Alexander Marshack (April 4, 1918 – December 20, 2004) was an American independent scholar and Paleolithic archaeologist.
He was born in The Bronx and earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from City College of New York, and worked for many years for Life magazine.
[1] 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.
[2] Using microscopic analysis, Marshack suggested that seemingly random or meaningless notches on bone were sometimes interpretable as structured series of numbers.
Marshack's work has been criticized as having over-interpreted many artifacts, finding numerical and calendrical patterns where none exist.