A Peer Review of James Harrod’s Acheulian Art “Religion” Claims

I’m writing this as a practical peer review of James B. Harrod’s recent monograph, which I’ll refer to as “Acheulian Mode II Art Religious Creativity” (2026 version). He repeatedly uses terms like “decoded” and “deciphered” for an Acheulian semiotic system, and builds a religious interpretation on top of “figuration” in handaxes.

I’ll be blunt: this is an annoying read — not because big ideas scare me, but because it repeatedly skips the hard science step: proving figuration and intent with constraints, controls, and a key that can be tested. Instead it jumps straight to religion — a claim with no facts, no hard evidence, and ultimately no way to prove it. Miss that first step and you can “decode” anything… including a bruise on a banana.

1) The 1988 “unpublished manuscript” problem: where is it?

Harrod repeatedly leans on “Harrod (1988)” as the foundation — he even labels the current monograph as an update of that earlier work, with version notes that include “v6 19 Nov 1988,” while still presenting this as a living, expanding project.

Acheulian_Mode_II_Art_Religious…

Fine. But here’s the problem:

I can’t find a traceable, archived copy of the claimed 1988 manuscript, not a scan, nothing on his website about it, not a library record, not even a stable citation trail (that reeks), not even a “here’s the original PDF.” Yet the entire rhetorical force of “I’ve been saying this for 35 years” depends on that missing document existing in verifiable form.

Acheulian_Mode_II_Art_Religious…

So I’m left with an unavoidable question:

If the 1988 manuscript is the foundation, why is it functionally uncheckable?

And yes, from my perspective, that raises a smell. Not “proof of fabrication,” but enough to justify suspicion and to demand transparency: produce it, prove an archive of it, or stop using it like a trump card, a card that thus far we cant even find an independent archive or citation of. 

2) “Decoded” and “deciphered”… without a key

Harrod doesn’t just interpret. He uses language like:

• “an Acheulian symbolic system is decoded”

• “the Bilzingsleben semiotic system deciphered”

Acheulian_Mode_II_Art_Religious…

Decoded? Deciphered?

With what key?

A decipherment without a published key isn’t a decipherment, it’s an assertion with no demonstration.

What’s offered instead is a long, elaborate interpretive architecture (themes, motifs, meanings), including a table of proposed signs and “animacy themes,” and even a rhetorical reversal of burden (“if you object, substantiate the objection”).

No. That’s not how this works.

If you’re claiming “decoded system,” you publish:

• the key (rules),

• the constraints (how it can fail),

• independent checks (blind scoring, replication, comparative finds and assemblages).

Otherwise you haven’t cracked the code, because you've not shown a key, the lock, or the opened door. (this is what I've been attempting for many years on my blog, demonstrations of the key, lock and open door)

And honestly? If anyone has put a “key” online in this area, it’s me, no I'm not responsible for every motif or combination, but huge breakthroughs and parts are demonstrably mine, archived and visible to all, with charts and a  published methodology as an actual framework, not a poetic mood.

3) Before religion: prove you even have figuration

Harrod jumps from “figuration” to “art-religious behavior” with lines like “vague Elephant… head and trunk” — but how about a good elephant? You know: one that’s actually demonstrably sculptured, not something in some random noise that you can talk yourself into after two cups of coffee.

Then it gets upgraded to “ritual deposition… into spring waters” as part of some “multi-thematic art-religious performance.” Honestly, the only two-word combination that can be scientifically verified in that sentence is “spring waters.” Everything else is an interpretive costume.

That’s a ladder of leaps. Because the hard bit isn’t “religion.” The hard bit is the earlier rung:

Is it actually an intentional depiction at all?

Harrod hops over that chasm without even pausing to build a bridge. Why? Because the bridge is the hard science: methodology, constraints, design arguments, probability, pigments/residues, lab tests, typology/topology — the stuff you need before you’re allowed to say anything more than: “I can see a vague elephant.” and that matters immensely.

And when your scoring system includes categories like “Very Vague” and even “Divine,” you’ve baked subjectivity into the method. If “very vague” counts, then everything can count. And if everything can count, you can decode religion out of anything — including a bruise on a banana.

4) Even if it’s an elephant… it doesn’t automatically mean elephant worship

Let’s do the generous thing and say: yes, an Acheulian object depicts an elephant, some do.

That still doesn’t mean “elephant worship.”

“Depiction” could mean:

• observation

• storytelling

• teaching

• ornamentation

• “because it looks cool”

• “because elephants taste nice”

• LOOK THERE’S A FEKING ELEPHANT

Religion is not the default explanation. It’s a specific explanation that needs specific constraints to beat all the simpler alternatives.

Why call it religion at all?, when there’s a simpler, evidenced alternative hypothesis that I put on the table back in 2012. In some cases the genuinely sculptured images in some Palaeolithic flint tools have directional qualities — they can be animated to “read” like movement — which fits far better with practical or playful uses: a hunting aid, a teaching prop, or even the Stone Age equivalent of pushing a toy car around and making tracks in sand.

5) The missing citation / missing engagement problem

I don’t pretend to know every author in figurative lithics or “palaeoart.” I’m not claiming I invented the entire field.

But I am saying this:

I’ve been publicly displaying, since at least 2012, an assemblage-level body of work where I argue for recurring motifs, conventions, and a method for separating signal from rubbish — including the logic/probability angle, context, patina consistency, and the “stacking constraints” argument. My method is publicly linked and organised as a science hub.

So when someone in 2026 starts confidently dragging “elephantid head and trunk” on handaxes into the spotlight — and then builds “religious doctrine” on top — while showing no meaningful engagement with the publicly available methodological key… it looks less like scholarship and more like helping yourself to the headline while ignoring the scaffolding.

Ovate Handaxe and the Symbolism of the Egg

Ovate Handaxes and the Symbolism of the Egg

I’ve spent years turning over white-patinated flint tools from my Southdowns site, tear-drops, ovals, perfect balances of curve and taper. Archaeologists call these “ovate” tools, meaning simply egg-shaped. The term’s meant to be neutral, but when you hold one, the connection to the egg is immediate. It’s not coincidence; it’s deliberate.

Many of these tools hold figurative content, hands, faces, animal profiles, even clear zoomorphic detail. They carry memory, symbol, intention. So it isn’t far-fetched to ask whether the ovate form itself was symbolic, a nod to something familiar and valued in the makers’ world.

A selection of Boxgrove Acheulean Ovate Handaxes (
© The British Museum) note the thin patina of only 500 kbp, compared to my highly patinated white flint finds

The Egg in Stone

In archaeological texts, “ovate” describes geometry, not meaning. Handaxes are praised for symmetry and balance, qualities that, not coincidentally, define an egg.

When a form repeats across vast time, we should ask why. Many Acheulean bifaces could have been less rounded and still functional; they didn’t need symmetry like the egg, yet they have it. Again and again, the same near-egg outline appears, knapped into flint with sculptural care.

And if we accept that some of these pieces already contain figuration (they do, you numb nuts)  hands, animals, even faces, then an egg-shaped outline holding meaning isn’t far-fetched; it’s logical, bloody obvious. The egg was a familiar thing: observed, gathered, carried, protected, stored, and eaten. Protein and calcium, simple sustenance that couldn’t possibly go unnoticed.

A Different Kind of Symbolism

In 2012, Portable Rock Art ran a post quoting Jan van Es, who described the egg as a primordial symbol the “cosmic egg”, he called it, containing the germ of creation itself. He even proposed a conceptual journey “from face to Venus,” tracing prehistoric art from self-image to fertility goddess, from person to planet, a kind of prehistoric Big Bang omelette. Give it a few more paragraphs and we’re hatching galaxies, feathered gods floating in the void, and Venus herself stepping daintily out of some celestial yolk, born of a gigantic intergalactic mutant alien space chicken.

Now, I’ve no quarrel with poetry, but I don’t buy into cosmic poultry. I’ve never met a “space chicken,” and I doubt the Acheulean knappers had either. An egg, to them (and to me), is an egg. It’s breakfast, protein, calcium, sustenance, a full belly, and an easy prize if you’re quick with a stick and know where the nests are.

So while van Es saw the egg as a symbol of the universe, I see it as the shape of breakfast. If there’s symbolism here, it’s the sort born of appetite and observation, not cosmology. These flint eggs speak of survival, not of space; they speak of omelettes, not goddesses. They’re reminders of what was gathered, shared, and eaten, the humble miracle that kept life going, not the cosmic one that invented it.

Hidden Figuration and Daily Awareness

Across my assemblage, ovate flints merge the practical and the figurative. Some show clear imagery, a face or a hand emerging from the curve, yet their outer contour remains that steady, rounded outline. I think of it as a fusion of tool and thought. The knapper shaped what worked, but also what felt right in the hand and in the imagination.

In this sense, an ovate handaxe could carry a quiet duality: a usable edge and a symbolic shell. Its form may have reminded its maker of something nourishing, something that sustained life. Repetition of that form, over thousands of years and countless horizons, suggests the association endured.

Mainstream archaeology still prefers to see this shape as a function of physics, efficient flaking and symmetry. But people capable of such precision were also capable of perceiving likeness, rhythm, and meaning. The egg’s form is rounded, whole, containing life, and would have been too present, too vital to ignore.

The Egg as an Egg, Not a Metaphor

My claim is simple: the ovate shape in flint echoes the egg not as a cosmic emblem but as a real and valued object. The prehistoric maker could have chosen many outlines; this one persisted because it resonated both practically and perceptually.

The result is that Acheulean and eolithic “ovates” may be among the earliest examples of symbolic figuration drawn from daily subsistence. They capture, in durable form, a memory of nourishment and renewal, a pattern of recognition running from hand to mind to stone and to belly.

These are not sacred space eggs of creation. They are remembered meals, ideas of gathering, life held in form, the everyday miracle rendered durable, the egg.

Addendum: The Geometry of the Egg and the Handaxe

The Simple Version

It turns out the resemblance between ovate handaxes and eggs isn’t just in the eye.
When you actually measure them  (the long axis against the wide) both sit in almost the same geometric range.
Most large bird eggs, the kind you could pick up for a meal, are about one and a half times longer than they are wide.
And most Acheulean handaxes, when you flatten them into their outline, fall into that same 1.3 to 1.6 ratio.

So the shape we keep calling “egg-like” isn’t a metaphor. It’s geometry.
These tools occupy the same mathematical territory as the eggs of ostrich, goose, emu, and rhea, the large, edible ones our ancestors would have known well.

The Numbers

Object	Typical Length (L)	Breadth (B)	L ÷ B (Elongation)
Goose egg	85 mm	60 mm	1.42
Duck egg	75 mm	55 mm	1.36
Ostrich egg	160 mm	125 mm	1.28
Emu egg	130 mm	90 mm	1.44
Rhea egg	130 mm	89 mm	1.46
Acheulean ovate handaxe (typical)	—	—	1.40–1.55
Acheulean elongated handaxe	—	—	1.55–1.65

Shared Geometric Zone:
The typical planar outline ratio of large edible eggs is quantitatively very similar to the typical elongation index of well-made ovate Acheulean handaxes.
This isn’t casual likeness; it’s a measurable, recurring morphometric pattern.

The Science Behind It

In biology, egg shape is described using elongation (length divided by breadth) and asymmetry (how far the widest point is from the middle).
Across almost every bird species, elongation values cluster around 1.3–1.5, except for cliff-nesting types that make deliberately pointed eggs.
That same range defines the “ovate” class of Acheulean handaxes, as measured by geometric morphometrics, the statistical comparison of outline shapes.

In 2021, biologists formalised the universal egg equation (the Hügelschäffer model), which mathematically defines the egg’s profile using four parameters: total length, maximum breadth, offset of breadth, and diameter at one-quarter length.
When archaeologists use morphometric models on handaxes, they use the same logic: measuring outline curvature, breadth position, and symmetry.
And when you place the two datasets together, they overlap.

Mathematically, that means the outline of a goose egg and a Boxgrove ovate handaxe occupy the same area of shape space, the coordinate system used to measure geometry independent of scale.

That’s not artful coincidence; it’s a physical correspondence between the geometry of sustenance and the geometry of manufacture.

You can hardly see the goose egg here, because the Boxgrove ovate follows it exactly.

The Takeaway

When I say these tools might represent eggs, I mean just that. The shape itself says egg, not as decoration, but as recognition. It’s the outline of something known, gathered, eaten. A message made of geometry.

They weren’t carving obscure cryptic symbols; they were repeating a form that already meant survival. The ovate axe doesn’t hint at the egg, it states it. The egg, made in stone. The meal, made permanent.

Portable Rock Art Database at Eoliths.org

 A New Way to Explore the Collection

I’ve added something new to the Eoliths site that I’m genuinely pleased with, a proper visual database for the artefacts.

You can find it here: https://eoliths.org/gallery.html

It’s a gallery in the simple sense, but it works much harder than that. Think of it as a living catalogue of my Southdowns assemblage, with room for finds from other locations and other people’s finds as well. It’s searchable, filterable, and easy to use. You can look up individual objects, compare examples, or narrow things down by subject and type. For example : Flint tools, Portable Rock Art, Ovates, Elephants, Bears, the lot......

The above find is a lucky 'golden-gravel' find, and goes straight to the core of what I have been banging on about since 2011. An obvious artistic impression of an elephant front half, with an ape like face frontal. This is a world wide combination, and is likely millions of years in age.

If you want to see only the elephant-like figurations, you can. Or maybe you’re interested just in the classic tool forms, choppers, scrapers, ovates, from the Southdowns site. The tag filters make that possible with a click. It’s designed for anyone who wants to dig deeper, from researchers to collectors who simply want to look closely. Click two tags, scraper and elephant for example, and only flint tool scrapers with suspected elephant iconography will be shown.

Many artefacts carry an ID number. If a stone is marked as “0001,” for instance, you can type that into the search box and the database will show every photograph of that piece: five or six views, different angles, different light. The aim is to let you study each object as if you were turning it in your hands.

The system also supports video and GIF formats. The clips are full quality, sharper and more detailed than what you’d normally see on the big video platforms. They show the fine texture, the flake edges, the way the patina catches the light. That sort of detail can be the difference between speculation and real understanding.

For me this is a research tool first and foremost, but it’s also a way to share the material more freely. The plan is to keep adding to it, steadily, until it represents not just my Southdowns work but a much wider record of portable rock art and ancient flint technology from wherever it may appear.

The database will grow with the project, piece by piece. My hope is that it becomes a reliable, searchable record, not just a gallery to browse, but something that helps map how these early forms, and the ideas behind them, are connected.

Take a look and see what you think: https://eoliths.org/gallery.html