Through the ages, a sign of peace

Originally published 28 January 1991

Smart bombs. Night vision. Laser targeting.

Pilots used to fly by the seat of their pants; now they fly by com­put­er screens, and place bombs with pin­point accu­ra­cy down air shafts and smoke stacks. The strange­ly blood­less zip and flash of war is instant­ly relayed by satel­lite to every TV screen in the world. Prime time, high-tech mayhem.

The war in the Gulf dri­ves all oth­er reflec­tions about sci­ence right out of the head. More somber themes sug­gest them­selves: Sci­ence goes to war. Knowl­edge in the cause of death. The dark side of the force.

The top­ic is numb­ing. I look up from my word proces­sor to stare out the win­dow. There, taped to the glass, inter­cept­ing my gaze, is a Xerox trans­paren­cy of the Hopewell hand.

It has been there for some time, placed in the win­dow for no oth­er rea­son than that the object it shows is beau­ti­ful, to my mind the most beau­ti­ful arche­o­log­i­cal arti­fact of pre-Columbian Amer­i­can cul­ture: A life-sized sil­hou­ette human hand, cut from a thin, flat sheet of nat­ur­al mica by a crafts­man who lived 1,000 years ago in south­ern Ohio.

Now I see some­thing I had not noticed before, some­thing that dis­tracts me from thoughts of war. The Hopewell hand is the hand of peace.

The peo­ple who cut the mica hand were the ances­tors of the Algo­nquins, Iro­quois, Chero­kees, and oth­er native Amer­i­can peo­ples. They lived in riv­er val­leys of cen­tral North Amer­i­ca from 200 BC to 1000 AD, and left behind impres­sive com­plex­es of bur­ial mounds, tem­ple mounds, hill­top ram­parts, and earth­en walls. We call them the Mound Builders.

Many of the ancient mounds were exca­vat­ed by arche­ol­o­gists a cen­tu­ry ago to pro­vide an arche­o­log­i­cal exhib­it for the 1893 Chica­go world’s fair. One of the rich­est sites was on the farm of M. C. Hopewell in Ross Coun­ty, Ohio, and the Hopewell name has come to sig­ni­fy the cul­ture of the peo­ple who built the mounds.

The mica hand was exca­vat­ed from a bur­ial mound on Hopewell’s farm. It now resides in the Field Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry in Chica­go, and it was there that I saw it near­ly 30 years ago, a thing of unfor­get­table beauty.

The beau­ty of the hand derives first of all from its styl­ized grace: long, taper­ing fin­gers, del­i­cate­ly crooked thumb, almost cir­cu­lar palm. It is translu­cent, flaky-thin, and sub­tly tinged with col­or. That it sur­vived unbro­ken in the earth for a thou­sand years seems lit­tle short of miraculous.

The beau­ty of the hand derives also from its inno­cence. There is a play­ful­ness about the mica sil­hou­ette, like the trac­ing of a hand on paper that is a way of self-expres­sion for almost every child. And not just chil­dren. One of the com­mon­est images of ear­ly rock and cave art world­wide is the sil­hou­ette hand, made by blow­ing or daub­ing pig­ment onto a rock sur­face around the artist’s spread fingers.

Through time and through space

There is still anoth­er dimen­sion to the beau­ty of the Hopewell hand, one that required thoughts of war to bring to aware­ness. I am struck by a con­nec­tion between the Hopewell hand and the Pio­neer 10 spacecraft.

Pio­neer 10 blast­ed off from Cape Kennedy in 1972. It flew past Jupiter two years lat­er, then head­ed for the vast emp­ty spaces between the stars, the first Earth-launched space­craft des­tined to do so. Attached to Pio­neer 10 is an engraved plaque bear­ing a mes­sage to any extrater­res­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion that might encounter the craft in future eons. No one seri­ous­ly expects that the space­craft will actu­al­ly be inter­cept­ed; the plaque was placed aboard as a sym­bol of human aspi­ra­tions to com­mu­ni­cate with extrater­res­tri­al intelligences.

The plaque was designed by astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan. It bears infor­ma­tion about the place of ori­gin of the space­craft with­in the galaxy, and it depicts a male and female human stand­ing against an out­line of the craft. The male’s hand is raised, palm for­ward, in the aspect of the Hopewell hand.

Sagan added the raised-hand to the fig­ure of the man because he had once read in an anthro­pol­o­gy book that the ges­ture is uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­nized among peo­ples of Earth as a sign of peace, and there­fore pos­si­bly might be under­stood as such by inhab­i­tants of oth­er plan­ets. Why should the mean­ing of this ges­ture be com­mon to peo­ples who dif­fer in lan­guage, reli­gion, and way of life? Prob­a­bly because it is a way of indi­cat­ing, “See, I have no weapon.”

The raised-hand greet­ing is a cliche of Hol­ly­wood west­erns. The Indi­an wel­comes the White man with raised, open hand and the sin­gle word, “How.” The cav­al­ry offi­cer responds with raised gloved hand, palm for­ward, weapon-free. In the movies, as in life, these pre­lim­i­nary civil­i­ties are often fol­lowed by treach­ery and war­fare, but the open hand ges­ture remains a famil­iar part of our non-ver­bal vocabulary.

It is this that I see in the image of the Hopewell hand taped to the win­dow pane. “Peace,” the appro­pri­ate­ly-named hand seems to say, and that too is a part of its beauty.