I thought this line of discussion was pretty fertile ground and maybe over in the controversial historical opinion thread I could make room for other conversations. The Ancient Americas have become my passion and I have read dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the subject. So I hope I can help those curious to learn something about it. At the same time though, it's a rich and deep field that's in constant evolution and there'll be things that some very smart people know more about than me, especially if it's outside of Mesoamerica or Oasisamerica. Hopefully the existence of an Americas thread will attract these beautiful humans.
Yes, the Bering strait was a conduit for contact for thousands of years, including more recent waves of migration into the Americas and back-migration into Asia.
IIRC there's evidence that the Polynesians made it to the Chilean coast and had some kind of contact (enough to trade chickens for sweet potatoes, I think?), but it was sporadic as hell and never took off. There's some extremely circumstantial evidence they made it to California, but nothing concrete.
IMO it's not the wildest idea that some Polynesians stumbled on the New World (we're talking about people who figured out how to sail across the Pacific fucking Ocean using nothing but wayfinding), but on "easy POD scale" it's pretty far down there.
A study as of 2018 found sweet potatoes to have arrived in the Polynesian triangle before humans did. However people a lot smarter than me have pretty significant problems with that study:
"The findings are not without controversy: some researchers question the handling of the 250-year-old herbarium sample used to generate the 100,000-year divergence estimate.
The team didn't follow standard procedures for handling and analysing ancient DNA, says Lisa Matisoo-Smith, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Her work on ancient chicken DNA supports the idea of contact between Polynesians and Americans before Europeans arrived in the South Pacific. She questions some of the findings from Muñoz-Rodríguez and his colleagues given the age of the samples, and would like to see the tests replicated independently."
In California, if you're talking about the Chumash, I personally find it difficult to imagine that Polynesians would stay long enough to teach them to sewn-plank construction but not the sail.
All in all I agree, out of any pre-Columbian contact theory (aside from the Norse who are the only definitively established to have visited) the Polynesians seem to be very likely. Unfortunately we just haven't found conclusive evidence of it.
A study as of 2018 found sweet potatoes to have arrived in the Polynesian triangle before humans did. However people a lot smarter than me have pretty significant problems with that study:
Sweet Potatoes are great. Also there is always that story about Tupac Yupanqui who sailed to somewhere in Polynesia. Here is a video in Spanish about that.
I do think it's quite reasonable to think the Inkas or another Andean before them reached the Galapagos, considering the maritime contact between Ecuador and West Mexico. This happened via a route where I could imagine someone accidentally finding the Galapagos on the way in/out over the centuries that the route probably existed, and it does fit the bill for being 'uninhabited' as the story there goes. Far as I know though there is no academic consensus about Andean knowledge of the Galapagos.
Getting to Polynesia is something else entirely though, there's some background for Polynesians finding the Americas but the opposite seems much less likely.
Funny that a thread like this appear after I've seen two really good documentaries dealing with precolonial peoples. Both from the Andes, actually, as a fun coincidence!
The first is about the Moché people, in the documentary Lord of Sipan, which does an incredible job at discussing what is known of the Moché people in general, with just really impeccable recreations all around around all the known corners of their life (while also doing some good emphasis on how there is still much we don't understand—most importantly, "How The Fuck Did They Gold-plate Copper, It Took Us The Industrial Revolution To Get That Trick Working Like This, Wha,,,"), and can be found through CuriosityStream.
The other, I found by sheer chance on TV, and comes from National Geographic, Chachapoya: Mystery of a Lost Civilization, which also did a good job on discussing them, their distinction from Incan culture, and showing what (likely) lead to the downfall of their fortress-city, Kuelap (the conclusion they arrive to is a disease outbreak, but indirectly. Kuelap can be ascertained to have fell during Colonial Rule, but examination of the skeletoms proves that the damage caused to these people in an outright genocidal action can't be attributed to Spanish rifle or sword, because the damage isn't consistent. It is consistent, however, with the kimd of damage a Chachapoya 'star-mace' causes. They then speculate that, since Kuelap was a cultural, economic, and religious centre, that it was held in a state of ill-regard by neighbours, who grew only more discontent with Spanish colonization. A disease pitbreak later, and a desperate and terrified people now see a target to let their outlet against, the chosen of the Gods whi have failed them; a factor that would be likely compounded by many other factors lost to time. What is certain is that there was a genocide committed by weapons of their own sorts, and years layer, the abandoned city filled with bodies not even placed aside in burial was set ablaze, likely in a sort kf way to try and bury the past.)
The first is about the Moché people, in the documentary Lord of Sipan, which does an incredible job at discussing what is known of the Moché people in general, with just really impeccable recreations all around around all the known corners of their life (while also doing some good emphasis on how there is still much we don't understand—most importantly, "How The Fuck Did They Gold-plate Copper, It Took Us The Industrial Revolution To Get That Trick Working Like This, Wha,,,"), and can be found through CuriosityStream.
Lord of Sipan is pretty great. As I understand it the Mochica traditions were carried into the Late Intermediate by the Chimor Empire, particularly their metallurgy. Andean metallurgy was one of the most sophisticated in the world, even boasting of electroplating. It is via that maritime route I mentioned above that Andean metallurgic tradition diffused to Mesoamerica. In any case while a bit outside my jurisdiction I have a fairly comprehensive book on the Andes, The Inka Empire and its Andean Origins which I got for $1.55 on a whim one day and ironically spent a lot of time reading while caught without power in Guatemala. I believe it may have some answers to the question of gold-plating copper:
Metallurgy in the Americas is often underestimated I find. When it comes to working in non-ferrous metals though it is objectively very advanced; equal to if not better than old world metallurgy in that regard. In Colonial Mesoamerica the Spanish became dependent on native copper and bronzesmiths. A Mexican acquaintance of mine, AztlanHistorian, spent some time putting together this map:
Though metal objects were definitely traded beyond that range, too. Notice the Tumaco platinum smiths, as far as I know (a powerful qualifier) no one in the old world really did anything with platinum until later.
I thought this line of discussion was pretty fertile ground and maybe over in the controversial historical opinion thread I could make room for other conversations. The Ancient Americas have become my passion and I have read dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the subject. So I hope I can help those curious to learn something about it. At the same time though, it's a rich and deep field that's in constant evolution and there'll be things that some very smart people know more about than me, especially if it's outside of Mesoamerica or Oasisamerica. Hopefully the existence of an Americas thread will attract these beautiful humans.
Without further ado...
Yes, the Bering strait was a conduit for contact for thousands of years, including more recent waves of migration into the Americas and back-migration into Asia.
A study as of 2018 found sweet potatoes to have arrived in the Polynesian triangle before humans did. However people a lot smarter than me have pretty significant problems with that study:
... so I guess it's still an open question.
In California, if you're talking about the Chumash, I personally find it difficult to imagine that Polynesians would stay long enough to teach them to sewn-plank construction but not the sail.
All in all I agree, out of any pre-Columbian contact theory (aside from the Norse who are the only definitively established to have visited) the Polynesians seem to be very likely. Unfortunately we just haven't found conclusive evidence of it.
I've heard about the "sweet potatoes drifted to Polynesia" study before and while I'm admittedly not a botanist, archeologist, or ethnologist, but "Some Polynesians reached South America and picked up a few sweet potatoes" feels a lot more plausible than "Some sweet potato plants just managed to drift across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and washed up on Easter Island".
Like, wilder shit has happened historically (and we'll obviously never know without a time machine), but it seems like a straight line to say "This historic group of incredibly skilled sailors and traders managed to acquire sweet potatoes through skilled sailing and trading" than "Yeah this was the one time they just rolled a nat 20".
*EDIT* This is obviously just my deeply uninformed spitballing, but it's possible that there just want's enough of an incentive to keep a possible Polynesian/American trade going? I mean, sweet potatoes are an obvious game changer (especially for the Polynesians - it's a carb packed tuber that keeps for fucking ever), but once you've got a cutting or two going back home there's no need for a return trip. Reaching the America's from Hawaii (or wherever) is doable, but it'd be a loooooong voyage, and you'd need a hell of an incentive for the Polyneisians to keep it going for any sustained period.
Metallurgy in the Americas is often underestimated I find. When it comes to working in non-ferrous metals though it is objectively very advanced; equal to if not better than old world metallurgy in that regard. In Colonial Mesoamerica the Spanish became dependent on native copper and bronzesmiths.
I've heard about the "sweet potatoes drifted to Polynesia" study before and while I'm admittedly not a botanist, archeologist, or ethnologist, but "Some Polynesians reached South America and picked up a few sweet potatoes" feels a lot more plausible than "Some sweet potato plants just managed to drift across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and washed up on Easter Island".
Like, wilder shit has happened historically (and we'll obviously never know without a time machine), but it seems like a straight line to say "This historic group of incredibly skilled sailors and traders managed to acquire sweet potatoes through skilled sailing and trading" than "Yeah this was the one time they just rolled a nat 20".
*EDIT* This is obviously just my deeply uninformed spitballing, but it's possible that there just want's enough of an incentive to keep a possible Polynesian/American trade going? I mean, sweet potatoes are an obvious game changer (especially for the Polynesians - it's a carb packed tuber that keeps for fucking ever), but once you've got a cutting or two going back home there's no need for a return trip. Reaching the America's from Hawaii (or wherever) is doable, but it'd be a loooooong voyage, and you'd need a hell of an incentive for the Polyneisians to keep it going for any sustained period.
It's basically my headcanon that Polynesians must have made it at some point. Even if sweet potatoes were to be taken out of the picture, there are plenty of other avenues that you would have to analyze. Nonetheless it is a good habit to be empirical, and at the moment there is no consensus about it. There is no strictly good reason that "sweet potatoes spread through trade" is more likely than "sweet potatoes drifted across the ocean". It makes more sense to human intuition, but I think time and time again the universe has shown that human intuition is not very good at understanding it. Coincidence and sheer happenstance may not satisfy us, but they don't have to.
Certainly though, if it did happen, it was pretty sporadic. It might have even just been once or twice.
Hello frens. So with my "gsrp" over in the other board having released its turn and myself having recently fallen into the weekly bout of despair about the Americas' portrayal in pop history, I thought I might breathe a bit of life into this thread every so often with periodic "lessons", I guess you could say, showcasing advances that have been made regarding the study of the Pre-Columbian world. Lots of things have happened in the last 30 years - let alone the last 10, which are not as readily accessible to most people for nebulous reasons like being stowed away in the ivory tower. Other times it is stuff that has been known and documented for literally centuries but has been... misconstrued somehow. Probably purposely.
A simple glance through Quora will reveal the nature of questions often leveled at the Ancient Americas. ... often based on depressing assumptions. And with some far more depressing answers. For some reason, probably because of video games, a lot of them revolve around military history. Things like:
Why didn't native Americans wear armour?
Which initially appears a strange question, as it has been known for hundreds of years that natives all over the hemisphere wore armour of some kind into battle. It's known because, well, contact often involved conflict. Nevermind that "Native American" in this usage probably aims to exclude Central and South America for some reason, Conquistadors lauded the brine-reinforced textile armour (ichcahuipilli) of their adversaries in Mexico, and English explorers in the northeast were kind enough to give us drawings of natives clad in armour made of bundled wooden canes. I have even seen some people ask why wooden armour never existed, when historically there was an entire hemisphere where it was relatively commonplace. When weapons are primarily stone or wood themselves, wood makes enough sense as a means of protection.
In some cases we see a tradition of armour disappear - the same northeasters that once looked like those drawings in later times abandoned it and seemingly forgot how to make it. To some, this can only be the result of cultural degradation as a consequence of relentless European diseases: crafting of armour was a specialist skill and once 70% of a culture died off, the specialists were either included in that number or their skills no longer considered important. A reasonable argument to be sure, and one that under other circumstances would certainly be in-line with what is known to have happened in other places. Yet it has become apparent that the northeast - at least inland - was relatively spared the worst of disease outbreaks, and furthermore the region became the epicenter of a new and lucrative trade: that in firearms. Here, no one European colonizer held a monopoly and so various powers willingly traded arms to native allies in the hopes of getting a leg up on their competition. What we're seeing then is not degradation but adaptation: the sheer ubiquity of guns meant that warfare even between native cultures had changed, and armour was rendered obsolete. If that sounds familiar, it's because it is also generally seen as one reason that Europeans, too, mostly abandoned armour.
Why didn't native Americans invent the crossbow?
This is a bit more forgivable. What is less forgivable are the answers: some focusing on the idea that crossbows require metal parts - as if crossbows always had metal parts even in the Old World or that these metals were always ferrous. All-wooden crossbows were actually common, plus Ancient Chinese crossbows have bronze mechanisms, and many cultures in Central and South America were proficient bronzeworkers as discussed earlier in this thread. Another comes at it from an angle relevant to the previous question, alluding to crossbow's evolution as a means to deal with heavy armour (ignoring crossbows usually have origins in hunting, by ambush, particularly as bow traps) which, of course, natives never had. And one that goes along the lines of "well natives are stupid, you see." Followed up by "they didn't have the wheel, how could you expect a crossbow." Not sure what wheels and crossbows have to do with each other.
To these people, crossbows are seen as this insanely advanced genius device, a product of Eurasian ingenuity, a pillar of the superiority of not just European arms, but European culture. If I'm offended, imagine being European. (Some of you don't have to imagine.) Your continent's countless achievements would mean nothing if you didn't figure out a bow on a stick.
It's altogether fitting then that an argument of indigenous backwardness rests on the non-existence of a weapon which certainly did exist. That's not the most ironic part, though. Was it the complex military systems and semi-professional armies of Mesoamerican kingdoms and Andean empires? No. Was it the warrior castes of Mississippian chiefdoms? Nope. The crossbow was invented in the Arctic, not as a weapon of war, but as a means to feed a family. The Inuits were the ones to figure out that one can rest indefinitely with an arrow nocked over a hole in the ice, ready to release it instantly the moment a seal shows himself.
Given that bows in general too are hypothesized to have spread from the Arctic southward until becoming ubiquitous in the hemisphere by about 500 AD*, it is reasonable I think to say that the crossbow may too have eventually spread in a similar manner, if people thought it was useful. Alas it spread not from its Inuit origins but by its Post-Columbian introduction. At the end of the day though, the real question remains unanswered: why didn't most of the hemisphere, given 1000 years minimum of archery by the time of European contact, think to develop one? If it's not lack of metallurgy or lack of a need to punch through a well-armoured opponent, what could it be? Crossbows became important not because they're strictly amazing weapons but because they can be massed very easily. Certainly the powerful city-states, kingdoms, and empires of Central and South America were plenty capable of raising enough troops in substantial numbers that crossbows could be viable for cost-effective massed firepower.
That is a complicated question, one I feel ultimately unable to provide a satisfactory answer for. Some might suggest it is the lack of ambush hunting tactics that might lead to bow traps and, by extension, hunting crossbows. Given the insanely specific lifeways that numerous American peoples developed for their insanely specific ecological niches, I find it doubtful that only the Inuit in an entire hemisphere had a use for ambush hunting. There may be a cultural explanation too: among those cultures that were able to muster large armies and thus may prefer a larger number of crossbows over a small number of atlatl or slings, bows were often derided as poor weapons, as tools of utility rather than as weapons of war, and furthermore tools of nomads. This perception was changing in Post-Classic Mesoamerica as the atlatl-based martial tradition of the ancient martial Orders was forced to adapt to a changing world and err on the side of practicality. Archery traditions thus appeared virtually overnight, particularly in those cultures/states which already had a penchant for innovation, and had a big part to play in numerous defeats the Aztecs suffered, and when you already have a rich archer tradition, the pattern seems to be to avoid crossbows in favor of the superior weapon... at least that's the impression I get from elsewhere in the world. The Bow was basically to Mesoamerica as the gun was for Europe, it revolutionized warfare, proving its worth among atlatls and slings.
All this nuanced consideration ultimately got us the very substantive answer of "well, I dunno, tbh." Maybe that's why people prefer the nice answer of "well crossbows require metal parts!"
* = this hypothesis is being challenged though.
Why didn't Native Americans have the wheel?
It's sort of a trick question. People who ask this might also think to ask why the Americas didn't have metal... which I have seen before, even though I thought Mesoamerica and the Incas are famous for having a shitload of gold? Many cultures also worked bronze, yet seemingly never considered using bronze as tips for spears and arrowheads. So the question isn't really "why didn't people have the wheel" but more "why didn't people use the wheel for the things Old Worlders used the wheel for?" It is also one of the most dreaded questions people like me get, right next to "why did the MayaNs collapse?" because like the crossbow thing there isn't really a neat, straightforward answer.
The first part to the messy answer is that some of 'em *did* have the wheel. You can go to museums in Mexico and see for yourself. I did. You can find centuries-old physical examples of the wheel in practice... on toys. Then, right next to that exhibit, you look up at a mural depicting the moving and raising of a basalt statue, itself pulled along a set of rollers dragged by a team of human laborers, similar to how the construction of Egyptian pyramids is supposed to have been done. From these things it is certainly clear that peoples of the Americas fully understood the principle of a wheel: rotatey thingy make work easy. More recent studies have also led some scholars to believe that the Mayas had a specialized pottery wheel, and the museum in Paquime, an Oasisamerican site in modern Chihuahua that flourished roughly 700-1400, insists that its ancient inhabitants had a kind of water wheel. Since coming home from that museum I have never found anything more on the subject, which is a shame, because the discovery of a Pre-Columbian American water wheel would probably be Earth-shattering news. There is also a Mesoamerican codex depicting a watermill, although it is most likely discussing a European one used on the land someone sued for.
Yet no carts, wagons, wheelbarrows, or chariots. Many might come to point out the Americas had no draft animals, and therefore there isn't much use for the wheel in its "typical" roles. It is a good point, and (mostly) holds true, but there's just a bit more to it than that. Just as important as the wheel, you see, is the axle, and every set of wheel-and-axle involves friction between its rotating and non-rotating components. The first iteration of wheels back in Sumeria were quite poorly made and the friction was so much that the literal only way to use them was to have a pair of oxen pull them. But there *was* a way to pull them, and thus there was impetus to evolve on the wheel-and-axle: over the next 2,500 years, the small horses of the time could pull it, and the friction and weight of the wheels reduced such that they could do it *fast*. It is by this point in the wheel's evolution that its full inventory of applications becomes more apparent.
As ingenious as the peoples of the Ancient Americas may have been, they are no more capable of skipping the primordial stage of wheel development than the Sumerians were. Someone probably tried it, realized it was a lot easier to pull a sled - let alone up even slight inclines. And just decided to keep pulling the sled. The Egyptians, evidently, came to the same conclusion for a long time.
Okay, but what about the Andes? They have a domesticated animal, the llama, which can carry decent weight more efficiently than a human, and do some work. And there's videos on the internet of llamas pulling carts in Peru, so clearly llamas *can* and do get trained to pull stuff. Maybe not a shitty early Sumerian wheel, but, hypothetically, there might be reason to iterate on the basic wheel design. Often, the explanation in return is that the mountainous Andean homeland of the Inkas and their predecessors were simply too... mountainous, for wheels to be practical. This may be partly true, especially considering the kind of wheel technology that would have been available to them, but I find it a flawed explanation on its own, as again clearly Peruvians have found a use for llamas to pull carts. Where it is actually significant is that, well, llamas simply aren't horses.
Horses are, to put it simply, evolved for the plains - they actually originated in the Americas before migrating to Asia in ancient times and subsequently went extinct in this hemisphere during the Pleistocene. Horses thrive in places like the Steppes, the Great Plains, or to some extent the Sahel. Llamas, however, are creatures of the mountains, and if there is anything llamas are good at it is navigating the terrain of the Andes.
The Inkas were not the first empire of the Andes, but they were by far the biggest - at their height the largest Pre-Columbian Empire the Americas had ever seen. It was even larger than its contemporaries Ming China and the Songhai. As far as I'm aware, for at least a brief period between the end of the expansion phase and the onset of the civil war, the Inkas' empire of Tawantinsuyu is literally the largest worldwide, and failing that it was definitely top 3. A problem emerged that no Andean ever had to deal with before, and it was an urgent one that demanded a prompt solution: how to maintain communication across the empire, extract labor from the ayllus, and distribute food and provisions from the warehouses to the ayllus across so vast a kingdom. To this end an enormous system of hard-surfaced roads were built, punctuated by periodically-replaced rope bridges, which altogether in length exceeded some 40,000 kilometers, which to put in perspective is ~80% the length of the Roman paved highway system in an empire only about ~40% the size of the Romans' at its height, and built in arguably more difficult terrain.
These roads however were not built like Roman roads, to accommodate wheeled carts and like, but rather with llamas in mind. Rather than presenting flat surfaces for horses, they are often more like stairsteps narrowly zig-zagging through the hills. Such roads proved very hazardous for Spanish men, equipment, and horses, and were a big part of why the so-called "Neo-Incan State" was able to survive so long. Where a horse-and-cart is literally physically unable to use the Inka road past a certain point (if at all) is where a llama is right at home. Literally evolved for it.
So I like to compare it a bit to the modern dilemma of electric cars. The technology certainly exists, the problem, however, is existing infrastructure. Gas stations are frequent, "electric stations" rare, so electric vehicles do not suit the needs of many people as they in the current climate have more limited utility. Even if the Inkas wanted to, their road system would not allow them to put it to good use without serious large-scale modifications.
Why did the MayaNs collapse?
Firstly, it's just Mayas. MayaN is incorrect except when referring to the Mayan language family. This is partly because no one really calls themselves Maya... there are dozens of different Maya groups. Sorta like how the word "Chinese" casually does away with all the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity of China. I'm not that mad tho, my Kaqchikel tour guide in Tikal didn't seem to care much if you called him MayaN. And the map in my signature, unfortunately, labels all Mayas with the same color, much to my extreme remorse. Alas, nobody's perfect.
Anyway this is the worst question. Just awful. You'd almost lie about having any intellectual interest in the Maya just for the sake of avoiding the conversation. The narrative goes that the Maya were a flourishing civilization but then "mysteriously vanished without a trace" in the aftermath of a tumultuous "collapse". Considering the Mayas were the targets of a bloody US-backed genocide as recently as the year I was born and the existence of the aforementioned Kaqchikel man who climbs the tallest pyramid in the Americas 3 times a day guiding gringos like me around the largest archaeological site in the hemisphere, it would certainly seem odd if not even a little insensitive to suggest that the Mayas have just all "vanished". Poof.
The real issue lies in the word choice of "Mayan Collapse". Don't get me wrong, something pretty disastrous happened at the end of the Classic Period** (strange, it could be that it is used as the bookmark for the end of the Classic or something). Cities were abandoned, states forgotten, dynasties died. And it is likely enough that drought and soil leaching may have, at least in some select incidences, had a role to play, particularly as the region had just emerged from a cascade of dynastic "Star Wars" between feuding dynasties sporting armies of foreign mercenaries. But when people left the cities, they didn't just vanish. Poof. Actually they founded *new* settlements. Not to mention that the Collapse did not affect everyone uniformly: some cities, like Coba and Lamanai, were founded in the Pre-Classic and remained inhabited by Spanish contact (well not Coba, it was abandoned later). It is a "collapse" in the sense that the old world order had fallen, but it could just as easily be called a Maya Revolution or Maya Reformation or something. I dunno, this is why they don't put me in charge of naming things.
Post-Collapse, many people have come to regard Maya culture and civilization as being in some kind of degenerative state: past like ~900 AD massive pyramids like La Danta and Tikal IV were no longer constructed, knowledge of the writing system and calendar appeared lost, and it is the opinion of many archaeologists in the early to mid 20th century that the craftsmanship of ceramics and stonework had also deteriorated. However I'm not sure the Mayas would have seen it that way. We see a fundamental shift in the conception of a state and kingship: in the Classic period rulers were called ajaw (or ahau), a god-king, ruling with the mandate of heaven (or, well, a similar concept). In the Post-Classic, rulers in the lowlands are called halach uinik, which translates to "true man", and in the highlands they are ahpop, "[the one who sits on] the mat". In contrast to the autocratic theo-monarchies of the Classic, later we see a trend of oligarchy, the system of "multepal", Yucatec for "together-rule".
What seems to have happened then is a large-scale rejection of Classic kingship, perhaps the equivalent of a Chinese dynasty losing the "mandate of heaven", provoked by a multitude of crises that probably had something to do with incessant warfare and poor harvests - a dire combination indeed for any pre-industrial state. "Rule of one" became "rule of few" and in place of enormous projects like majestic pyramids, in the Post-Classic we see resources set aside for modest colonnaded halls, with courtyards and plazas to provide ample space for councilors to meet and debate affairs. A new calendar was devised, accompanying changes in religious iconography and the Maya logosyllabary. Merchants became powerful, and trade routes blossomed across the Gulf Coast, while leagues of cities joined together to gain bargaining power. These markets were such that, from a purely material standpoint, it has become clear from remains that the average Post-Classic Maya commoner was better off than his ancestors, even having easy access to obsidian tools, which in the Yucatan often had to be imported from far abroad. Maya society was still very aristocratic, and traditions of cranial deformation, restrictive literacy, and limited social mobility continued, but it's clear enough that the Post-Classic world is not inferior to the past, it's just different.
** = for reference, Mesoamerican chronology starts with the Pre-Classic (1600 BC at the earliest - 200 AD at the latest) Classic (200 AD - ~900 AD) and Post-Classic (900 AD to 1520 AD). However, the early Post-Classic, roughly 900-1250 AD, is sometimes called the Epiclassic, and bears some resemblance to Europe's Migration Period.
Let's talk about Amazonia
The basin of the largest river system in the world has come under scrutiny in recent years. The first Europeans who traveled through it had what were considered for a long time to be merely the product of a creative imagination or alternatively an effort to justify the danger and expenditure of the journey. Given that many conquistadors have done similar things in other places, it had been accepted as truth that the dense populations and urbanism the explorers reported were pure fantasy. Tropical environments pose many difficulties for agriculture, not the least of which is the dense foliage that must be cleared for fields, the relatively nutrient-poor soil, and scarcity of sunlight beneath a jungle canopy. With agriculture considered nigh-impossible, the high population densities and complex societies noted by observers were disregarded.
Yet cassava (also called yuca or manioc), a tuber which today is a staple food for almost a billion people, was soon found to have likely been domesticated in Amazonia. Then came the advent of LIDAR technology: basically lasers aimed at the ground from planes, allowing one to map the ground hidden under the jungle canopy. In more familiar territory, LIDAR has also forced a re-evaluation of Pre-Columbian population densities in lowland tropical regions of Mesoamerica. Those who have read Charles Mann's 1491 may also recall its allusions to other work done regarding pre-Columbian soil modification and the use of ants to maintain raised fields for ancient farmers. Also mentioned in that book is the relatively newly-discovered Peruvian civilization of Norte Chico (also known as Caral-Supe), which was found to be entirely without ceramics. Norte Chico built cities and boasted a population density similar to contemporary Sumer without any pottery. Evidence has since suggested that ceramics were not an Andean invention but likely an Amazonian one which spread to the highlands later.
Amazonian ceramics ended up being pretty important, though, not because they were used to store grain or whatever Mesopotamians did with it but because it was crucial to the production of terra preta, or black soil. I am in fact not very smart, so I do not pretend to fully understand the mechanism by which it modifies soil in a positive manner for crops. But it is made by creating a layer of crushed pottery in the soil. The soil is then subjected to a controlled burn. Suddenly all the problems with tropical soil are solved. The paper I show in the spoiler below provides a better breakdown. Of course, it also helps that the Amazonian agricultural complex did not require vast spaces to be cleared for fields: the trees themselves were the crops, with their tubers, fruits, and nuts. Ancient Amazonians learned quickly which trees were advantageous to them and which to discourage, and in doing so over thousands of years shaped the entire rainforest to human ends.
So it turns out that maybe the first Europeans to explore the basin were right about something. Recent demographic work has revised population estimates for Amazonia from 1-2 million to 8-10 million. As they say, pictures are a thousand words, and while I could certainly write those thousands, I'll let them do the talking:
Now if someone could let Brazil know that there is in fact a way to farm without damaging the forest, that'd be grand. I'm sure Bolsonaro is inclined to listen.
The Caribbean: Mediterranean of the Americas?
We would be remiss to talk about Amazonia without moving on to the Caribbean. Amazonian crops and technologies certainly spread to neighboring cultural zones, but one may not expect that they also made it to the Caribbean, which of course also had influences from other parts of the Americas, including Mesoamerica. One also imagines, then, that they may have been in contact with the American Southeast, such as Florida, a distinct cultural region. Given its geographic position and the diversity of influences it had, some scholars have advanced the idea that the Caribbean was this hemisphere's equivalent of the Mediterranean, with its hodge-podge of customs, languages, and cultures of North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, joined by seafaring tradition and millennia of interaction. Indeed, the Caribbean is similar in area to the Mediterranean as well.
The issue lies in proving it and, if we're being empirical about it, the question remains open. Nonetheless there are some very compelling lines of theory to explore. First, a "brief" history of the pre-contact Caribbean.
The Caribbean was probably the last part of the Americas to be settled by humans, with evidence suggesting an island-hopping migration likely originating from eastern Venezuela starting between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago. Whatever the case, within the millennium all major islands from Cuba to Trinidad were colonized. It may also have been the place in the Americas where megafauna avoided extinction the longest, though it seems the jury is still out on that. Anyway, not much is known about this first wave of migrants - certainly they were hunter-gatherers with some seafaring prowess and so likely took to fishing as well. Nonetheless they have been divided into a number of groups, and over the next 4,000 years, a few smaller, minor migrations also took place - all of them probably starting from Venezuela. It was about 1,300 years ago, however, that the next big one was about to take place, and of these people much more is known, as they would still inhabit the archipelago in large numbers by the time of contact.
These were an Arawak-speaking people of northern Amazonia, aware of the soil modification techniques discussed before. They construct walled permanent villages, and unlike the previous inhabitants of the Caribbean, practiced intensive agriculture, centered around a complex of sweet potatoes and cassava. Over time however they came to distinguish themselves from their Arawak cousins on the mainland in a number of ways, in particular their adept fishing techniques, wherein some fish caught were used as bait to catch bigger fish. And as we all know, there is *always* a bigger fish. These "Island Arawak" are more commonly known as the Taino, and until the 15th century, they dominated most of the islands, save for pockets of groups leftover from previous waves of migration such as the Guanahatabeys (far western Cuba) and the Ciguayo (northwest-central Hispaniola).
Spanish observers had a lot to say about the Taino, in particular their peculiar habit of dividing villages into two sections, one for the men and the other for the women (and kiddos) to sleep separately. This meant it was the woman's initiative to engage in sexual activity (by walking over to her man's side if she wanted to), which may have granted them considerable sexual and reproductive autonomy. Indeed some conquistadors remarked on the 'macho' attitude of Taino women. Nonetheless, by day communities were brought together for ceremonies which were overseen by a class of priests, and just as importantly by games of Batey. A ballgame, played with rubber likely imported from Mexico, the rules were probably a bit dissimilar but maybe not entirely unfamiliar for their Mesoamerican counterparts, and both men and women played.
Other details of Taino society are somewhat less clear. One manner of ongoing debate is whether they were organized as paramount chiefdoms, with a class of elite nobles (and Tainos indeed had words for these sorts of people) or whether they were more egalitarian tribes who only appointed leaders as necessary when times demanded it, particularly to lead war parties. Often the Taino are remembered in a way that echoes the early Spanish impression of them as innocent and gullible - too much so for them to engage in something like warfare. There is, however, ample evidence for warfare, not the least of which is the plethora of weapons the Tainos invented, their habit of fortifying towns with palisades, and Spanish memoirs, particularly in regards to Puerto Rico, which seems to had been forcibly united by a powerful chief, Agüeybaná, just prior to contact (not to mention Taino resistance against the Spanish was certainly warfare). There is yet another dimension to this debate, however, which simply insists that both models of Taino society can be true - the Tainos of Cuba (called Ciboneys) may well have been more akin to those egalitarian tribes in contrast to those of HIspaniola and Puerto Rico, in which paramountcies may have emerged.
Another thing of some contention is to what extent each of the different islands interacted with each other, and even more likely to spark heated debate is to what degree they were in contact with mainland North and South America.
Starting a couple decades ago, a narrative emerged propagated by some hyper-diffusionist pseudoscientists, contrary to the mainstream hypothesis of settlement of the islands starting from Venezuela, proposed it having begun in the Yucatan Peninsula, by sail-equipped Maya galleys who then went on to establish colonies in the Mississippi basin. Alas, these hacks make it quite difficult for the average person to research the Ancient Caribbean as googling the subject will often yield their websites rather than the work of more empirical studies. In turn some scholars of the pre-contact Caribbean have tried to be a counterweight to the diffusionists by citing the Caribbean's relatively rudimentary maritime technology (based on the very small number of pre-Columbian canoes which have survived from this period), including the notable absence of sails. Their hypothesis was that the islands were settled in succession from east to west, migrants hopping from one to the next - likely to some degree by accident, taken off-course by the Caribbean's strong currents and fierce winds. Even *with* sails, it still happens today that ships in these waters are often forced to make detours due to inclement weather.
Although the Caribbean (along with *most* of the Americas including the Mayas) was lacking the sail, there was another technological innovation they did possess: straking. Normally, dugout canoes are shaped out of one tree. As such the dimensions of the canoe are derived from those of the tree, hollowed out and bent into the U-shape with axes and fire. Especially large trees lead to exceptionally large canoes - some examples being capable of carrying dozens of men or several tons of cargo. Straking however it the beginnings of a sort of partial plank construction, extending the height of the canoe's sides with a "gunwale". This grants a number of advantages, not the least of which is greatly improved stability in rough waters. Straking represented essentially the peak of Caribbean maritime ingenuity - evidence suggests, however, that the Caribbean's favorable geography meant it was plenty sufficient to maintain trade routes between every inhabited island. Unlike Polynesians there simply was no need to innovate double-hulled catamarans, crab-claw sails, and advanced wayfinding. Yet Caribbean sailors were not only capable of island-hopping, but, weather permitting, could probably cross open water to some degree.
Now we get to the mainland. That the Caribbean world interacted extensively with Venezuela is more or less universally agreed upon: central and eastern Venezuela are considered part of the pre-Columbian Caribbean culture region (the western highlands are considered Isthmo-Colombian, notable for the Timoto-Cuica civilization, who invented the arepa, still commonly eaten in Colombia and Venezuela today even though they're just a worse pupusa) but, apart from that things get a little complicated. Certainly some short-term contact took place, as the rubber balls sometimes used to play batey were most likely invented outside the archipelago for example. Trade goods manufactured in Colombian civilizations (or traded from the south) are occasionally found in the Caribbean, perhaps distributed by the Tairona and others thanks to the rivers. As Island Arawak made it to the Bahamas archipelago (Lucayans) it is reasonable to suggest they also were aware of Florida, although there doesn't seem to be physical evidence of it as far as I know. Granted, European presence in central and southern Florida was limited for a long time, and we know little even about its most prominent chiefdom, the Calusa.
Perhaps the most interesting stuff though is in Mesoamerica. Alternatively, it's just the area I know the most about, so I picked up on more of the interesting stuff. Let's dig in:
- Starting in the mid-1510s, Spanish ships operating in the Caribbean were occasionally taken off course and wrecked in the Yucatan, probably as a consequence of powerful storms. In fact one of the first things on Cortez' agenda when he landed in 1517 was to find two Spaniards who were reported to have survived the wrecking: he somehow randomly stumbled upon them. Both were enslaved, but one renounced Christianity and became the loyal servant of a local Maya lord with a wife and family (and later helped fight against the Spanish), while the other kept his faith and remained a slave. The latter having learned the Maya language, he was an incredible asset to Cortez. Anyway, it seems unlikely to me that Caribbean boats would only start wrecking in the Yucatan after Europeans write about it. If that's not good enough for you (fair), well...
- Taino DNA may have been found to be present in Maya peoples of the northern Yucatan and if so it seems this admixture goes back a few centuries at least. It seems probable to me that some of this could be because of slaves taken from wrecked sailors over many generations. As far as I know though that is just my headcanon, I've never seen any of the actually smart/qualified people directly confirm this suspicion. Probably because there isn't be much evidence for it left.
- We actually have documentary evidence! Well, sort of. One of the books of Chilam Balam, composed in the colonial period under Spanish supervision but probably based on texts extant prior to their... uh being burned, mentions that in 5 Ahau (about 1300 AD or so) a people unsuccessfully invaded from the east, who are described as "skirtless" and who "devour men". It could be coincidence, however, it sounds an awful lot like the Caribs, who were the final (pre-Columbian) migration into the Caribbean at that time. The description of their dressing habits and custom of ritual cannibalism (among some islanders), while vague, matches Spanish descriptions and would also certainly have made an impression on the Mayas. We also know that Maya maritime trade was valuable enough for piracy to be a problem, and that settlements sometimes had walls facing out to sea. But given the distance from the Yucatan to the Lesser Antilles though (where the Carib presence was strongest at that time) some instead say it could have been Miskitos, a people from the coast of NIcaragua (although they were not known by that name until they took in runaway African slaves). If only we had the original document, assuming it had more to say.
- Cassava, the aforementioned Amazonian crop cultivated in the Caribbean, began to spread to Mesoamerica by the Late Postclassic. By the contact period, it appears it spread to the Yucatan Peninsula and perhaps as far as Oaxaca in limited numbers. Given that, as far as I know, the Amazonian complex did not spread through upland Colombia and Central America, a Caribbean origin for its introduction seems most likely.
All of these things, individually, would probably not amount to much and could be dismissed as easily as, say the Malian Mansa Abubakari's visit to Brazil based on one throwaway line in an old text that could mean literally anything. Or at least they would not be significant enough to be something akin to the Mediterranean world. Taken together, though, and with some caveats, I think it is fair to say eastern regions of Mesoamerica would have at least been familiar with, say, Cuba. Maybe in 10-15 years, more conclusive evidence can come along. And then we can have new more difficult questions!
The paper I show a couple times by the way is Scott Fitzpatrick's Seafaring Capabilities in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean, from ResearchGate. If I recall correctly I procured this particular one freely, maybe that option is still available if you don't have student access or whatever. I certainly don't. By the way if you want the bookup on dozens of articles on studies like this one regarding the Pre-Columbian Americas, DM me, maybe I can toss it over on google drive or something.
The fact that new crops were being spread into Mesoamerica as Cortez landed is actually really fascinating and a good one-liner to shake up that mindset of the pre-Colombian Americas as somehow frozen in time, has there been any thought put to how cassava/manioc would have been incorporated into Mesoamerican society and what changes it could have brought if a Cortez figure either never appeared or only showed up 40-50 years later?
Good question. It's probable that given a few more decades, cassava would have spread to Central Mexico. Even if we ignore that the Yucatan-Gulf Coast maritime route was one of the most important trade routes in the hemisphere, by the time Cortez landed, the Aztecs were fully intent on launching campaigns into Maya territory, presumably with the goal of conquest, and in doing so may well have encountered people cultivating cassava if they didn't already during their (mostly failed) expeditions in Oaxaca. Like many Mesoamerican cultures the Aztecs were situated in a highland basin, where, contrary to what most people seem to imagine when they think Mesoamerica, snow and frost were actually pretty frequent problems. Despite a generally very productive landscape, frost coming early and rains late the following year could well lead to famine, and it was a particularly bad famine in the 1450s (the One Rabbit famine, one of the only pre-Columbian disasters we have documentary literature about), provoked by a swarm of locusts on top of drought and frost, that served catalyst for Aztec military expansion into food-productive regions in the lowlands, in order to secure food tributaries.
Cassava is pretty great as an 'emergency' food, a fallback supply when all else fails, and no doubt it might well serve this purpose well in Mesoamerica. However given its homeland is Amazonia, I'm not sure it would do well in the frigid highland climate that was home not just for the Aztecs but many other Mesoamerican peoples like the Purepecha. I suspect this is also why (afaik) cassava didn't spread to highland areas in South America, either. Still, even if it was just the lowlands, it could well be traded for (or taxed as tribute) by highlanders, and may well serve in a capacity as a safety net against unpredictable droughts and the like, as well as a factor in increasing population density.
EDIT: Now imagine if Mesoamerica got both cassava and potatoes. Whew. Woe betide the Spanish.
I don't care if I'm crazy, but I want to believe that Amazonia domesticated capybaras and that most of the modern representatives are the feral descendants of those rodents. No proof of course, but I refuse to listen to reason on that.
I'm also surprised to learn that the Maya naval tech is generally bungus! I knew that the Taino (and Carib?) where most likely from Venezuela, but I had thought that the Maya were just developing good boats when Cortez hit. But if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
But all of this is immensely helpful! I've wanted to try writing a ISOT story where the Americas are transported to a virgin world right before Columbus arrives and letting the Americas develop without interference. This really helps in that regard!
I don't care if I'm crazy, but I want to believe that Amazonia domesticated capybaras and that most of the modern representatives are the feral descendants of those rodents. No proof of course, but I refuse to listen to reason on that.
I'm also surprised to learn that the Maya naval tech is generally bungus! I knew that the Taino (and Carib?) where most likely from Venezuela, but I had thought that the Maya were just developing good boats when Cortez hit. But if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
But all of this is immensely helpful! I've wanted to try writing a ISOT story where the Americas are transported to a virgin world right before Columbus arrives and letting the Americas develop without interference. This really helps in that regard!
Hm, to be honest Amazonia is not really my wheelhouse, you probably shouldn't quote me on anything outside of Mesoamerica. That said, domesticated capybaras does sound kinda plausible - or at least semi-domesticated if not fully. Mesoamerica is full of examples of that, like white-tailed deer being herded into pens and bred to eat but not really fully domesticated. (There's also a few people who enthusiastically over-interpret a piece of Maya art to say deer were also used as beasts of burden)
Speaking of the Maya, if it's any consolation, the Mactun Maya (from the western coast of the peninsula) probably also had straked canoes. It may have indeed been a recent development by the time of contact... which now that I think of it I guess could possibly maybe be a Caribbean diffusion. There were certainly some big ones: one of the first things the Spanish do when they initiated contact with the Maya was literally intercept a Maya merchant ship on its way back from Honduras. The memoir says it carried 150 people but historians generally think they were exaggerating, probably only half that, carrying a shipment of tools and weapons. That the Mayas frequented markets in Honduras is pretty commonly accepted, it's likely they also reached the Miskito coast on occasion too. They were probably only one middleman away from the Muiscas in Colombia. Don't underestimate canoes - they are certainly "good boats"!
Good luck with the ISOT - feel free to ask if you have any questions about Mesoamerica-adjacent stuff (Oasisamerica and Isthmo-Colombia especially), this is exactly the place for it
Oo. I can see myself using this a lot in the future! I can see Pixel (or I guess Nevaddy Yankee in this forum)'s been bearing the brunt of the myth dispelling, it seems. Absolute tank.
In California, if you're talking about the Chumash, I personally find it difficult to imagine that Polynesians would stay long enough to teach them to sewn-plank construction but not the sail.
And the people that were most optimally lined up to hit California weren't even using full-plank canoes to begin with. Almost everyone in Polynesia used washstrakes, but it's the places that didn't have dugout-worthy trees that opted to use only planks. Which is similar reasoning for the Chumash -- cedar splits very easily, and large trees close enough to the coast aren't common enough to make a dugout tradition practical in most places (though they were still used when they were available).
But making boats out of planks still allowed for a much bigger expansion of maritime culture than what their neighbors were using. Tule boats, small watercraft that are basically the reed boat equivalent of a sit-on-top ocean kayak (most of them even have the same kind of double-paddle), are completely fine if your intentions are just to fish or transport you and some friends to nearby places. Y'know, kayak stuff. If you want to exploit the sea more intensively -- transport more people and bulk goods across larger distances, and harvesting deeper water animals from tuna to billfish to whales -- you're gonna need a bigger boat. Preferably more rigid too. You could still do this with tule reeds, like they do in South America, but keeping a large reed boat intact takes so many additional steps that planks are a much more sensible choice.
The Chumash fished for large sea critters and regularly ferried people back and forth to the Channel Islands to facilitate the industrial production of shell-bead currency that was exchanged throughout California. So, they needed a boat they could trust with that job.
Here's some maps of watercraft type up and down the California coast (note: 'balsa' refers to the tule boats):
Favorite part about this is how it's one of the few things that are actually pretty easy to Google with some popular examples, yet people still ask this question. If anyone hasn't seen examples of Pacific Northwest cedar armor, I highly recommend it. But the indigenous peoples of the Americas have made armor out of almost every practical material. There's even a few instances of light iron armoring; among the Inuit and parts of the Pacific Northwest where trade/meteoric iron is common, and in/around the Great Plains where multiple figures wearing iron scale cuirasses appear (probably just one or two jackets being passed on), likely originally from the conquistadors.
I think this is a good case study for how technological change is an interplay of cultural habitus, existing technology, logistical support and external issues rather than some inevitable linear progression of "good → better". As with many technologies, there's clearly more than one reason to invent a crossbow, and I'd wager exponentially more reasons not to.
Modern bows, crossbows and archery has probably skewed popular culture's conception of what it's really like to have some of these things. For example, my brother's aluminum-fiberglass compound bows and crossbow simply sit in open boxes, physically unmodified from the day they came out of the factory aside from some wear (though one of the bows probably needs a string replaced). You'd never do that with a traditional bow. For one, keeping them strung longer than a couple of days will kill your bow's ability to store and release energy. Rain and moisture can also damage wood or loosen glue and sinew - a death sentence for composite bows but un-ideal for any bow before the advent of modern oils and waxes. And if you're any kid where wild game is frequented, hunting is an important part of your culture's life. If your culture considers bows to be the proper hunting implement, then they're going to be introduced to you at a young age. You're going to grow up with bows and archery, and your ability to aim, draw quickly or hold a draw for a long time will be the subject of lots of bragging. You'll eventually learn to build and care for your own bow, which tends to be a personal process involving lots of pride, sometimes reverence. It's usually not something a top-down authority trains you for. It's just something that's expected for you to know as part of your livelihood.
Point being, there's a strong social force maintaining bows as a tradition where they exist. Even when guns were introduced to the Plains, bows still held an important place for many indigenous nations. They effectively replaced the war bow with their heavy draw weights, but ones under 50 lbs survived for hunting and for rapid-fire horse archery. Then we haven't even gotten into the mechanical aspects. Traditional bows have to be very well maintained as is. Now you have a tool that's clunkier to lug around with additional moving parts, all needing to be cared for, all of which can fail causing the rest of the tool to fail...and for what? The ability to hold your draw longer to wait for an opportunity? Experience tells you that will probably hurt your bow and string, but even so, you can already do that if you're halfway as competent as you're expected to be. The same is true of accuracy. A heavier draw? You mean I'm not strong enough on my own? I ain't no pansy! For what armor, and is it really worth the longer loading time? Would it actually work (keeping in mind things like Southeastern wicker shields could resist Spanish crossbows)? Small game? Try blowguns. Or throwing sticks. Or trapping. Any one of these can be a good reason for inventing a crossbow in certain contexts and not good enough in others.
Like Pixel brought up, the existence of other weapons occupying war-crossbow niches compounds the issue. Want a high-powered ranged weapon that can circumvent armor? Behold, the atlatl and sling; time-honored and elegant weapons for a civilized age, with a glorious history of use by great warriors since the time of your dad, his dad, his dad before him, et cetera to untold generations. If it's good enough to bring down a mammoth, it's good enough for a soldier. No, I don't know what a 'mammoth' is, kid, don't give me lip! Wait, training? You're saying one of the biggest weaknesses of these weapons is training? What the hell were you doing all your life that you never learned to use these well? Did your father or school fail you miserably? Unthinkable! Everyone knows how to hit a target with a sling/atlatl!
So I think it's telling, then, that the ubiquity of crossbows in warfare in Europe and Asia coincides with the majority of the population relying less and less on subsistence hunting. It's definitely not the only reason they were developed, but a big incentive for their adoption.
It's funny because, like the crossbow thing, it's one of the more popular examples of people assuming X technology is a necessarily ideal or better thing to have simply because that's what our own history is like. More unilineal evolution, tech tree stuff. As you said, it all depends on the available physical and social infrastructure along with a realistic means to practically develop this technology. Because the Americas developed without rolling wheels, her civilizations developed infrastructure that exploited terrain wheels would hate. Like Himalayan sherpas, Aztec porters were able to carry heavy loads across often surprisingly rugged terrain. Kinda makes me think, a wheeled infrastructure probably would go around these places at the cost of time. So I wonder how much time would actually be saved using human porters traversing non-roadable terrain.
Also, it's easy to discount how useful sleds are, and most people only think they have value over snow and ice. Sleds, especially if lubricated, can be used across nearly any type of terrain - sand, grass, mud, brush, probably even hard concrete depending on the design. Sleds still have a practical use in our age of wheeled vehicles on non-ice terrain; stoneboats are pulled by draft animals or tractors to move boulders, and when hunters need to pull deer out from thick brush without damaging the carcass, they use a sled. Watch how easily this sled glides over tall grass and bush. Sleds of this shape can also be brought over shallow water, since they're essentially boat-shaped too. The majority of nomadic people across and around the Great Plains made use of the travois, an A-frame sled that lifted itself off the ground in the forward end so that only the back ends touch land. This allowed people, dogs and horses to pull much more weight a longer distance than they could carry; even dogs could pull a hundred pounds of stuff or more across terrain that frequently troubled settlers' chuckwagons. All this isn't to say the wheel is inferior, because it's not when used correctly, or that there was no room for improvement in technology, because there always is no matter what or when, but that the societies of the New World were adapted well enough to their circumstances that wheels were neither necessary nor immediately practical.
But even in the Old World, the wheel can be abandoned. That was the case in the Middle East starting around the third or sixth centuries A.D., up to the nineteenth century. Why was this the case? Camels became popular. People started using them for transport instead of milk, and while they couldn't come up with an efficient harness, camels could still carry hundreds of pounds on their back, not have to drink frequently, and live off nothing more complicated than dry, inedible-looking desert flora. Technology isn't necessarily "advanced" on its own merit; as with everything else discussed, it's all about context. Otherwise it's just a different flavor of Rube Goldberg machine.
The fact that new crops were being spread into Mesoamerica as Cortez landed is actually really fascinating and a good one-liner to shake up that mindset of the pre-Colombian Americas as somehow frozen in time
Oh, man! And that's not even the half of it! The Americas were becoming more interconnected than ever and probably on the verge of a new era of connectedness that would have had untold effects on cultural, political and material change. North America north of the Rio Grande was covered in a criss-cross of land routes which also connected to the water routes of the Mississippi watershed in the east and routes to Mesoamerica in the south. In the Southeast, Mississippian chiefdoms created a mixed political sphere with thick buffer zones but also some increased cooperation, creating a sort of rivalrous coexistence in a cultural-political atmosphere not altogether dissimilar from 9th century Ireland or England in some places; Timothy R. Pauketat hypothesizes some of these chiefdoms may have been on the way to becoming states (if others were not early states themselves).
The northern Eastern Woodlands is no static Arcadia either; maize continues to travel further north as people breed it to be cold-hardy, spreading as far as North Dakota to the northwest and producing immense bounties in the growing Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacy to the northeast. But the Iroquois weren't the only game in town; to the east was the Algonquian Mawooshen Confederacy, and to the east were the confederacies of the Huron and Neutral Nation. Further west, the Ojibwe, having migrated from the east according to their birch-bark scrolls that constitute the most complex pictographic tradition north of the Rio Grande, formed the Council of Three Fires, capable of holding its own against the Iroquois and the Sioux.
Mesoamerica is an absolute hotbed of activity itself; as Pixel mentioned before, it's home to one of the most thriving merchant classes in the world, buying and selling goods from all over the region. The average Mesoamerican had greater access to a greater diversity of goods than a person from Europe, and the entire region was beginning to culturally "globalize" of sorts, the cultural hegemon being Central Mexico for the most part. The Mexica's formation of the Aztec Empire was necessitating the large scale construction of roads and relay systems, connecting Mesoamerica physically more than ever before. Having to keep track of all these cities started to shift the Mexica's pictographic writing system into something increasingly phonetic. The Aztecs were just beginning to make inroads into Maya polities, no doubt resulting in frontier garrisons put up, daughters being married to Maya lords and increased cultural diffusion. Meanwhile, the Maya were conducting long-distance coastal trade all over the Gulf and Caribbean, and had a number of different styles of government (as Pixel has also mentioned, and way better than I can) from things resembling constitutional monarchies to elective monarchies to federations. Further west, the Tlaxcala also had a strong republic whose resistance against the Aztecs showed great promise for survival, as well as the P'urepecha whose newly centralized kingdom was slowly gobbling up West Mexico.
And then Mesoamerica was being more frequently visited by Andean sailing ships, who had introduced bronze metallurgy to them a little over a thousand years ago and spread to new bronze-producing centers like the Huastec region and the southeastern Yucatan. And then the Andes of course had the empire of the Incas building their own roads and relocating people across vast distance, in turn spreading small bits of culture here and there as Tawantinsuyu continued to grow in size both to the north and southeast (bypassing the Mapuche who successfully resisted), colonizing as well as conquering.
And, so, you know all the cool stuff the Old World had? A lot of that's down to an interconnected cultural sphere sharing traditions and technologies. And then as the New World started to connect more frequently...who knows what would have happened next.
I don't care if I'm crazy, but I want to believe that Amazonia domesticated capybaras and that most of the modern representatives are the feral descendants of those rodents. No proof of course, but I refuse to listen to reason on that.
Hmm, would you settle for hutia? Taino from Jamaica to the Bahamas seem to have captured them, relocated them to other islands and kept them in corrals. Pretty tame and easy-breeding too.
Capybara are farmed today, but I don't know if an earlier culture would have considered that worthwhile considering their demanding care requirements. If they were any bigger, they could maybe fill the role of a water buffalo, otherwise they won't contribute much. Patagonian mara is slightly smaller but could be more promising.
Oookay! It's 3:45 AM and I should not have spent this long writing. Would love to get back to this and perhaps write a post of my own! Maybe take a whack at some Diamond myths. Like domestication. Or disease.
It really is kind of insane and vaguely demiurgic that Colombus and Cortez and all them basically came just at the eleventh hour to pick apart and genocide Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica just before a new transformative era of Nahautl-Maya-Inka exchange and new state formations incorporating the new material basis. If the processes of greater trade and conflict continued uninterrupted and potato and cassava was introduced deeper and deeper into North America while the newer more phonetic shorthands for Mesoamerican pictograms starting being picked up elsewhere for trade and accounting, then it would have been a whole 'nother ballgame.
Hmm, would you settle for hutia? Taino from Jamaica to the Bahamas seem to have captured them, relocated them to other islands and kept them in corrals. Pretty tame and easy-breeding too.
Capybara are farmed today, but I don't know if an earlier culture would have considered that worthwhile considering their demanding care requirements. If they were any bigger, they could maybe fill the role of a water buffalo, otherwise they won't contribute much. Patagonian mara is slightly smaller but could be more promising.
Generally I was thinking of capybaras being comparable to water sheep, so just being "farmed" for meat and hide. But as I said, I'll going full sicko-mode and saying that your trying to surpress my beliefs and I will be forced to call the cops to your premises.
And of course, I'm completel open to mara being included.
This is some great informative stuff, I'm familiar with most of it but I appreciate you laying out all the facts.
As to the quite fascinating extinct fauna of the Caribbean, in a perfect example of insular dwarfism/gigantism they included a dwarf species of ground sloth and a giant (like, three feet tall) stilt-legged owl. The latter almost certainly inspired the Chickcharney, a folkloric creature from the Bahamas which is, you guessed it, a magical stilt-legged owl (with arms, no less!).
EDIT: And yeah, it seems likely that the Americas were on the verge of something big, with the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the Andes increasingly coming into regular contact.
Oasisamerica: A cradle of civilization
On occasion, someone discovers how cool and enthralling the Ancient Americas actually are and they get all excited right before it then dawns on them. Oh no. There's hundreds of cultures across numerous different culture regions in two continents. These people were, much like their counterparts across the oceans, hardly monolithic: you got city-dwelling bronzeworkers, seal hunters, and aquaculturalists, just to name a couple of lifeways. So it's sometimes asked: where the hell do I even start? To that the general advice has typically been to start with the area you actually live in, if you live in the Americas. I guess mold worlders can do whatever they want.
(also don't take "mold" worlders to be disparaging, it is endearing)
I did not follow this advice. Or rather didn't get the chance to hear it. What started as a fascination with modern Latin America led to a gradual investigation of its past until I found myself deep in the Pre-Columbian rabbit hole, particularly enchanted with Ancient Mexico and Central America. No regrets really, if there's any good gateway drug it's Mesoamerica. So enthralled was I and maybe a little crazy that I set off in a tiny toyota to drive across Mexico and back (and hire a driver for Guatemala). But along the way down south, I made sure to stop at a few places in the desert. One could hardly visit the American Southwest, let alone live there all their life, without some passive awareness of its ancient inhabitants, whose culture we in some ways have appropriated. Strewn throughout the desert are 13,000 year old petroglyphs. Freeways in Arizona are decorated with mock-Hohokam art, and every third sign along the highway directs you to a historical location which, often, is 500-1500 year masonry architecture in the middle of nowhere down a dirt path. You could almost be misled into thinking we are proud of what this land used to be. The truth of course is that we aren't, but maybe we could be.
So, one checks in to a hotel in Phoenix (god what an awful place) and next morning drives out to the Pueblo Grande museum. Hardly anything remains of the platform mound and its town of some 4,000 inhabitants: the... "interesting" excavation techniques of the early 20th century were hardly kind to it, let alone the fact it is smack dab in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the Southwest. Nonetheless, some echo of what the Salt and Gila river basins was like in the past becomes apparent. Oh yes, this was a desert, but it was no empty desolation: the basin home to 40,000 people and dozens of villages.
Since the first couple decades of American encroachment in the region, the ruins of reasonably sophisticated adobe and masonry architecture were commonly attributed to some far northwestern projection of Mesoamerican, usually Aztec but sometimes even Maya, culture. Indeed we have some unfortunate names here like Aztec Ruins and Montezuma's Castle. Spaniards first made their forays here starting in the 1540s, when Hernando Alarcon took a ship up the Colorado River. It was they who coined the term 'pueblo', or town, to describe the people they encountered. By the 1950s however it was becoming apparent that this was not Mesoamerican at all but an independent development. 'Oasisamerica' became the preferred term to describe it in Mexico, coined by the same guy who came up with 'Mesoamerica' to describe Central Mexico and, what was by then increasingly obviously part of that same cultural sphere, the Maya world.
Oasisamerica stretched through the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua (and adjacent areas) across the border through the Four Corners region of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. And adjacent areas, including Clark County, Nevada. It was distinguished from "Aridamerica" by the local people's turning to intensive irrigation agriculture, sedentism, and stratification, in comparison to Aridamerica's more semi-nomadic disposition. However, modern geopolitical boundaries hindered understanding of these cultures: the United States-Mexico border creates an artificial delineation which in ancient times did not exist. American academia studied the region as "the American Southwest" almost entirely separately from Mexico, who insisted on the full extent of Oasisamerica known today. This trend is fading as of recent times - now, we work together, and English publications have taken up the name Oasisamerica.
So, naturally, after crossing the Mexican border, I was sure to make a stop at one of the major Oasisamerican sites: Paquime, also known as Casas Grandes. I was unaware I chose a route that was at the time undergoing "modernization", so I was somewhat unprepared for the uphill off-roading surrounded by semi-trucks that this entailed - but when I stopped in Janos to check my tire pressure, somehow the Sierra Madre Occidental was no match for a lil' toyota. Anyway, Paquime was 100% worth the hassle. Even by lofty Mesoamerican standards, this was a city: perhaps 12,500 people in a somewhat dense area, sustained by an elaborate system of canals, ruling over an area where some 30,000 more people may once have lived. This city-state was a key center of north-south trade (though it had local competitors), and flourished for 700 years, before water tables presumably diminished, then being repurposed as a presidio during the colonial period, and even saw action during the Mexican Revolution; where it housed machine gun nests, and some soldiers were buried there.
I had left my country with passive curiosity about Oasisamerica - I would return to it with a more active interest.
Although Oasisamerica just being a distant extension of Mesoamerica has long been debunked, that is not to say that the two regions were isolated from each other. Most important of these mutual influences was the Mesoamerican agricultural complex - the Three Sisters - spreading to the northwest (although seemingly not all at once). Oasisamerica would become the first place apart from its homeland to get this very productive complex, demonstrated with the La Playa site in Sonora, where evidence of sedentary agriculture is found dated to 2500 BC, and was definitely present in the American side by 2100 BC. It is also likely the origin of these crops later spreading eastward to the rest of North America. However, some adaptations of course had to be made. Local substitutes for some supplementary foodstuffs existed which were more water-efficient and drought-resistant (such as a local species of agave, used for all the same things as in Mesoamerica), but more ingenious was the deviation from the milpa cultivation method typical of Central America as local adaptations to the region's aridity. To save every drop of water, Oasisamericans invented the so-called "waffle garden" so called because of their grid of 14x14 inch squares divided by small mounds. Although this method was more space-intensive on a large scale, it allowed careful management of resource allocation: by compartmentalizing their fields in this way, farmers could carefully track exactly how much water is used to maintain healthy plants based on an optimal distribution of seeds, in contrast to other fields in which the allocation of water and nutrients may be inconsistent.
Oasisamericans appear to have taken to agriculture quite quickly - as already mentioned, the beginnings of sedentism already taking root (hehe) more than 4,000 years ago. Given the arid and semi-arid landscape of the region, it is worth asking how and why people would choose farming. One possible answer has been suggested, that it is the desert itself which encouraged agriculture. By farming, people could be assured of a reasonably consistent food supply, whereas they could not necessarily count on the scarce wild foods that could be harvested or hunted in such a region. In any case, although they had been early adopters and keen innovators on the Mesoamerican model, Mesoamerica would later develop something revolutionary: nixtamalization. Probably discovered by accident in Guatemala, it is a process by which maize is soaked in boiling limewater. Maize was already capable of modern yields by 3,000 BC, but nixtamalization not only improves the taste, but kills fungus, improves nutrition (allowing human digestion of certain vitamins present in corn and easing consumption of others) and prevents pellagra. It is no coincidence that it is not long after the invention of nixtamalization that Mesoamerica's first urban "civilization" - the Olmecs - appears.
Nixtamalization would take time to make its way northwest, even as it rapidly worked southward. But by 500 AD, Oasisamerica was equipped not only with nixtamalization (lacking in abundant limestone or mussel shells, it was usually done with alkali substances harvested from the ashes of certain plants and trees) but a number of corn supplements: turkey husbandry had begun, ceramics were adopted en masse, and a local form of bean (tepary) was domesticated while amaranth and cotton also arrived from the south. The period of the next few centuries is the height of interaction between the two regions, spearheaded by a mercantile system called the Aztatlan Complex. Rex's post has an awesome map showing routes and centers of trade in its northern half, I have some that cover the southern half in ... somewhat less detail.
In a prominent example of increasing interconnectedness of the Americas even during the Classic period, apart from precious minerals like obsidian and turquoise, living birds (especially macaws, a tropical bird held to be sacred among desert people and ritually sacrificed), and rubber balls, this trade also included metal objects, especially copper bells, made using the techniques which already by this time were diffused to West Mexico from the Andes. This all coincided with the first big flowering of Oasisamerican civilization: over the next 1,200 years, people increasingly chose to live in permanent towns, irrigate the desert, engage in long-distance trade, and come together to build great projects on a large scale. Some feats of Oasisamerican engineering include the Great Northern Road, constructed to facilitate trade between lowland desert and forests in the hills to maintain a steady supply of timber for fuel. In addition to the elaborate canal systems, some places had dams, where it was advantageous, such as Kawaika (afaik, literally means 'little lake', referring to the reservoir their dam created).
Perhaps most iconic and evocative of Oasisamerican architecture though is Pueblo Bonito.
Impressive even in ruins, and in its time comprising 5 stories and thousands of rooms, it is on a scale to match the Coliseum in Rome, and was probably the largest such building in the contiguous United States until the 19th century. Together with an agglomeration of neighboring towns connected by the Northern Road, something like 30,000 people could have lived in the canyons of the valley. So great it is that it is at the frontline of an ongoing debate among experts of the region: what the purpose of these structures was. There are basically two camps: that these were seasonally occupied ritual structures where in fact only a small number of people lived at any given time (which, if you've read almost anything about the Ancient Americas, is a tiresome conclusion that never ages well), and the one I personally like better, that these were fortified apartment complexes. This question is important as, if it is the latter, the number of rooms in Pueblo Bonito would suggest a large population, at least 6,000 - and so on for other similar complexes.
One issue lies with hearths. Despite its size, Pueblo Bonito does not have many hearths, so many have come to the conclusion that not many people could have actually lived there. However, a friend of mine who studies archaeology in the Middle East told me about evidence for communal hearths there, where multiple families or households may share a fire, essentially. Given the circumstances, I wonder if such a measure also makes sense here in Oasisamerica, where good fuel can be in relatively short supply and so it may be prudent to keep fewer fires going and just sharing the ones you have. It's probably just my headcanon, but it makes a fair bit of sense to me.
Mapping project
Maybe some of you have witnessed the labor of love that is the handcrafted map of 15th century Mesoamerica in my signature. Oasisamerica is next in line for that treatment. It is extremely work-in-progress, but I figured why not show off a bit of the most completed parts so far.
The latter almost certainly inspired the Chickcharney, a folkloric creature from the Bahamas which is, you guessed it, a magical stilt-legged owl (with arms, no less!).
This reminds me of an interesting tidbit I've picked up. Some native folklore talks about mythical creatures which... apparently... resemble horses. This has been used by some weird conspiracy people as evidence that horses existed in the Americas pre-contact (which is technically true, but more than 10,000 years ago). Some stuff has come out of Australia (seriously, Aboriginal Australia thread when?) which shows that oral tradition is capable of preserving surprising detail over surprising lengths of time, and in that article they also mention an example from the Americas the eruption of Mt Mazama which formed a crater lake in prehistory being possibly recorded in local tales. So I've long wondered if, in fact, a cultural memory of horses (however distorted) might also have survived the eons.
Let's dig in:
