About Gary

Gary J. Maier MD is a forensic psychiatrist who worked for over thirty years at Mendota Mental Health Institute (MMHI) in Madison, Wisconsin, the site of the world's largest Eagle Effigy Mounds. He has expertise in transcultural psychiatry. He has worked with shamans to diagnose and treat Native patients who believe in an ancestor religion where deceased members of the family continue to have a significant influence on daily life. While he has over fifty papers published in refereed forensic journals his book "The Eagle's Voice" (2001) an interpretation of the effigy mounds on the grounds at MMHI is currently being published as an ebook. Gary has a long standing interest in Native American Tribal cultures. He spent five summers "playing" with Crow and Blackfeet Indian kids in southern Alberta where his uncle was a Reservation administrator. In 1972 he spent part of a summer living with the Slavey Indians in the NWT. He has participated for years in a sweat lodge community and has participated in peyote ceremonies as an observer and participant. He is a co-founded of the Ancient Earthwork Society in 1982 and is at present a member of the Board in charge of archiving Professor Scherz' survey maps at the American Geographical Society Library.

He is now retired and applying interpretive skills he developed when clarifying the meaning of the patterns found in the effigy mound symbol system to the repetitive patterns found in Paleolithic cave art where animal figures dominate the communication. In 2018 he had a personal tour of the Lascaux cave where patterns similar to those found in the effigy mounds were identified. His articles and book on the interpretations of those patterns has offered the research community a model that appears to yield a basic understanding of the cave art there. At present he is completing his second book on  the effigy symbol system and a second book that focuses on the graphic, pictorial, oral and written traditions that begin with dot patterns in African caves around 100,000 years ago. Gary enjoys applying his interpretive skills to historical mysteries including the possible meaning of Paleolithic cave art.