Ten Forgotten Indian Innovations

Most people in the United States have heard a skewed history of the Americas before Columbus. In the popular account, the New World was a vast wilderness populated by scattered, nomadic tribes who traveled with game herds, used bows and arrows, and slept in teepees. They knew nothing of possession and lived off what nature provided. In this version of history, American Indians were stuck in the Stone Age.

When Europeans arrived in this unsullied land in 1492, they used metal, horses, and large ships to subjugate a technologically inferior people who had never seen such things. The people of the Old World celebrated their conquest by tearing down forests to plant crops and introducing alcohol to Indian society. According to the popular narrative, Europeans brought technology to the New World and Indians suffered for it.

As many historians are coming to realize, this interpretation of the conquest of the Americas is bunk. Most Indians in 1492 were not the hunter-gatherer nomads seen in westerns. Instead, many lived in agricultural societies, some with populations in the millions. And although Europeans did have technological advantages over the people of the Americas, they weren 't as pronounced the popular narrative portrays.

In fact, Indians had many of the same technologies as Europeans, but their knowledge wasn 't shared throughout the New World. Owing to the diverse geography of the Americas, innovation did not spread as well as it did in the Old World. It took far longer for ideas to spread across the jungles and mountains separating North and South America than it would take for the same innovation to travel across the smooth Siberian plains between Europe and China.

Indians were not as technically advanced as Europeans, but they weren 't as far behind as is commonly believed. Here are ten technologies and innovations we don 't usually associate with American Indians.

10. Writing

Like their European counterparts, some Indians had writing. For example, the Mayans of the Yucatan Peninsula used hieroglyphics images to tell the story of heroic ancestors. Like English, Mayan writing reads left to right, symbols represent different phonetic pronunciations, and a symbol 's meaning can change based on its place in a sentence. Mayans covered their temples in this writing, carved stories on wood, and even painted epics on long scrolls, known as codices.

We don 't associate Indians with writing because Spanish conquistadors destroyed as much of the Mayans ' literature as they could find. Viewing the language as heretical to the teachings of the Catholic Church, Spanish priests burned countless codices and killed anyone capable of translating the language. By the 17^th century, no one could read or write Mayan. Only in the 20^th century were linguists able to decipher some, but not all, of the Mayan texts that survived the Spanish purge.

The Mayans were not the only Indians recording their history, but to date they 're the only ones we 've been able to translate. The Incas of the Andes Mountains used a series of knots called quipus in what may have been a form of writing, and the Aztecs and Olmecs had symbols that resembled Mayans glyphs, but we don 't know what they mean. So Indians had writing, it 's just that a lot of it 's been destroyed and we can 't translate much of what remains.

9. The Wheel

One of the most cited examples of Indian technological backwardness is their lack of wheeled vehicles. Europeans never saw Indians using wheels and for a long time, archaeologists found no evidence of indigenous New World wheels. Wheels, of course, make life easier. It takes much less effort to pull a cart bearing 200 pounds of cargo than to carry this same weight on one 's back. With a wheel being a very beneficial, yet simple to conceive invention, it seemed that Indians would have used them.

One group of Central American Indians did, just not in the way most would expect. In the late 1800s, archeologists started digging up wheeled 'toys ' all over Central America. These small clay figurines came in the shape of dogs and jaguars and had two sets of wheels to permit movement on flat surfaces. The wheels on the toys resemble modern wheels 'they detach and sit at the ends of an axle.

It 's unclear why wheels failed to spread beyond Central America and why the Indians of this region only used them for toys. Some historians argue that the geography of the Americas (especially in places with advanced Indian civilizations) made it more difficult to travel with a wheeled cart than it would be on foot. Others say that because Indians lacked beasts of burden to pull carts, it made wheeled vehicles less beneficial to Indians than they were to Europeans with horses. Whatever the reason, Indians had wheels, they just didn 't use them the way we do today.

8. Domesticated Animals

Movies like Dances with Wolves always show American Indians riding horses. Although a warrior on horseback was a common sight on the plains in the 1800s, there were no horses in the New World when Europeans arrived in 1492, as the first people to arrive in the Americas some 15,000 years before had (probably) hunted them into extinction. With no horses left to domesticate and with the handful of large animals remaining resistant to domestication, the people of the New World had no large beasts of burden when Europeans arrived.

This led the newly arrived Europeans to conclude that Indians never bred animals, something that isn 't true. American Indians had plenty of domesticated animals, just none the size of a horse or a cow. Like the people of the Old World, Indians selectively bred animals to make them more beneficial to humans. They domesticated animals for companionship, protection, and as sources of food and clothing.

As in Europe, Indians bred dogs to be kind to their owners, but unfriendly to strangers and animals. Apache Indians even bred and trained dogs to drag teepee-laden travoises. The Incas raised llamas to breed in captivity and to carry small packs along mountain paths. Indians even had ranches stocked with animals bred to be docile and palatable to humans. Like Europeans had done with cattle and chickens, Indians domesticated turkeys, ducks, and guinea pigs for consumption. The people of the Andes even bred and raised alpacas for their wool in the same manner Europeans raised sheep. So Indians had domesticated animals, just not big ones.

7. Sailing ships

Much like the Europeans who sailed to the New World, at least one group of Indians had large ocean going vessels that they used to explore and colonize new lands. When Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro first sailed off the coast of Peru in 1526, he captured a large balsa sailing vessel manned by Incan Indians carrying hundreds of pounds of gold, jewels, and fabric. Constructed of thousands of woven reed fibers and measuring over thirty meters in length, the boat used cloth sails and paddles for propulsion. The vessel carried some twenty sailors, weighed over ten tons, and held ten tons of cargo.

Andean Indians had been building balsa rafts for thousands of years before Europeans arrived in the New World. Initially, the boats ferried fishermen, but over time Indians began using the vessels for trade and exploration. According to one legend, shortly before Europeans arrived in South America, the Incans had sailed as far west as the Galapagos Islands and had perhaps made it all the way to Easter Island, over 2,000 miles from the coast. In recent years, historians reconstructed some of these balsa boats to see if such a journey was possible. Not only were the vessels seaworthy over long distances, one adventurer even sailed from western South America to the Caribbean.

We don 't think of Indians as seafarers, because Incan ports were some of the first places to be subdued by the Spanish. Spain 's method of boat construction replaced the Incan way. Indians continued to construct small reed boats to fish, but gone were the large seagoing vessels seen by Pizarro.

6. Cotton Clothing

Another common misconception about Indians is that they all wore fur clothing, if they wore anything at all. Most Indians in pop culture come clad in loincloths or wrapped in buffalo robes. Although many New World inhabitants dressed in this manner, Indians in the Andes, New Mexico, and Mesoamerica wore cotton clothing just like their European counterparts.

Over thousands of years, Indians cultivated a type of cotton known as upland cotton that was easier to weave and softer than any type of cotton grown in the Old World. To make clothing, Indians extracted fibers from cotton bolls and wove them into cloth, creating a fabric that was much more delicate and breathable than that worn by most Europeans of the time.

The Aztecs became so efficient at weaving cotton that they created cotton armor that could repel arrows almost as efficiently as steel armor. Because Aztec cotton armor was much more flexible and cool than metal armor, yet still offered protection from arrows, some Spanish conquistadors shed their steel armor and donned Aztec cotton.

5. Plumbing and Irrigation

Although not nearly as advanced as modern plumbing, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had a series of aqueducts that brought fresh water into the city and dumped dirty water into an adjacent lake. A marvel of the ancient world, Tenochtitlan aqueducts had two separate pipes, allowing for maintenance on one pipe without a disruption in water flow. The Aztecs 'who liked to bathe twice a day 'even had springwater fed bathhouses. When Spanish conquistadors arrived in Tenochtitlan in 1519 they were astonished, as most had never seen such complex engineering in Europe.

The Incans also had aqueducts and Indians throughout the Americas built levees, dammed rivers, and constructed irrigation canals to provide water for crops. The Pueblo Indians of the dry U.S. Southwest dug miles of ditches to redirect mountain runoff to their fields and Amazonian Indians even rerouted creeks to create fish farms.

4. Terraforming

Owing to that one commercial with the crying Indian looking at a litter-strewn beach, many people believe that Indians were environmentalists who took from the land only what they needed and nothing more. For most Indians, this couldn 't be further from the truth. Although some Indians 'like those of the North American Plains 'were hunter-gatherers, most were farmers who burned down vast swaths of forestland to grow crops. In fact, Indians burned so many trees that some scientists argue that the vast amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by this ritual caused a mild form of global warming. Indians were not environmentalists.

The people of the Americas not only burned down forests, they changed the land for their own benefit. In the Amazon jungle, one of the most hostile environments on the planet, Indians were able to create cities with tens of thousands of people by burning a swath of jungle the size of France, and then tilling pottery, charcoal, and bone into the dirt. The resulting soil mixture, known as terra preta, allowed the Indians to plant more crops on the land, which meant more people and bigger cities.

Indians in the Andes went so far as to carve terraces into mountains to better grow crops and inhabitants of plains regions annually burned millions of acres of grassland to create pasture for buffalo.

We probably think of Indians as environmentalists because few Europeans saw the Americas before most of its inhabitants died of European diseases. With some 80 percent of the population of the New World succumbing to disease, forests grew over plowed fields and former villages. When the Pilgrims arrived in New England in 1620, they thanked God that he had given them tilled fields while also killing the Indians who had done the tilling.

3. Genetic Engineering

Indians not only terraformed the earth for their advantage, they also changed the very nature of plants to make them more beneficial for humans. Perhaps the best example of this is corn. Indians created corn by selectively planting the biggest, most caloric kernels of an almost inedible grass called teosinte. After thousands of years of selectively cultivating teosinte, corn was born. Using a similar process, Indians turned ill-tasting tubers into the highly caloric potatoes we enjoy today.

It can be argued that Indians cultivated plants better than Europeans, as corn and potatoes provide more calories per acre than European and Asian staples like wheat and rice.

2. Metallurgy

Although the vast majority of people in the Americas used stone tools and weapons when Europeans arrived in 1492, a handful of sedentary Indians utilized metal. Most of this metal was of the malleable variety 'gold, silver, copper 'that is easy to manipulate, but too soft to make into weapons. As such, Indians used these metals to create artwork, hammering gold and silver nuggets into beautiful figurines and jewelry.

Manipulating soft metals is easy. Working with steel and bronze 'made by combining a specific mixture of metals at high temperatures 'is not. Although no Indians had steel in 1492, Indians in the Andes had been working with bronze for nearly 1000 years. Not as resilient as steel, bronze is nonetheless a strong metal born of a complicated metallurgical process, a process considered to be a stepping stone to creating steel. The Indians of the Andes used bronze in axes and maces, but because the components to create bronze were rare in the Andes, bronze weapons were only issued to the best soldiers and elites.

It is unclear how far the people of the Andes were from creating steel when Europeans arrived, but it is safe to say that at least some Indians had entered the Bronze Age by 1492.

1. Alcohol

A common misconception about Indians is that they didn’t have alcohol before 1492. Because of this, Indians had not evolved livers capable of processing alcohol when Europeans introduced spirits to the New World, and they were not aware of the dangers of excessive drinking. Unable to regulate their alcohol intake, many Indians fell into the throws of alcoholism. Families suffered and tribes split.

Although it is true that alcoholism had an adverse effect on American Indians, the disease did not affect all Indians the same. This may be because many Indians imbibed alcohol before Europeans arrived and some Indians even warned their people about the dangers of alcohol. The Indians of Central Mexico, for example, created a potent alcoholic mixture from agave plants named pulque sometime around 200 C.E. At first, Indians of all social classes drank pulque, usually at annual celebrations.

It seems that by the time the Aztecs came to power in Mexico in the 14th century, many Indians had taken to heavy drinking, which had led to an increase in violent crime. Witnessing the dangers unregulated alcohol consumption presented, the Aztecs passed laws against public drunkenness, making the offense punishable by death. In some areas the Aztecs only allowed the elderly and pregnant women to drink pulque, people less likely to get drunk and rowdy. Perhaps owing to this exposure to alcohol and its dangers, the Aztecs did not succumb to alcoholism at the same rate as North American Indians who 'd never before consumed liquor.

Conclusion

This list isn’t an attempt to portray Indians as the technological equals of Europeans in 1492. Europeans were more scientifically advanced than Americans Indians in almost every way and even the most highly developed Indians in 1492 were 1000s of years behind European nations technology-wise.

Nor is this list trying to say that Europeans would have been unable to conquer the Americas had Indians been better able to pass knowledge from one tribe to another. Disease would still have killed 80 percent of Indians, rendering knowledge of wheels or animal husbandry insignificant. And even if every American Indian knew how to create bronze weapons, they would have been unable to compete with the industry and steel of Europeans.

This list is simply an effort to show that Indians had many technologies that we don 't give them credit for. It 's also an attempt to show that Indians weren 't just stone age hunter-gatherers. They invented many of the same things Europeans did, but their technologies remained isolated because of the diverse geography of the Americas.

Brad Folsom

 

Coming Soon: Five more Indian Innovations

 

Sources

Unless otherwise stated, photos are from wikipedia or wikicommons.

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the World Before Columbus. New York: Vintage Press, 2006.

Mann, Charles C. 1493: Uncovering the World Columbus Created. New York: Vintage Press, 2012.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1999.