Pre-American industrial "evolution"

[Quasqueton]

Why didn't the native people of the Americas go through the armor-firearms-industrial revolution "evolutionary" steps that Europe and Asia did?

Quasqueton

 

[Henry]

Without going into a political context, different societal stressors, resources, and developmental patterns, combined with different cultural driving forces. You could ask the same concerning African tribal nations of the 17th and 18th centuries.

 

[Wolf72]

oi ... that's a Master's thesis if I ever saw one ...

the Social Studies Teacher in me wants to give a long detailed explanation ... but the simpler side of me is thinking that they didn't need it as much and there wasn't as much conflict pushing them.

If you've ever seen the movie Black Robe about a Jesuit priest in North America you might remember one of the Natives complaining that just a few years before they met the white man they could cut down a tree and have it prepped to become a canoe without metal tools ... now without them they were near helpless.

and 17th and 18th C Africa was already impacted by European Powers ... not to mention their own tribal conflicts (many times complicated by Europeans).

 

[Aust Diamondew]

For one thing they never developed the metallurgical skills to make tools out of iron. Which suprises me.

 

[DMH]

The book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond goes indepth on this subject.

 

[Rel]

The book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond goes indepth on this subject.

Fer' serious. Great book that I think any GM who ever wants to build his own world would benefit from reading.

Among the big reasons was that there were no good domesticable animals of suitable size to add substantial "horsepower" to their efforts. The best the Americas had to offer was the Alpacca. Not a great animal to try and hitch to a plow, particularly in the rocky terrain where they were indigenous.

As an aside, the lack of living side by side with domesticated animals for large chunks of their history was a large contributor to the susceptability of native americans to european diseases.

 

[fusangite]

I think you're making a bit of a false assumption a la Marxism, Hegelianism or Spiral Dynamics that there is a particular set of "stages" through which societies go to get from point A to point B.

Interestingly, one of the small obscure nations in the Mexico Valley was smelting copper at the time of contact but nobody in the region really saw what they were doing as a big deal or especially useful.

With technology, there are two essential factors: whether you know it and whether your society has decided it is useful. Take the Chinese and gunpowder or Mexicans and the wheel -- just because you discover something doesn't mean you are going to make the best use of it.

And the answer to your question is: actually they did. Europeans had barely started making firearms when they got to the Americas -- and within a few generations, people in the Americas started using them. Just as the alchemical theories that the Europeans used to "invent" the gunpowder were stolen from the Arabs and Chinese (who independently invented gunpowder). Most technology is not independently developed.

Why did the Europeans start using firearms a century or so before other people? Who knows? But most tech, whether used by Europeans, Americans, Africans or Asians has come into being because information and materials have moved across cultures.

Can I ask what the purpose of your question is?

 

[Quasqueton]

Can I ask what the purpose of your question is?

D&D campaign world building, of course.

Quasqueton

 

[fusangite]

D&D campaign world building, of course.

Quasqueton

I guessed that but I was looking for a slightly more specific answer, as in: is this a question about how to design an advanced stone-aged culture, is it a question about the technological effects of geographic isolation, is it a question about giving a region or people a meso-American feel, is it a question about the introduction of firearms or other new deadly tech?

 

[Ferret]

I would assume that the fact that the tribes were spread out over a large continent, and there was not much need for land. I would also think that the underlying similarities wouldn't have spurned the need for war and then technology. Thias my best guess, I don't know anything about them, just making assumptions.