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Robin Hood's Barn
Arthur Hill Corwin
A late, singular project from Arthur Hill Corwin — artist, architect, and former dean at Cooper Union — published as it launched at the school. Across some 400 lavishly illustrated pages, Corwin argues that a single advanced culture spanned the Ice Age world, sharing a worldview and even a language, and that its traces survive, hidden in plain sight, in the stories we still tell: unicorns, Robin Hood, Arthur and Guinevere, Santa's eight reindeer, Snow White. It is a work of speculative independent scholarship rather than mainstream archaeology — closer in spirit to the grand pattern-hunting of an earlier age — but made with a designer's eye, carried by more than 600 images and the author's own drawings.
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The author
Arthur Hill Corwin was an artist and architect who taught at and served as dean of The Cooper Union School of Art in New York. The book is a posthumous project — Cooper Union hosted a launch for the late professor — designed by Yvette L. Francis, a City College professor and former student of his. Its authority is that of a lifelong visual thinker and teacher: an insider to art and design education, an outsider to academic prehistory.
The book
A roughly 400-page hardcover with more than 600 images of artifacts alongside original drawings, released November 14, 2023 by Seven East Publishing. Its method is diffusionist and comparative — reading recurring motifs across widely separated cultures as evidence of a shared Ice Age source.
How to read it
This belongs to the venerable, contested tradition of universal-myth and lost-civilization theorizing — the lineage that runs from Frazer through Hamlet's Mill to modern alternative-history writers. Mainstream archaeology does not accept a single global Ice Age culture, and the pleasure and the caution here are the same: a bold pattern pressed onto a vast, fragmentary record. Best taken as a provocative, beautifully made argument rather than settled fact.
For more context
Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill; James Frazer's The Golden Bough; and, on the skeptical side, the archaeological literature on diffusionism.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Arthur Hill Corwin
- Publisher
- Seven East
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN
- 979-8-9880400-0-2
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine