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Where I live, I have to have this conversation way too often with people. Early Modern Period (~1600 AD) Medieval Period (~1000 AD) (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/historymemes@piefed.social
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[–] 35 points 6 months ago* (12 children)

All of the above are true, right? They had advanced astronomy, agriculture, ceramics, economics, and systems of government while living in the Stone Age. Their tools and weapons were made of wood and stone, right? Not bronze?

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    Actually, many weapons were made from copper (and wood, but even modern firearms nowadays and military firearms up to round about the 1960s are partially made of wood).

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (8 children)

    As the person below mentioned, they very much had access to copper. We find quite a lot of copper artworks. We find surprisingly few copper tools. This makes sense. Pure copper kinda blows for tool making. Stone is harder and easier to get. And the problem lies with the purity. Other civilizations had to accidentally discover early metalworking and eventually stumbled upon bronze, being more durable than anything else at the time. North America, up near the great lakes actually has fairly pure raw copper deposits on the surface. A theory is that it led to the native people finding a "new" type of rock, but other than being distinct looking, it proved to be kinda useless.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    Fun fact: The ancient Egyptian pyramids were built with copper tools, not bronze. Bronze hadn't been invented yet; the Egyptians hadn't established the international trade required to get tin.

    They found that copper with arsenic impurities was harder and held its shape better than pure copper, so arsenical copper was cast into basic chisel shape and the edges were cold hammered to work harden them into something that will just about cut limestone for awhile I guess. They also used tube drills and flat saws. They would scatter a slurry of quartz sand and water on the stone to be cut, and then they would work a flat plate of copper back and forth over the sand or rotate a hollow cylinder of copper in place to make a straight cut or drill a hole respectively. In that way they could cut material as hard as granite.

    Now as a woodworking tool, even copper is vastly superior to stone in one key way: Ease of repair. You make the bit of an axe out of stone, it's considerably harder than copper, but it's brittle. It's easy to just break, and if you do that you'll never get it back to the same shape because to re-sharpen that bit means napping more of the edge away. A copper axe bit might dull easily, but it can be honed in a minute or so. It bends, rather than breaks.

    "Stumbling upon" bronze requires access to tin and knowledge of forging and casting technology. Tin and copper are seldom found near each other, and even if you've got tin it needs to have occurred to you to try melting copper. If you only ever cold work copper, you're not going to figure out bronze.

    Hernan Cortes landed on the Yucatan, riding a horse wearing an iron breastplate and carrying a steel sword, and found the Maya and Aztecs living in societies not dissimilar to the Old Kingdom Egyptians. A dude on foot wearing a jaguar skin swinging a wooden club studded with bits of sharp obsidian is scary. A dude on horseback with a matchlock musket and a steel saber is scarier. Imagine a galleon full of 16th century Spaniards dropped anchor at the mouth of the Nile in 2600 BCE and rode into Khufu's Memphis. That's pretty much exactly what went down in what is now Mexico City.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    Imagine a galleon full of 16th century Spaniards dropped anchor at the mouth of the Nile in 2600 BCE and rode into Khufu’s Memphis. That’s pretty much exactly what went down in what is now Mexico City.

    This bears so little resemblance to what happened that it’s essentially 1500s Spanish propaganda. Archaeological remains from first contact show mass civil uprisings of peoples who had been conquered by the Aztecs prior to Spanish contact, not OP European kill bots plowing through thousands of Native zombies. You fire that musket once and then what are you doing for the next 30 seconds while the other 5000 screaming warriors are still headed over to kill you? That’s why they had to flee Tenochtitlan until the plague they brought with them did the work for them. Even then it still took them 3 months to retake the city; pretty poor performance all things considered.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    any books or whatever you'd recommend to read up the the subject?

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    Conquistadors and Aztecs by Stefan Rinke and When Montezuma Met Cortez by Matthew Restall are good reads. And if you feel like waiting until tomorrow I can access my school stuff and tell you the name of a good documentary on it, but for the life of me I can’t remember or find the title right now.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Brain fart, the documentary I was thinking of was actually about the Incas! But it’s the same time period, it’s PBS Nova: The Great Incan Rebellion if you can find it anywhere. Unfortunately PBS doesn’t seem to host it online anymore.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Archaeological remains from first contact show mass civil uprisings of peoples who had been conquered by the Aztecs prior to Spanish contact, not OP European kill bots plowing through thousands of Native zombies.

    Yes to the first; Spanish conquest would have been impossible under Cortes without the alliance with anti-Aztec native polities. But to the second, the Spaniards were OP killbots - just not enough to take on the entirety of Mesoamerica with an expeditionary force, as is sometimes imagined. At the Battle of Centla, some ~500 Spanish troops under a man with no military experience successfully held off and forced the surrender of several thousand native troops.

    Steel, guns, and cavalry are massive advantages.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Both aztecs and their rivals were decimated by disease, that was the key. Given time, they would have been able to master horse riding, armor and more modern weapons, as they actually did in one of the last battles in Xochimilco just a year after the fall of Tenochtitlan, but too few remained to make a difference.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Both aztecs and their rivals were decimated by disease, that was the key.

    In the long-run, in terms of why there wasn't a resurgence of native polities, sure. In the short-term, the ability of a small expeditionary force of Europeans to exercise disproportionate force (making them a desirable ally for the Aztecs' enemies) was the key element of the overthrow of the Aztec polity, not disease.

    Given time, they would have been able to master horse riding, armor and more modern weapons, as they actually did in one of the last battles in Xochimilco just a year after the fall of Tenochtitlan, but too few remained to make a difference.

    I'm unfamiliar with that particular battle, but I'm familiar with later examples. Those weapons also need to be produced in large enough quantities to make a difference, as well as proficiency with them developed. Horse riding is a notoriously difficult skill to master, and metallurgy itself is far from simple. Being able to use captured equipment at a basic level is not nearly the same as being proficient with it, or being able to equip an entire cohesive military unit with it. Disease does not explain battlefield imbalances, which is what I'm referencing.

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