Ten minutes outside of Paris is what Aquinnah archaeologist Duncan Caldwell calls a “phantasmagoric landscape” of gnarled rock outcroppings and crevasses. Within these chasms Mr. Caldwell has discovered ancient inscriptions and a novel interpretation of Paleolithic art.

On Tuesday Mr. Caldwell presented his latest findings from the neolithic and Paleolithic caves at the Aquinnah old town hall. Later in the week he left for the Ariège region of France to discuss his Prey-Mother hypothesis at the annual International Federation of Rock Art Organizations’ Pleistocene Art of the World Congress.

Unmarked on maps as a bulwark against vandals, the caves of the Massif Fontainebleu hold a staggering record of prehistoric thought, one that, like most ancient inscriptions, Mr. Caldwell says is largely impenetrable.

“You need to start with the recognition that you’re never going to be able to go beyond a certain point. You can find various points of leverage to eke out a glimpse of how people were structuring their metaphors, but you’re never going to be able to recreate their words,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s a little bit like when you hear a great storyteller or musician working in a language you don’t understand. You can recognize the artistry and the emotive power but you’ll never ever get to the utter depths of the experience.”

Duncan Caldwell
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Etched into the cave walls Mr. Caldwell has investigated near Paris is a profusion of unusual petroglyphs, typically a combination of prehistoric megafaunal game such as mammoth, bison and Megaloceros, along with what could politely be termed vulval or obstetric imagery. Some in the field have facilely dismissed the latter as prehistoric pornography, an idea that Mr. Caldwell regards with “exceptional umbrage.”

To him, the juxtaposition of feminine imagery and vital game species evoked the supernatural regenerative properties attributed to women in some polar regions such as the whale wives of the Koryak and Nootka tribes in Siberia, who are revered for their supposed ability to summon whales for the hunt. Mr. Caldwell said the stone age etchings, which included animals connected to women by umbilical cords and bizarre representations of elk with superimposed vulvar heads, gave powerful credence to his hypothesis that Paleolithic women were endowed with similar sympathetic regenerative powers. In the next week he will present this novel exegesis to his peers in the field.

“It’ll be great to share these findings and ideas,” he said. “Hopefully it will lead to some breakthroughs.”

Mr. Caldwell’s fascination with deep time is well earned. The earliest years of his life were spent in the shadow of the pyramids, where his parents, both CIA agents stationed at the Egyptian embassy, instilled in him a powerful sense of curiosity.

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Not just another pretty cave drawing. — unspecified

“My mother taught me to look for little blue and green specks in the sand that were the beads of necklaces of the poor people buried around the pyramids and whose mummies had disintegrated,” he said. “I developed a love for finding little, hard-to-find objects.”

While his father traveled Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus and Tunisia, Mr. Caldwell further developed his taste for antiquity.

“They were all places very rich in fabulous things that can be found by a small boy,” he said.

When not spelunking in France or combing the Sahara, Mr. Caldwell has fittingly made a home in Aquinnah, one of the richest archeological and paleontological sites in New England.

“I consider myself a Vineyarder the way people did during the whaling days,” he said, “when they’d go away for two or three years at a time to the far corners of the world but they’d always take the Island with them.”

An abundance of Clovis points and pottery shards on the Vineyard point to a human presence on the Island at least 13,000 years ago, when it was not an Island at all but a vast coastal plain. But on one lazy afternoon stroll on Squibnocket Pond in 1999, Mr. Caldwell discovered something of rather more rare vintage. Stumbling across an unusual rock he recognized as the same type that contained fossils in Madagascar, he chipped it open with his trusty geological hammer to reveal the fossilized remains of what he has proposed is a new species of mid-Cretaceous crustacean, the lobster-like Linuparus squibnocketus. He says that the fossil beds of Martha’s Vineyard, virtually unique to New England, are an irreplaceable and disappearing resource.

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“They are all in dire need of more study,” he said. “They keep cleaving off in hurricanes and winter storms. When those artifacts go out to sea unstudied it means certain organisms will never be known.”

Mr. Caldwell has lived in a barge by Pont Neuf in Paris, cavorted with famous artists and poets, found meteorites in the Sahara, written screenplays, drawn architectural plans and painted. He is a true polymath. Still, for him, nothing compares to the thrill of the caves.

“You are confronted with something that’s completely alien and yet deeply recognizably human,” he said of the Paleolithic etchings to which he has dedicated his life. “There’s something I think very cathartic about that. No pretensions of our time, whether religious or historical or nationalistic or anything can lay claim to them. You’re simply in the presence of what has been distilled down to being purely human.”