When are two bodies and a hand equal to 45?
For Anglican priest, John Peter Bennett the answer was simple. His explanation helped noted archeologist Denis Williams in his interpretation of Amerindian petroglyphs which culminated in Williams’ seminal work ‘Petroglyphs in the pre-history of Northern Amazonia and the Antilles’ published by Advances in World Archeology in 1985.
In his letter, now in the hands of the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology, Bennett -in what was termed his “motive system” by director of the museum, Jennifer Wishart – explained that in Amerindian culture, a drawing of one hand meant 5; two hands and a foot meant 15; a body meant 20; a body, two hands and a