Yes, there is a ‘shamanism and rock art debate’

Abstract

This paper is a detailed response to a series of misrepresentations and mischaracterisations of our work by David Whitley (Before Farming 2006/4 article 7), a proponent of Lewis-Williams and Dowson's (1988) ‘Neuropsychological Model’ (NPM). We have been pointing out numerous flaws in this model since 2002 when we published a booklet outlining the many neuropsychological and shamanistic factual errors. Indeed, we responded to many of Whitley's points in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (Helvenston & Bahn 2003, 2004), as we discuss herein. Unfortunately, none of the proponents of the model has ever addressed what we have actually written, a matter of public record: they have only quoted each other's egregious distortions of our work. Actually, it takes more words to correct distortions than it does to create them, thus we will discuss some of the errors that Whitley, as well as other proponents of the NPM have made in order to provide a context for our remarks. We also seek to correct the record by taki...