Native American Empire

[KrazyHorse]

I was mostly responding to Odin.

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by Frogger
I was mostly responding to Odin.

[Rosa Rosanna Dana Voice]

Never mind.

[/Rosa Rosanna Dana Voice]

[Odin]

Originally posted by Frogger
I was mostly responding to Odin.

I got that from my history book.

[Ethelred]

Since wheeled vehicles were unknown in the Andes, the roads sometimes made steep, stepped ascents and descents along mountain ridges and through valleys. The road system linked an area from modern Ecuador with the northwest of Argentina. The roads centered on Cuzco and ran out to the four provinces of the empire.

Or perhaps with that kind of road wheeled transport was never used. I am speaking of roads that are fit for wheeled transport. Of course the Incas and Aztecs had roads. They just weren't fit for wheels. All those mountains are hard to deal with.

Since there are some indications that wheels were known in the New World the question is whether the roads weren't fit for wheels because they hadn't figured out wheeled transport or that they never developed wheeled transport because the roads weren't fit for them.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by Tuberski
According to the Book of Mormon, which most here would call a work of fiction, but that I feel has a ring of truth to it, the Amerindians at one time were highly advanced.
At least on par with Europe and the Med(not going to try to spell it out) Sea area.

There isn't a bit of archeological evidence to support the BOM. No chariots or horses or a sign of the cultures that are in the BOM. Its clearly a complete fabrication. Only a strongly held religious belief could lead to one to any other conclusion.

And I don't even consider myself a true mormon.

Swallowing any of that stuff is shows that Morman beliefs are still part of you. Mormons have been looking for evidence to support the BOM for a very long time. They have found nothing. There is however evidence that Joseph Smith was a bit of con artist even before he faked the Book of Mormon. He was arrested for something called crystal gazing which was a con game at that time. The details are fuzzy enough thats its hard to tell if the charges were dropped or not.

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by Ethelred

There is however evidence that Joseph Smith was a bit of con artist even before he faked the Book of Mormon. He was arrested for something called crystal gazing which was a con game at that time. The details are fuzzy enough thats its hard to tell if the charges were dropped or not.

There is "evidence" that he was a charlatan, but the evidence is "fuzzy" when it comes to the charges?

Please......

[molly bloom]

The llama in agriculture-

“..since the llama was never used –and is unsuited- as a draught animal, agricultural tools were naturally manual one person implements; the plough was unknown. The principal tool was a strong wooden spade, the taclla, generally called a foot-plough. Breaking up the ground was arduous work.

The punas, the high grassed tablelands, were -and are- naturally unsuited to agriculture, but used for grazing. The cultivated fields are in better-watered and more protected valleys. These tend to be narrow and steep, so that there is a relatively small amount of level land, and the steeper slopes were terraced with retaining walls of stone.

Because of their sure-footedness, endurance, and ability to go without water, llamas make very satisfactory pack-animals; moreover they graze on the upland plateaux or punas, which are unsuited to agriculture. They will not carry a load much over 100 lbs, however, and are seldom ridden, as they tire and baulk quickly under a man’s weight. They never travel swiftly, like a horse or a mule, and are almost always driven in pack-trains, covering a distance of only about nine to twelve miles (15-20 km. ) a day.”

J. Alden Mason, Chapter 8 , Economic Life, The Ancient Civilizations of Peru

So no llama cavalry and no dray llamas.

[Capt Dizle]

Well, so ends the great Apolyton llama debate, and so begins the great discussion of the book of mormon and a man named Smith.

If the Mormon thing was a big hoax, and as a Baptist, I tend to believe in that vein, how was it possible for Smith to build so much out of whole cloth? And how honest of Tubes to lay himself bare like this. Tubes, I salute you.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by Tuberski




There is "evidence" that he was a charlatan, but the evidence is "fuzzy" when it comes to the charges?

Please......

No. The results are fuzzy. The charge was clear.

http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no95.htm

http://wind.prohosting.com/rlanwood/trial.htm

[mindseye]

Why do so many of you persist in thinking that the Amerinds would've taken centuries to develop politically and technically while living alongside European-based cultures? Just look at how they adopted to the technologies of the horse (as jimmytrick noted) and gun.

Do you really think they would have stuck with "scraping buffalo hides" when their neighbors were using steam engines, etc? That doesn't make sense. Surely, if given a chance, they would've developed right alongside the caucasian cultures, picking up any beneficial ideas and practices.

After all, do Amerinds now live in teepees and wear hides? No, they can drive cars and use computers just like the "white man".

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by mindseye
Why do so many of you persist in thinking that the Amerinds would've taken centuries to develop politically and technically while living alongside European-based cultures?

Because that is not the question. The question is WITHOUT contact. After all contact introduced diseases which destroyed the Amerind cultures even where there was no conquest as happened in the Mississippi Vally.

Since it took thousands of years to go from the level Egypt was at when the pyramids were build I see no reason to think that things would have gone faster in the New World. In fact I see reasons for it to be slower since there weren't as many different major cultural regions that could continue on while another region was experiencing a dark age.

[mindseye]

It's really funny to hear talk of how the Chinese respect nature. That professor who said that really should visit China.

Chinese are terrible, terrible litter bugs who think nothing of throwing trash right into manicured flower gardens as they stroll by. No exaggeration, you see this all the time. Even in nature preserves they heave trash out bus windows or just drop it as they stroll. I would also point to the massive industrial pollution, and attitudes towards animals if you want to know how they really feel about nature.

Recently I took a day trip to a neighboring island, just to escape the concrete jungle for an afternoon. One of my students asked "Why do you want to go there? There is nothing but trees!"

I think it's pretty hard to argue that historically, they did not industrialize because they felt they were part of nature. After all, they mined, smelted iron, changed the course of rivers, replaced forests with fields, and practiced advanced metallurgy from early on (the circa 200 BCE Terracotta Army has chrome-plated weapons! ).

They came close to industrializing several times. I think the reasons they failed to had little if anything to do with attitudes towards nature. That's just kooky.

[MrFun]

According to Jared Diamond, the dimensional shape of Eurasia and the Americas are dramatically different from each other.

Most transfers of technology, crops, ideas, and people in Eurasia went roughly east to west, and west to east with less substantial geographic obstacles.

In the Americas, the Panama region acted as a bottleneck that was corked shut by dense tropical forest, and among other geographical obstacles that hindered similar transfers from occurring, north to south, and south to north.

[mindseye]

Why do so many of you persist in thinking that the Amerinds would've taken centuries to develop politically and technically while living alongside European-based cultures?

Because that is not the question. The question is WITHOUT contact.

From the initial post:

Or if the US had stayed east of the Mississippi, could the remaining Native Americans have ever really compeated with the US?

[Sikander]

A good thread for the most part, with Calagastia, Imran and Paiktis doing their usual job of cluttering things up with wild assertions.

A few points that I think important to the discussion.

1) The point made earlier about the superiority of Meso-American agriculture is a good one. This indeed allowed the creation of very large cities, though they were not built in the typical Eurasion mold, ie as small as possible in order to cram as much into the walls as possible. Rather they were sprawling affairs like American urban areas today, except that where the suburbs are in a typical American city stood numerous gardens and farms. This reduced the importance of long distance transportation to some extent.

2) The pre-Columbian residents of North America vary considerably. While the vast majority utilized some agriculture, most groups could not survive on the fruits of their agricultural labors alone.

3) I have to take slight issue with Ethelred's discounting the importance of domesticated animals. One thing not taken into account in the thread thus far is their importance as a means for the introduction of disease into the human population. Were there a virulent enough American disease the Conquistadors would have been decimated as well, and it is likely that European penetration into the Western Hemisphere might have been as slowed as it was into parts of Africa. More domestic animals would have created more opportunity for this entirely accidental but brutally efficient means of warfare.

The Americas were already at enough of a disadvantage by being situated mostly north to south rather than east to west, where plants and animals domesticated in one Cultural Area (like Meso-America) were not suitable for and could not make the journey to another Cultural Area (like the Andes). Eurasians thus had a number of advantages accruing from their east-west orientation, with both crops and animals moving in both directions. Trade is another critical means of spreading disease, and the Americans traded very little from one region to the next.

All of this stuff is right out of Guns, Germs and Steel, an interesting book. I don't have the same respect for Diamond when he strays from his own area of expertise (biology, natural history) and into History, Archeology, Sociology etc., as he has the typical "white man's guilt" common amongst the masochistic liberals, but critically read the book makes many good points.

4) The Amerinds did pick up quickly on Western Tech. The Cherokee especially bought into the techniques used by Europeans in North America, as did the residents of Mexico etc. This went hand in hand with the obliteration to a large extent of their own cultures, by force or by necessity.