In the field of prehistoric archaeology, the concepts of notation and notational sequences were first introduced by Alexander Marshack in 1964 to describe the orderly arranged series of marks commonly found engraved on Upper Paleolithic artifacts. Three key concepts can be inferred from the detailed artifact accounts published by the American researcher, the first of which is that each mark was notational and therefore symbolic for a natural or cultural event and the resulting series record of those events. The second is the notion that each mark was meant to represent a day, making the corresponding series an observational or calendrical record. The third and last is the hypothesis that notational sequences reveal lunar periodicities. This was met with skepticism and along with methodological issues attracted most of the early criticism on his research, but the first two concepts still stand as the only modern theory addressing the symbolic meaning and use of non-figurative visual creations from the Magdalenian and earlier cultures. Later criticism was more focused on the technological analyses performed by Marshack and their implications for our ability to identify notations in the archaeological record.

在史前考古学领域，符号和符号序列的概念由 Alexander Marshack 于 1964 年首次提出，用于描述旧石器时代晚期文物上常见的一系列有序排列的标记。从美国研究人员发表的详细文物记录中可以推断出三个关键概念，其中第一个是每个标记都是符号性的，因此象征着自然或文化事件以及这些事件的系列记录。第二个概念是每个标记都代表一天，使相应的系列成为观察或日历记录。第三个也是最后一个假设是符号序列揭示了月球的周期性。这遭到了怀疑，并且方法论问题引起了对他的研究的大部分早期批评，但前两个概念仍然是唯一解决马格达林和早期文化非具象视觉创作的象征意义和使用的现代理论。后来的批评更多地集中在马沙克进行的技术分析及其对我们识别考古记录中的符号的能力的影响上。