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hard to say. How did the Incas pack llamas? Rope and the Diamond hitch was as useful if not more useful in the allowing the transit of goods to places like Montana.

   

No, the Maya and the Inca had the wheel and used it in very limited applications. They did not use wheeled vehicles because they tore up the roads which had been constructed with no small effort.

The Aztecs only had wheels for toys. Archaeologists now note that much of what had been originally credited to the Aztecs was actually built by the Toltecs - who died out for an unknown reason.

While the American empires had the lever they never used wheels for mechanical advantage in the form of the pulley or the more advanced block & tackle.

There was an article not so far back (last five years) that detailed the cannibalism and human sacrifice of the Aztecs and it noted that the less a society was involved in cannibalism and human sacrifice the more advanced it was.

Had not the Spanish come along the Inca and the Aztecs were on a collision course as the two local superpowers and there would've been a war the Inca would've inevitably won.

The Inca stopped human sacrfice during times of war and the Aztecs radically increased the volume of sacrifices during a war - often killing their best soldiers at precisely the time they needed them the most.

Frankly, the Spanish did a favor to the smaller North American tribes by putting an end to the Aztecs.

The Aztecs are now suspected of carrying out a genocide against the Anasazi where the Aztecs cannibalized, enslaved, and sacrificed the Anasazi out of existence and they are also the prime suspects in the disappearance of the original tribes in the Los Angeles basin who disappeared around 1300 and were replaced by migration from the coastal and valley tribes.

Had not the Aztecs been stopped by the Spanish then the Hopi, Navajo, Apache, Cocopah, Yavapai, and etc. would certainly have been extinguished.

I'm not saying the Spaniards did these people any direct favours, but the Spanish action had a positive (if unintended) by-product.

   

Interesting, got a link or book title?

Everything I've read was that the Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans is the PC term) were forced to abandon their settlements in and around Mesa Verde because their population grew too much and they depleted the local resources (water and lumber mostly).

I think Atlantic Monthly did an article in 2001/2002 called 1491. I wonder if the book is an expansion of that topic?

   

I can't remember!



That's what happens when you put in for retirement, I guess!



The jist of the article was about how the Ansazi had inexplicably moved from being cliff dwellers to living in European-style hilltop fortresses and redoubts.

The disturbing issue was that Aztec bodies were found at some of the sites and fecal matter was found with human hemoglobin in it. The Mexicans were all ticked off at the implications that they had been cannibals and the usual PC crowd whined about it until the evidence was peer-reviewed and verified. There was even a program on PBS about it.

It is true.

   

True, but there has been debate and speculation that the Incas may have found Iron shortly before the Spanish arrived, adn that they may have invented the wheel, but never found a practical use for it.

But Dude, the llama is a good beast of burden...

   

Really? Cool!

Although I'm not sure about teh wheel tearing up Inca roads. Many were paved.



Damn straight!

The Inca were far better rulers than the Aztecs and were able to govern a larger empire more effectively.

About teh whole human sacrifice thing, while there was Human Sacrifice, ti was nowhere near the levels of the Aztecs or the Maya regardless of whether it was in times of war or not...

   

I recall the main roads were paved in some areas but in most they were gravel or just graded soil - and wheels tear those up in the wet weather that is common to the area. While these people were advanced with road building they were not at all like the Romans and many of their roads were really just well-maintained trails - albeit - some of which are in use today. And that fact is either a testament to the durability of the roads the Inca designed or it is a testament to the fact that too many Latin countries can't get their crap together to fix roads that are 500 years overdue for some work.

And, yes, the Inca were far better rulers and that was noted even by the Spanish who observed that not all of Inca expansion was by conquest. A number of peoples joined with the Inca voluntarily which indicates that living under Inca rule improved their security and their quality of life.

   

Yep. They would approach a tribe and say: "Look, you could either join us peacefully for the following reasons, or you can be stubborn and fight our massive army..."



I believe that in the mountains and in parts of the Coast it was well-paved, but other parts of teh coast and in the jungles the highway was marked with poles with rope connecting them...

   

they could also flee, but I could see where the Incas offered security to tribes as an empire.

   

The Mayans used up their forest area to white wash their walls. The lime like mixture though affective caused a great deforestation the is believed to one of the key things that lead to their ultimate fall.

   

Wasn't it also the fact that another invading tribe(their name escapes me at the moment) posed a very serious threat?

   

At this point their empire was in steep decline and ripe for the fall. Kind of like the roman empire.

Anyone know about the mound builders of North America? If they might have had use of the wheel or not.

   

They wouldn't have known what to do with iron as they had no real knowledge of smelting. The practical use of iron in the 'Old World' was possible only because they had centuries of experience with copper and later bronze. The process of converting the ore into workable iron would have been beyond them.

   

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