Despite lacking a
PhD, Marshack became a research associate at the
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at
Harvard University in 1963 with the support of
Hallam L. Movius, giving him access to state and university archaeological collections that he would not otherwise have been able to view. He rose to public prominence after the publication of
The Roots of Civilization in 1972, where he proposed the controversial theory that notches and lines carved on certain
Upper Paleolithic bone plaques were in fact notation systems, specifically lunar
calendars notating the passage of
time. Using microscopic analysis, Marshack suggested that seemingly random or meaningless notches on bone were sometimes interpretable as structured series of numbers. For instance, Marshack hypothesized that notches on the bone plaque from the
Grotte de Thaïs in southern
France (which dates to approximately 12,000
BP) were structured in subsets of 29 notches, thus suggesting that they were used to mark the duration between two
lunations. Prior to Marshack's work, many Paleolithic archaeologists focused their work on art such as the cave drawings at
Lascaux, but paid little attention to the abstract notches and marks on plaques and other artifacts found at these sites. Marshack's work has been criticized as having over-interpreted many artifacts, finding numerical and calendrical patterns where none exist. Nonetheless, his work had a major impact on the study of Paleolithic art. In 2010 a book was published in his honor with contributions from many in the field. Following a stroke in 2003, his health was in decline, and he died in December 2004. ==References==