Eyes, nose, cheek scarifications & necklaces of the “goddess”
Alan, Carolyn & friends at the last cave
The “astral owl”
Mike pointing at a menhir, Milly-la-Foret
Les Sieges in the Yonne
Sue amid wild hyacinths outside Knight’s Cave
Evan, Bennett, Rebecca & Steve look at art
In the “amphitheater”

Testimonials


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

 

For more information, please contact:



caldwellnd(at)aol.com

+1-774-368-4422

paleothought(at)yahoo.com (as a back-up)



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



By Dan Burstein, author of Secrets of the Code and numerous other books, in support of a job application on July 18, 2020:


Duncan Caldwell just informed me that he's applied for the Executive Directorship of the MV Museum, and I wanted to say a few words in support of that application. Perhaps you can pass this letter on to the firm leading the search for the position.


    I know Duncan has sent you a letter—well, a virtual introductory encyclopedia—concerning his background. Among the materials pointed to in Duncan’s letter, you may come across a short blurb I wrote about Duncan after my wife, Julie, and I first met him as a result of the MVCS Possible Dreams auction, where we purchased the once-in-a-lifetime experience of having him take our family on an amazing tour of prehistoric cave art in France. The tour included several sites he had discovered himself in the Essonne, and well-known sites in the Dordogne that he'd interpreted in new ways.  


    We have known Duncan and his family for the last 16 years and have become good friends. In Duncan, I believe you have a candidate for the Executive Director role who is as unique as Martha’s Vineyard itself.  He knows the island from the ground up, having lived part time, and now full-time, on the Vineyard for many years. He knows its soil, sands, rocks, beaches, waters, tides, sea-life, animal life, and current and past human life and history as few others do. He has made numerous discoveries all over the world, and several of those unusual discoveries are right on MV. I have often imagined a TV show where the director plops Duncan down in an unknown place for an hour and starts a time clock to see what treasures he can dig up and what he can tell us about that place’s history after a brief hunt. In the Vineyard, he is truly in his element as a thinker / storyteller / educator / historian / prehistorian / curator / humanist extraordinaire.    


    People often speak of those who have Duncan’s multifaceted talents as being a “Renaissance Person.” I would modify that slightly to say Duncan is an “Enlightenment Person”—he has all the many art forms and skills at his disposal that one would expect from a Renaissance Person, but he also has the inquiring mind of an Enlightenment scientist—eager to ask the big questions, insistent on working through the scientific method to discover answers, at home in the use of experimentation, evidence, and data to discern the dimensions of truth and reality, but unwilling to dismiss imagination, the big picture, and macroscopic thinking as components of the tool set necessary for the advancement of civilization.  


    When Duncan looks at the human pageant, he looks at all of it, not just the last few thousand years that most historians focus on, but the thousands and tens of thousands of years before that—the time when most of our evolution took place; the eons that made us truly “who we are.”


    As a collector himself of amazing artifacts and as a curator of breakthrough and revelatory museum shows, Duncan also understands a lot about the museum world today and how to make a museum experience an enticing and compelling one for all ages and types of people. He is a master storyteller, whether he is speaking of events in Neanderthal Europe or 19th Century Martha’s Vineyard.


    Many voices are seeking to be heard today, making many points about the connection between past, present, and future. Duncan has one of the most sweeping and all-encompassing frameworks for looking at the human past, emphasizing how we are truly “all in this together” in the present and suggesting an inspiring path for the human future that extends from the Island to the rest of the blue dot in the cosmos known as Planet Earth.


    I would be happy to engage in any dialogue that would be helpful to the search firm seeking to select the right candidate for this position.


    Thank you for listening,



    Dan Burstein