 

*****


8) “The Mirage of Simplicity in Paleolithic Art

San José State University (SJSU) Graduate School of Art + Design, San José, California.


In addition to reporting on the first life-size Paleolithic sculpture ever found near Paris, this lecture unveils:

• the first use of decomposed, interactive, cubist conventions, over 15,000 years ago,

• some of the oldest known true optical illusions, which play upon similarities between the contours of bison and mammoths, and even

• the intentional hiding of secondary and tertiary readings within more blatant Paleolithic images, vastly enriching their known symbolism.


Although the presentation is based on years of reflections about Paleolithic art and many discoveries of my own, several of its conclusions first appeared in a paper called The Identification of the First Paleolithic Animal Sculpture in the Ile-de-France, which appeared in Pleistocene Art of the World (edited by Jean Clottes. N° spécial de Préhistoire, Art et Sociétés, Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Ariège-Pyrénées, LXV-LXVI, 2010-2011. pp. 74-75 and CD pp. 419-461. ISBN 987-2-9531148-3-6). Andrew Howley of National Geographic also wrote a report on one of the paper’s findings - its revelation of some of the world’s oldest provable intentional optical illusions.


*****


9) “Digging into Deep Time”

For children (of all ages) at schools and summer camps. For a typical reaction contact Pam Benjamin, Director of A Sense of Wonder Creations Summer Camp, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts.


*****


10) “Designing Time Machines: Reflections on the creation of archaeology & ethnology museums”


I was asked to give this lecture to final-year doctoral students at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture in Nantes, France to shake them out of their ruts by approaching architecture from surprising perspectives. As a consequence of this playfulness, the lecture is really designed for anyone who is interested in the changing conception of museums in general.


*****


11) “Re-examining Museum Prehistory Collections in Search of Fresh Perspectives”


This is one of the lectures that I give annually in the doctoral module of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris, France.


*****


12) “The Magic Trumpeter: An exceptional BaKongo statue and its links with World War I


This lecture, which has been commissioned by Détours des Mondes in Paris, France will use one of the most complex African statues in existence, a huge nail fetish with hundreds of attachments, including large tusks, horns, skulls, shells, grenades, and a trumpet, which the Kongo maker seems to have obtained from one of the Black American brass bands, which introduced jazz to the world, when they came to Europe with the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War. I intend to use the nkondi’s details to talk about the hundreds of thousands of African troops that colonial powers threw against each other in that conflict, as well as the story of how those troops fraternized with ones from the African diaspora, with consequences that would ripple from the Western Front and Montmartre to Memphis and Brazzaville. With any luck, the story, which will also delve into the statue’s rich religious iconography, will become not only a lecture, but a book before the 100th anniversary of the end of the war.


ETC.







The following lecture series, which have been given individually in various institutions, were organized around a central theme in response to Alan Dershowitz’s recommendation to Harvard that I conduct a foreign study session in Paris during the winter.


The Cave and the Scarab

Lectures on Prehistoric Anomalies


Part One: Anomalous artifacts.


1)     A scarab made of meteoritic impactite from an impenetrable part of the Sahara will introduce a persistent theme: the anomalous artifact. How did the material get into one of King Tut's pectorals? After all, the Great Sand Sea, which is the only place  where the glass occurs naturally, had already become so dry by the king's time that it had become as inaccessible as Mars. Even if the Egyptians of Tut's era had had dromedaries, which were not introduced into North Africa until later, they could not have gotten far enough into the desert to find the natural deposits, because even camels need occasional water and fodder. All the king's subjects had were donkey caravans, which could bear water jars to depositaries like Abu Ballas, from which smaller caravans could carry jars to yet smaller depositaries a bit farther into the desert, but eventually the law of diminishing returns prevented them from getting anywhere near the area where the impactite occurs naturally. So how did the meteoritic material get into the pharaoh’s tomb?


The session reveals the answer and uses it to launch a deeper series of explorations concerning Saharan prehistory.


2)     Which leads us to the second lecture. Again, it starts with some anomalous objects: metates from the northwest Sahara with decorations identical to those found on metates from a Neolithic cemetery in Nubia, 2500 km away. Should one dismiss such replication of complex motifs as a coincidence - or look further? The lecture will explore the possibility that the metates and hawk totems found at both poles reflect a diaspora as long as the one which took gypsies from India to Europe. We will see how a western Saharan people may have taken their association of raptors and natural cycles across the Sahara as they fled its desertification around 6,000 years ago, contributing to the foundation myths of ancient Egypt.


As we trace their possible path, we will encounter sculptures as refined as Brancusi's and encounter a phantasmagoria of frescoes in the Cave of the Headless Beast at Wadi Sora.



Part Two: Anomalies and the re-interpretation of prehistoric feminine imagery.


3) The next anomaly is an inexplicable field find: a polished, drilled and engraved vulvar cobble found with bronze implements near a dolmen in northern France. At first it seemed like an exception. Then, as fate would have it, we will stumble upon a second, probably related feminine sculpture hundreds of kilometers away in another collection - which had again been found near a dolmen used and re-used into the Bronze Age.  Next, similar sculptures pop up among finds outside other dolmens that had been used long after they were built. The phenomenon may be huge - yet it has been overlooked because the sculptures rarely occur in the most obvious places for Neolithic and Bronze Age excavations - habitation sites or inside tombs.


The interest of this segment is fourfold:

-    one, the unveiling of a corpus of ancient art that is unfamiliar,

-    two, the mind-stretching consideration of possible iconographic links back to the Paleolithic,

-    three, the realization that important phenomena can escape our attention because of blinkered methodology or biases,

-    and, four, the fact that we don't even know how extensive these new phenomena are or what they portend.

As with all the sessions, this one is bountifully illustrated.


4) The next fluke is one that has troubled prehistorians since the 1890's: the uniqueness in Paleolithic art of the Schematic Venus of Předmostí. Is she really that unrelated to the rest of the canon? If so, what does she signify? The answers are illustrated with the unveiling of the second Schematic Venus, which is the subject of an article by Francesco d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux and the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, Martina Lázničková-Galetová of the University of Brno, and the lecturer. It actually extends the theme of the anomalous artifact, since the new “venus” was found in a drawer and had lain unrecognized since the 19th century. The fact that Francesco’s micro-wear analyses reveal that the two works may be by the same hand and that the two are the oldest known portrayals of the human face and body using geometrical forms serves as the starting point for a survey of the earliest experimental phase of high art and current neurological and cultural theories about why it took place. By the end, we'll see that these two masterpieces may help to explain how art meshed with the region's Ice Age economics and culture and cast light on the origins and first manifestations of the “art instinct”.


5) The third session devoted to prehistoric feminine imagery will be triggered by the conventional wisdom that artificially perforated phalanges were whistles. The anomaly here is simply that most of the holes are too small to make a sound. A mass of direct and ethnographic evidence assembled by Pascal Raux and the lecturer will lead us to the conclusion that some of the perforated phalanges were simple feminine figurines – vastly expanding the number of anthropomorphic sculptures for the Paleolithic. The ripples from this insight will not stop spreading until they have embraced revelations from Cyprus to the mammoth steppes. 


The hard science behind this lecture is largely described in Raux’s book “Animisme et Arts Premiers – Historique et nouvelle lecture de l’art préhistorique”, published by Éditions Thot Expert, and “Palaeolithic Whistles or Figurines? A preliminary survey of prehistoric phalangeal figurines” (Rock Art Research, May 2009, Vol. 26, 1: 65-82).


6) Finally, one of the most visually and conceptually sumptuous talks surveys the debates that have raged over the meaning of prehistoric feminine imagery - before arriving at a series of unconventional conclusions based on evidence, that has never been brought together. Some of the arguments appeared in “Supernatural Pregnancies: Common features and new ideas concerning Upper Paleolithic feminine imagery” in the 2010 edition of Arts & Cultures (Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva; pp. 52-75).



Part Three: Some anomalies from human evolution.


The third set of lectures focuses on how the investigation of anomalies has led to advances in physical anthropology. The past is full of cases, several of which will be described before examining how nagging questions about such little things as soil sheen on Neanderthal bifaces found near bogs led to some of new hypotheses. 


7) Anomalies concerning the range, nutrition, parasites, tool kits and osteology of Neanderthals will spark the first of these debates. We’ll see how a host of fresh observations cast new light on the adaptations and demise of one of the last and most advanced groups of archaic humans. This is an argumentative, lavish parade of stunning images that often playfully reinforce every point.


Many of the arguments are laid out in “Are Neanderthal Portraits Wrong? Neanderthal adaptations to cold and their impact on Palaeolithic populations” - which appeared in Rock Art Research in 2008 (Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 101-116) - and in “Afterthoughts about the Neanderthal insulation hypothesis” - which appeared in a related publication called the AURA Newsletter (2008, Vol. 25, No. 2).


8) A set of human oddities will show how things we take for granted may conceal strange roots. Why is our hair distribution so unusual among mammals? Why did the ratio of pre-to-post-natal growth start shifting around 2 million years ago? And why did the highly conserved CMAH gene, which had provided a pathway for diseases linked to ungulates, suddenly get switched off in hominins - even though it had been so useful that it exists in animals ranging from mice to pigs - and every other primate? Listeners will learn how such disparate oddities led to an hypothesis that the first artificial environment created by hominins - the confined infectious space inside the earliest baby-carrying devices - triggered adaptations in juvenile hair distribution and immunology that set off a cascade of trends. Taken to an extreme, these trends may have even led to a speciation event, which could have been the one that created our genus, Homo. A debate will certainly ensue.


The arguments covered in this provocative lecture are drawn from a paper in Anthropologie - International Journal of the Science of Man -  called “Human Hair Distribution, Increased Immuno-resistance and the First Baby Slings.”


Part Four: Anomalies and Dysfunction


Anomalous and dysfunctional situations in archaeology often result from a mismatch between theory and evidence or between regulations and their effects. An anomaly suppressed too long becomes an embarrassment, or even a scandal.


9) A case in point is the attempt by a government utility to suppress information about the largest concentration of open-air Paleolithic art in Europe: the friezes of the Coa Valley. Near Pusan, in South Korea, another frieze, this time with a Paleolithic rhino, tigers and Neolithic men hunting whales, was dismissed as an anomaly when it appeared briefly above the waters of another dam - and was re-submerged. In both cases, the fact that just one or two panels were reported probably allowed zones of transcendental importance to be swept under watery rugs. The purposeful destruction of the Kennewick Man site by the Army Corps of Engineers and the origin of current patrimony laws in Italy and France under Mussolini (1939) and Laval (1941) are raised to get listeners to look at the subject afresh and ask if well-intentioned laws can lead to perverse side-effects. 


10) Finally, there is one of the greatest anomalies of all: over 1200 rock art sites within the sprawl of the Parisian suburbs, which pose huge dating, iconographic and conservation problems. This vast corpus, which has been largely ignored because of its strangeness, will serve as a vast visual feast as we brainstorm our way towards fresh revelations.