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Why were there no wheels in the Americas?

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by mismatched (U14242423) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  The recent discussion about foodstuffs that originated in The Americas prompted a thought. Why did the Native Americans, wherever they were, never use the wheel?
  
  I understand that there are some children’s toys with wheels. I also know that there were no draught animals to pull vehicles.
  But why did they never invent man powered trolleys or wheelbarrows?
  Did it not occur to anyone from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego that there must be an easier way to move things ? They must have used rollers to move some of the stones in those large buildings such as pyramids. A wheel in its most basic form is a slice through a wood roller.
  Plenty of trees so why were there no wheels ?
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  Mismatched
  
  The point about wheels is that they are most useful on roads and roads were not practical in much of the Americas nor Africa in fact.. becuase populations tended to be mobile and to move around according to seasonal variations and changing circumstances..
  
  Part of the agony of modern Africa (to my mind) comes from a European imposed policy of people having to stay put and try to develop the region by means of the kind of investment in infrastructure that worked so well in Europe..
  
  Recent disasters in the USA have suggested that even in an advanced and "developed economy" building and rebuilding costly infrastructure in defiance of continental forces may eventually prove impossible to sustain in the long run... The Japanese tsumani effect may prove to the contrary- but much depends on whether we have now created a global climate and environment that is much more violent and destabilised.
  
  The great South American building cultures- the Aztecs and the Incas- did invest in long-term construction probably - as in Great Zimbabwe- in order to keep possession of sources of gold and silver.. But even here the mountainous terrain at the heart of their Empires was more suited to travel on foot than by wheel. The Incas did build roads and those suspension bridges.. and uniquely in the Americas they did have a pack-animal the Llama.. But even in Britain at that time moving things by river or sea was first choice, and pack-animals second.
  
  Obviously the lack of any large domesticated animals had a major impact on Amerindian society. Some tribes had dog-sledges for summer as well as winter..
  
  The horse was brought by Cortes and the Spanish Conquistadors and was enough of a revolution in itself once horses had escaped to breed in the wild.. It totally transformed the lives of the Plains Indian tribes which had always had a very hard time of it on the immense prairee. Now they could achieve vast wealth and power through hunting the buffalo on horseback- and they had already learned to get most of what they needed from the buffalo..
  
  It also made possession of territories as "happy hunting grounds" much more crucial- because hunting and war-parties could range much further and inter-tribal conflicts and "war-chiefs" became proportionately more important.
  
  The Woodland Indians did build settled communities, but the rivers draining into the Atlantic, the Great Lakes and the Pacific- as well as those waters themselves- were the main arteries of travel.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  PS
  
  Also I think that you have to keep in mind that in societies that have to live in a savage wilderness there seems to be a constant need for people to prove that they "can take it".. Item the initiation ceremonies for Amerindian braves and the fighting to the death on the Moon Godess stone of the Aztecs when a captured warrior would stand on it fighting against the Aztec warriors armed with clubs with razor-sharp pieces of stone. Literally a death of a thousand cuts so that the blood would collect within the holes in the stone. It was a death that fed the Heavens.
  
  
  In our overweight and obese leisure society that is now facing a real crisis hour when everybody will have to "get their finger out" it is perhaps difficult to understand the kind of society in which men do not shirk from a challenge that is merely a challenge to their strength and fitness..and their ability to work as a team (back to the Rugby World Cup)
  
  I used to have a hard time explaining to pupils that I cycled to school out of choice- leaving the car at home.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  PPS
  
  Both the Americas and Africa had systems of slavery in which when there was no work for the slaves to do they got killed -and perhaps worse [according to some Congolese I saw in an "Under the Sun" programme who were showing how their ancestors had smelted iron, who said "at this point they would kill a slave to put his blood into the mix, and then they would use the fire to cook and eat him.. the cannabalism controversy].. so I am not sure that the slaves had much incentive to be spared their Labour, or their masters to do without slaves that were part of their relations both within Aztec Society and in relations throughout their Empire.
  
  Not very long before Cortes arrived in Tenochtitlan a great new Temple had been built.. It had probably been a very good reason to raise particularly heavy tributes of slaves from their Empire and about 20,000 slaves were sacrificed in the dedication of the temple.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  The sea and river systems have been the traditional way (the world over) to carry goods in enviroments with rugged terrain, far easier and quicker than trying to drag carts overland.
  
  However, I can't really answer for the Americas but the Australian aboriginals didn't invent a wheel either. On the other hand, why would they when they didn't need one?
  
  Things are usually not thought of or invented until they are needed in some way and with a semi-nomadic, gatherer/hunter way of life, when all one possibly needed to survive is carried easily on a person, when crops and domestic livestock are not needed to get through a cold season a wheel becomes superflous.
  
  The aboriginals were capable of inventing something as aerodynamically brilliant as the boomerang so a simple wheel was well within their capabilites, it was simply not necessary to survival.
  
  
  

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  Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  The wheel in its most rudimentary form is thought to have first been utilised around 10,000 years ago, though the oldest known reference to even a basic tree-trunk rolling method dates back only 5,500 years to Mesopotamia. It was to be another 2000 years of familiarity with the concept locally before what might be called an artificially constructed wheel came about (in Egypt and China more or less the same time) and another two thousand years before this refined model, spokes and all, made it to parts of Europe. The further gap of 1,500 years before its introduction into the Americas is actually one of the smaller gaps in the sequence and the fact that this continent was one of the last reflects less on its peoples' primitiveness than on their sparsity and where the most advanced cultures were based and how they organised themselves (incidentally, both the Mayans and the Incas were already on the way and had figured out that rolling blocks in building projects beat dragging them).
  
  The usefulness of a purpose-built wheel therefore seems to correspond with complexity of infrastructure and enough flat level surfaces on which it can be utilised. As a measure of human intelligence or ingenuity it is therefore not the most reliable factor on which to gauge an assessment, and as an indication of civilization it requires much by way of specific contextual analysis before its worth can be estimated.
  
  What seems the most definite thing one can say about the wheel is that nomadic societies, despite the built-in requirement to bear goods long distances, have always been the last to avail of its potential. Those societies which engaged in large-scale physical manipulation of their environment were always the first, and seemingly quite independently at times.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  Going back to the "slice through a tree trunk" remark I do not think that any Amerindian people had got iron and therefore certainly not steel..So making that kind of clean cut would not have been easy.
  
  Knives and hatchets were very highly prized barter goods along the Atlantic Coast when trading started up.
  
  The Copper River in Canada supplied nuggets of copper that could be flattened and worked.
  
  The Aztec weapons were elaborate stone-age ones, as I explained earlier- and the gold and silver that they possessed is-like copper- too soft to make effectice cutting tools.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  Outside of the Flinstones I don't think I've ever encountered an ancient culture which thought that thinly sliced tree trunks would do the job. A basic understanding of wood, and a proper disdain for waste of valuable energy, would have forced them into the contemplation of solutions which might last longer than a few minutes, I would (wood) have thought.
  
  I do recall an analysis of a site in Peru where purpose-built ruts in the roadway suggested a form of tramway similar to a method used in both Greece and Rome on occasion to ensure carts did not veer against installations by the road's side, especially within urban streets. I'll see can I dig it out again, but if such was the case then it could well mean that the Incas, or someone else in the area, might actually have been the only society to have invented, perfected and then abandoned the notion of wheeled wagon transport, as no corresponding wagons or wagon wheels have (yet) been found.

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  Posted by Hugh Mosby-Joaquin (U14258131) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  Likewise to all of the fascinating discussion above, the bicycle was not invented until there were adequate road surfaces to allow it to move freely. A rutted muddy cart-track would offer too much friction to a tyre-less man-powered wheel.
  Afteral, the chain-drive was used in wheel-lock pistols, and also pocket-watches by the 17th century, so a rudimentary solid-tyred, (wooden) spoked-wheel byke could have been constructed by 1600. Leonardo da Vinci rather teasingly depicts one in his sketchbooks, does he not?
  But the bicycle finally came about in the hobby-horse style, as a sort of trendy joke for the Macaroni men to pootle around parks and gardens in the 18th century.
  So what starts out as an executive toy has oft-times manifested itself in practical values in later years....
  
  
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  Hugh
  
  And the bicycle- like that early steam-train that was exhibited in London to paying customers behind a high fence-- something like "Catch me who can"- made its mark with people just cycling around an oval track for sport and entertainment.
  
  
  The vet J.P. Dunlop observed bicycle races in Ireland (Dublin?) and thought that he might do something with the rubber tubes that were part of his stock in trade.. So soon the rider on the "Dunlop Special" was suddenly winning every race. The pneumatic tyre had arrived.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  Of course my road observation might evoke familiar scenes from wagon train movies for some of the great plains could be traversed by wheel, but the situation encountered by the Boers on the Great Trek at Blood River point to the fact that moving across such terrain with a lot of goods and few people was not necessarily "a good idea".. Some of us were brought up on bandits and Indians furiously chasing stage-coaches. But that was in the days when the six-shooter and the Winchester repeater somewhat redressed the balance..
  
  People travelling in the African interior might see units of warriors- -impis- jogging in formation along the footpaths, usually having paid tribute to the local tribe just as a mark of respect and politeness- unless they deliberately wanted to be provocative.
  
  And thinking in terms of African situations roads might well have faced the same problems as gateways... I am not sure if this still applies but apparently Southern African footballers would often refuse to enter their opponents stadium through the gate, preferring to climb over the fence..They were afraid that someone might have laid a curse on the gateway that would make them play badly..
  
  Cass

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  Posted by Hugh Mosby-Joaquin (U14258131) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  "...scenes from wagon train movies for some of the great plains could be traversed by wheel, "
  
  They were going pretty fast if they managed 10 miles a day. In fact, the wagons, the so-called 'prairie schooners' of the western pioneers, and mostly pulled by oxen, carried the goods, tools and consumables; the trekkers accompanied on foot.
  The stage coaches came later, but as you say, a myth was created by Hollywood movies. The notion of them charging hell-for-leather across the plains was pure fantasy. I doubt if they could keep that sort of speed for more than five minutes, if the stage-coach didn't shake itself to pieces beforehand.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 27th September 2011

  Hugh
  
  The point that I was trying to get at was that there was no point going across the wilderness with more property and goods than could be adequately defended by the number of people there to defend them.. Therefore the advantage of the wheel in allowing a few people to move a great deal would be no advantage at all.
  
  Taking an earlier point from Nordmann nomadic and semi-nomadic people have shown genius in keeping all their "wordly goods" to a minimum.. This was something that Europeans misunderstood when looking at sub-Saharan Africa.
  
  As in many societies wives acted as "banks" - the only place to store valuable ornaments of gold and silver- that they wore at all times.. Save your wife and you save everything.
  
  And African culture was a performance culture with props like masks, musicla instruments etc- but the main ingredient in sub-Saharan spectacles was not great buildings like Temples but spectacular performances that the people could perform wherever they were.
  
  Much of Amerindian society seems to have had similar traditions.
  
  Cass

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