Hot answers tagged native-americans
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According to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, one of the first steps from a hunter-gatherer society towards civilization is agriculture. While agricultural societies appeared all over the world, the old world had a more suitable environment, especially with regards to the grains and large animals that lived there.
The old world had wheat, which is ...
20
Columbus is traditionally (and indeed still) credited with the discovery of the Americas for a number of reasons, some dubious but others quite legitimate. First of all, we must qualify this discovery as discovery by Old World people. Clearly, the original "discovery" by the human species was some 40,000 years ago by the ancestors of the indigenous ...
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I'm afraid I know nothing about which pre-Columbian cultures had any metalworking, but I can answer why metallurgy was, in 1492, very rare in the Americas but widespread in Eurasia.
Paraphrasing liberally from Guns, Germs and Steel, which I happen to be reading at the moment, Native American peoples were largely hunter-gatherers. Metalworking, like any ...
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The only ones I have ever seen were referenced in the Columbian Exchange as being passed to the Old World:
bejel or nonvenereal syphilis
Chagas disease which is more of a parasite from Central/South America
pinta which is similar to bejel and another form of syphilis
Mostly the effects, if you believe Jared Diamond, came more from the crowded conditions ...
7
The earliest recorded example of bacteriological warfare seems to be the Hittite plague (1715 BC):
A long-lasting epidemic that plagued the Eastern Mediterranean in the 14th century BC was traced back to a focus in Canaan along the Arwad-Euphrates trading route. The symptoms, mode of infection, and geographical area, identified the agent as Francisella ...
6
The railroad certainly received its share of harassment. Livestock was continuously rustled by tribal raiders, who also boldly shot up work crews and terrorized isolated station towns. Particularly vulnerable were route surveyors, who struck out on their own ahead of the work crews -- and sometimes paid for it with their lives. Twice, Native Americans ...
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From what I've been able to dig up, the answer appears to be yes, but not as much as you'd think.
It appears the Telegraph companies saw the danger every bit as clearly as you did, and actively took steps to prevent it. They made sure to meet with the cheifs through whose territory they ran lines, hired them to help construct the lines, and generally took ...
6
Depends on what you mean by advanced. If you mean in terms of metalworking, the lack of easily exploited tin deposits in the Americas means that a bronze age never took off. There was a copper-working culture surrounding the Great Lakes, and it pre-dated the chalcolithic in the old world by a few thousand years, but this lasted only as long as the accessible ...
6
This is highly speculative and subjective. After all, you put forth very valid contenders to hold the title, particularly the natives and the Vikings.
But what I find most likely is that Columbus was the first to do it for profit. He (and those who paid him) were the first to capitalize on it. The Viking settlement didn't last all that long, and didn't ...
5
Here's what evidence they had:
The word "Croatan" carved into a post of the fort
The word "Cro" carved into a nearby tree
All the houses and fortifications had been dismantled (They weren't destroyed)
They didn't carve a Maltese Cross into any tree (John white instructed them to do so, if they were forced to move)
Because there was no cross, John White ...
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One of the main topics mentioned in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is that communicable diseases such as the Old World diseases (plague, smallpox, typhus, cholera and measles in particular) generally made their way to humans from close contact to domesticated animals (cattle mainly, but also pets and vermin).
Almost all the large mammals of the ...
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Can't help much with the Massachusetts area, but if you're interested in pre-European America in general, I definitely recommend the book 1491 by Charles Mann.
As Michael points out, a lot of what we know is based on European accounts. And those authors had their own axes to grind, consciously or not - a man trying to turn the local hunting ground into a ...
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Australian cultures did not have access to good starter crops. This is explored at depth in an allo-history available here: http://alternatehistory.net/discussion/showthread.php?t=110941 on the topic of what crops could have been good starter crops.
Indigenous Australian cultures were highly developed, including development of aquacultural structures and ...
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Yes, it was paid to some degree. The catch was that it was paid slowly due to bureaucratic sloth (possibly intentional) and were diverted in some cases by government agents and tribal leaders. Payment vouchers were issued and ledgers were kept of these disbursements however these records are often incomplete and probably inaccurate.
You can find more info ...
4
If you are talking about the Omelc/Aztec/Maya, at war with the Cree or Inuits, I very much doubt this ever happened, as, 1) They had no quarrel, and so, no reason to go to war. 2) They had no way of marching across the USA, according to my Google Earth measurements, the distance from New York/New Jersey to Honduras, is 4,000 km. An average human can walk 5 ...
4
First off, what is today the state of Oklahoma is the result of three "leftover" pieces of territory. The eastern part of the state was reserved for the "Civilized" (aka farming) tribes pushed out of the American Southeast. The western half was later divied up to other tribes (eg: the Osages) as they got pushed out of their territories. Generally they ...
4
Columbus is credited with discovering "America" (the "Indies," actually), because he SET OUT to do so.
He had been trying to find a trade route west, to India, and thought that he had done so; i.e., that what later became the "Americas" was "India" to him, which is why he called the locals "Indians."
Other peoples, the Vikings, the Chinese, and others ...
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Actually, the Indian territory was established in the 1830s and originally included almost all of the land between the current states of Arkansas and Missouri and on up into the current state of Nebraska. Almost immediately, white settlers began to move into the territory.
Because the fertile land was so desirable for the white settlers, the 1854 Kansas ...
3
On the topic of the Aztecs, an intriguing book on this subject is Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control, by Ross Hassig.
The Aztecs were an extremely war-like civilization, that were constantly attacking and subjugating their neighbors. Interestingly, though, their style of warfare was quite different from what we are familiar with from ...
3
According to wikipedia, the current title for the earliest documented use would be the Hittites with the bacterial disease Tularemia in the mid second millenium BC. According to the texts, infected people were sent into enemy territory to help spread the plague there.
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You could look at the diaries of the colonists of the time, such as Anne Hutchinson who was captured by Native Americans, or John Winthrop and see what they note about the natives at the time. The problem with many of the tribes in the Massachusetts Bay area is that many were displaced by the Bay Colony and from diseases that were rampant up and down the ...
3
Historically, civilizations have developed best along peninsulas: mostly surrounded by water, but with one land bridge. Egypt was a peninsula (between the Nile River, Red Sea, and Mediterranean). So was Babylon (between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers). India is one large peninsula, as was ancient China (between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers). Greece and ...
2
Well, Africa is in the Old World, but most of sub-Saharan Africa was developed less than the Maesoamerican civilizations. Pre-Christian North-East Europe was also at the stage comparable with American cultures. Siberia and North Asia were less developed also.
That is, only the European civilization developed from Classic Antiquity had significant advantage ...
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The most well-known land run is of course the Great Run of 1889, in which the land now containing Oklahoma City and its suburbs was settled. That land, known as the Unassigned Lands, was originally part of the Creek and Seminole lands. But after the Civil War, in which many tribes allied with the Confederate States, the U.S. government punished them by ...
2
Politics.
An English fleet under John Cabot (actually Giovanni Caboto from Genoa) was the first (after the vikings) to land on mainland North America.
After the American Revolution an Englishman wasn't favorite for "founder of our nation" national hero status and so Columbus legend appears in the early 1780s. He then really took off in chicago 100 years ...
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A possible explanation is that he simply received the name of the saint on whose day he was baptized. That would be 11 April in this case. Wikipedia says he traveled to the mission on September 24 and was baptized "soon". Can "soon" refer to a six-month period? I don't know.
Or maybe the fathers at the mission just had a soft spot for St. Stanislaw for ...
1
For contact between the inhabitants of present-day United States and present-day Mexico, you can also see the Wikipedia article on Chichimeca, the commonly used name for the peoples that lived to the north of the Aztecs. It appears not much is known about them.
The map posted in another answer is beautiful and very informative, but we should remember that ...
1
First of all, a huge reason why my people were conquered is that we had no immunity to the diseases they carried. The people of Anahuac had huge deposits of metals. Working silver, gold, tin, bronze and iron, there were many sights catering to these true works. The Incas were known to arm their soldiers with bronze axes and iron knives to the tens of ...
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There were several reasons. The first was that most of the LOCAL (to Massachusetts and parts of Connecticut) Indians had either been involved with King Philip, and were defeated, or conversely, had allied with the settlers, and were sharing the spoils of war. The second reason is that most of the damage was done in the initial part of the war against ...
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