By Dan Burstein, author of Secrets of the Code and numerous other books: “Our experience with the eminent pre-historian, Duncan Caldwell, in traveling through France and exploring his physical and intellectual discoveries regarding cave art and human prehistory, gave new meaning to the concept of “adventure travel” for our whole family. The experience was amazing, fascinating, and thrilling: it was eye-opening, paradigm-shifting, and mind-bending. Traveling with Duncan, viewing his little known and rarely glimpsed personal findings – as well as his novel interpretations and context for other experts’ prior findings at some of the most famous caves in France – is about as close to time travel as we are likely to get. We were able to imagine the world of 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, as our human forbearers began to paint and engrave on cave walls and rocks. ... If you must borrow something from pop culture, try The Da Vinci Code: Imagine yourself in the company of a real-life Robert Langdon when you travel with Duncan Caldwell, as he helps you to experience the emotional/intellectual/visual/symbolic stew of the evolutionary cosmology of the mind 10,000 years or more before human beings developed written language to record their stories. Duncan allows the modern traveler the opportunity to understand the stunning visual images on these cave walls and the powerful secret, sacred symbols used by men, women, and children twenty millennia ago. Like an Egyptologist who can read hieroglyphics, Duncan can read the language that prehistoric humans have left as their legacy to us. ... There is a raw, awesome power to encountering these secrets, and to being among the handful of people to have seen what Duncan has found and to have the chance to learn from his outside-the-box and revelatory interpretations of prehistory. Imagine being a space tourist with Carl Sagan as your rocket ship’s commander, and you might have a sense of this encounter.”


By Frederick H.C. Hotchkiss, Director, Marine & Paleobiological Research Institute:

“At the Annual Meeting of the Directors I nominated you for election to Fellow of MPRI based on your career of creating significant new perspectives on human evolution, your archaeological explorations, including discovery and interpretation of prehistoric art, and your discoveries concerning the paleontology of Martha’s Vineyard. I particularly commented on the breadth, depth, and substantial body of your research. I especially noted the alignment of your creativity with a theme of MPRI that there are linkages between the sciences and the arts. I noted also your lecture and other cultural contributions to the Martha’s Vineyard community. I used your biographical statement and your publications and manuscripts to outline your principal achievements to the Directors.

 

It gives me great pleasure to tell you that the Board of Directors unanimously voted you a Fellow of the Marine and Paleobiological Research Institute (MPRI).

 

Duncan, you are a leader and contributor in many fields, and it is an honor for MPRI to have you as a Fellow.”


By Catherine Staples, Honors Program, Villanova University (July 21, 2019):

I am re-reading your marvelous article on Arrowheading (Mind Prints, Arrowheads, the Indians & Thoreau. 2018), I love it, it’s full of marvels and beautifully written, not unlike the arrowheads themselves.

 

So much of this article feels essential to me as a poet, sometimes the universe seems synched. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be reading your work! Wait until I send you the trace Triassic dinosaur print poem and the maker of arrowhead poem which was meant to be read last in my reading. I wish I had another five days in Concord to speak with you about these things.

 

But first let me tell you some of the things I loved: the notion that as he walked Henry was scanning not just for flora, fauna but for arrowheads AND the idea that the artifacts were like time warps that provided him with a sense of companionship when he seemed most solitary, exactly! Yes. And in looking at the artifacts and in holding them tangibly in hand they’re like Wordsworth’s spots of time, they retrieve and renew. They recharge the imagination and they bring back his days with his brother, and they connect him with like-minded souls & culture of another time period. They are indeed companionship. In my current manuscript, which is one part elegy/ celebration of my brother, I have tried to make landscapes I shared with him function as spots of time or artifacts or icons, they are good company in his absence. It seems you, too, have faced perhaps an even greater loss, my heartfelt sympathy.

 

Duncan, I also loved your prospecting connections with Thoreau, identifying with the same sort of accurate “mapping of finds” and growing mastery in reading the landscape. I first came upon the reading of landscape as a rider, some of it was pure necessity. The ponies then horses we were riding were often easily spooked so you studied and scanned so as to anticipate the events that might unseat you! Then, too, there was the navigation of wandering out and trying to make your way home, left at the lady slippers, right at the place where the black snake slithered off!


Catherine Staples

Honors Program, Villanova University

The Rattling Window

www.catherinestaples.com


By Marilyn Martorano, Registered Professional Archaeologist (RPA) and the owner/ principal archaeologist of Martorano Consultants LLC (Sept. 2018):

Your American Antiquity article on lithophones has been my "bible" the last few years as I've researched lithophones here in Colorado.

I read your article so many times during my research to not only help me understand the total concept of lithophones but to guide me in my quest to adequately document those artifacts in Colorado. If your article in American Antiquity didn't exist, I'm not sure I would have received the grant to do my research. Plus, as I'm sure you know, archaeologists are the first to try to beat down a new idea or concept so you saved me a lot of bruises!’


By Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and author of numerous books:

“Duncan Caldwell took us to secret caves that only a handful of people know about. Several of these were discovered by Duncan himself. What we saw was simply amazing: primitive carvings in the walls and ceilings of caves, some figurative, some abstract, several sexual, all interesting. Duncan is the perfect guide: extraordinarily knowledgeable, funny, accessible and a great teacher. We spent two days in the caves and these were among the most interesting days I have had. It turned out to be far beyond my wildest expectations.”


Professor Francesco Pellizzi – Columbia & Harvard Universities:

Penetrating studies of prehistoric imagery require the mastery of such a multitude of skills, covering many disciplines, that they are rarely brought together by a single scholar. André Leroi-Gourhan was such a polymath, and so is Duncan Caldwell. I had the pleasure of attending two of his lectures in New York in 2013, first on Neolithic cultural flows across the Sahara at the Explorers Club, and then, again, when I invited him to give the University Seminar on the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at Columbia University on October 3rd, where he entranced us with revelations concerning early Woodland iconography. The lectures could not have been more different in their focus, nor more similar in their successful integration of information drawn from multiple disciplines. As the editor of RES – Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, I am proud to have published the scholarly article underlying the lecture at Columbia.


Duncan has immersed himself in a wide variety of such intellectual adventures – both at his desk and often at some risk in the field, where he has found dozens of prehistoric art sites in Africa, Europe, and North America. His work in France alone, where he has found many of the known Neolithic engravings in the Massif de Fontainebleau, has been astonishing. One study, published in 2012, not only documented the discovery of the first Paleolithic bas-relief of an animal in the region, but cast light on the un-noticed representational complexity of many other examples of Paleolithic art, such as (a) the first known use of decomposed, interactive, "cubist" conventions (in the Vienne), (b) the intentional hiding of secondary readings within engravings like “la femme au renne” from Laugerie-Basse, and even (c) some of the oldest known figure-ground illusions, which play upon similarities between the contours of bison and mammoths. All of this evidence, and more, has led Duncan to argue that image-making has been extraordinarily premeditated in many cases for tens of thousands of years.


But I must also mention two more aspects of his work. The first concerns Duncan’s efforts to protect rock art, which have ranged from his leadership of an effort to save the Coa Valley from flooding in 1995 to his contributions to the rock art inventory for the Massif de Fontainebleau, which is now being used by France to win its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 


The second is Duncan’s special attention to the role of women from the beginning of humanity, particularly in regards to the biological, social, economic, and symbolic ramifications of pregnancy and child-rearing. An important article in this domain, called “Human Hair Distribution, Increased Immuno-resistance and the First Baby Slings” appeared in Anthropologie – International Journal of Human Diversity and Evolution.*  Another of his essays, this time called “Supernatural Pregnancies: Common features and new ideas concerning Upper Paleolithic feminine imagery”,  appeared in Arts & Cultures in 2010, and argued that Paleolithic portrayals of women were both surprisingly consistent, given the gaps that separate them, and in keeping with women’s known symbolic and economic roles in northern hunter-gatherer economies.


In conclusion, Duncan’s work from Maine – where he found the probable new class of musical instruments he described in American Antiquity – to Mali, where he found the unknown civilization and ethnographic practices that he described in African Arts (UCLA & MIT) - deserves to be recognized for both its astonishing depth and boldness.


* Formerly known as Anthropologie - International Journal of the Science of Man.  




© 2009 - 2020 Duncan Caldwell on all photos

 

Testimonials

For more information, please contact:



caldwellnd(at)aol.com

paleothought(at)yahoo.com





Prehistory home page




Archaeological tours




Archaeological Exhibitions




The Foz Coa / Coa Valley prehistoric rock art scandal



World's Oldest Optical Illusion Found?” -
National Geographic article by Andrew Howley about Duncan Caldwell’s discovery of one of the world’s oldest known intentional optical illusions (Dec. 22, 2010)



Prehistoric Art Emergency &  Foz Coa / Coa Valley home page




The “prey-mother” hypothesis concerning Paleolithic feminine imagery & venus figurines



The Neanderthal / Neandertal insulation hypothesis concerning Neanderthal diets, behavior, extinction & adaptations to cold



Baby slings & human evolution: The baby-sling hypothesis concerning human evolution & immunological and fur distribution adaptations among juvenile hominids to slings



PDF: The First Paleolithic Animal Sculpture in the Ile-de-France: The Ségognole 3 Bison and its Ramifications - Accepted for presentation at the IFRAO World Congress on Pleistocene art, 6 - 11 Sept. 2010, France



Key words: Human evolution; Neandertal extinction; The Neanderthal insulation hypothesis; Baby sling adaptations; The baby-sling hypothesis  for human body baldness, Paleolithic venus / venuses; The “prey-mother” hypothesis -  A new interpretation of Paleolithic feminine imagery; Archaeological & prehistoric art cave tours; Testimonials; Prehistoric phalangeal figurines; Neanderthal extinction; Alan Dershowitz; Dan Burstein, Secrets of the Code; Marine and Paleobiological Research Institute (MPRI); New Dominion Pictures; GREPAL; Gaumont; Wellspring Museum; Neanderthal / Neandertal adaptations and extinction; Architecture & landscape design; Neanderthal diet; Neanderthal behavior; Evolution of large brains; Balkan prehistory; Vinca, Lepenski Vir; Martha’s Vineyard Community Services Possible Dreams auction; Robert Bednarik; Rock Art Research; Susiluola (Wolf) Cave, Lappfjärd, Finland; paleontology museum in Paris / Montmartre quarries;