Bronze Age New World v2.0

[Hnau]

Bronze Age New World v2.0

For those of you who do not know, Bronze Age New World was a cooperative timeline started by Doug Muir in 2001 on the Usenet servers during its heyday at soc.history.what-if. Hundreds of pages of content were produced for the project. The original Point-of-Divergence for this timeline was the development of Polynesian-style maritime technology by the Arawaks around 500 CE. These “Polynesian Arawaks” expanded from the coast of Venezuela throughout the Caribbean and developed an aggressive slaving culture that terrorized peoples from as far north as the Chesapeake Bay down to the mouth of the Amazon River. After centuries, the constant raiding inspires the Mesoamerican peoples to finally use the bronze that they had originally used for ornamentation for making weapons. Bronze tools and weapons spread from Mexico through the *Arawak empire, along with the agricultural package, their writing system, architecture, religious ideas and other technologies. Unfortunately for the *Arawak, their civilization collapses in the 14th century due to overpopulation and exposure to Tloggotl, a terrible plague related to the Mapucho virus that was never seen in OTL.

In this timeline, the New World as Columbus finds it in 1492 has been centuries into its Bronze Age, and while the Caribbean islands are post-apocalyptic and easy to conquer, the empires and kingdoms elsewhere are much more advanced than in our timeline. The Spanish have a tough few centuries ahead of them in this alternate Clash of Civilizations, especially considering that the Tloggotl virus makes landfall in Spain by 1520.

This project has fascinated me since I became interested in alternate history in 2004 when it was still being updated. However, after 2005 it came to a standstill as Doug Muir and others who participated under his guidance fell away from the alternate history community. In 2009, I posted Giving Doug Muir’s “Bronze Age New World” Another Look in order to garner interest in a revival, but it never got off its feet especially after I left for Brazil for two years. What’s worse is that some time in 2010 the BANW wiki which contained all installments on one organized page was deleted after years of inactivity.

Fortunately, Google has maintained the Usenet archives and you can now search for “Bronze Age New World” in Google groups and find most of what was posted for this project. It is very disorganized, and some of the installments are difficult to locate, but it is still there.

The alternate history community now belongs to a different generation, but this timeline was very rich and interesting for its time. I’d like to not only renew interest in the project, but re-establish it. Some new information on the pre-Columbian Americas has come to light in the last decade that must be regarded. Also, we are allohistorians with opinions on plausibility that might differ from our predecessors. What is needed is to not only re-organize everything that was written before and streamline the timeline for easier reading, but to re-evaluate the timeline as a whole. We should also make the goal of going where the previous writers have not gone before and expand the timeline further than the 1560s which was the furthest point the project reached.

The largest challenge, however, which baffles me, is how to re-organize and direct the project. In its heyday, Bronze Age New World was managed completely by Doug Muir, its creator, who supervised and authorized everything that was written. These days he is much less active in the alternate history community than before. What is needed is to find a way to organize the project in a way that works best with current conditions.

As such, I invite every member of AH.com to help me restore this project to its former glory and beyond. I have no idea where to begin. I hope there are people out there that will not leave me alone in this endeavor, and that together we can make this work.

[Muwatalli']

I will be interested if you restart this, it sounds like an very interesting scenario...

[Screvier20]

Bronze Age New World is one of the reasons I got into Alternate History. I will be interested if you restart. I do own am copy of Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

[9 Fanged Hummingbird]

As usual I can help with anything related to Mayas. It must be noted though that OTL Mesoamericans (other than Tarascans who had some limited bronze) had copper weapons, but they were actually inferior to the flint and obsidian they usually used as they bent easily and weren't as sharp and deadly. In an environment where armor heavier than hardened cotton is impractical, you can see why they didn't take to metal weapons.

[Hnau]

I also feel like 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created might be useful, if not as useful as 1491, which I would like to use a lot too.

In the last thread I created on the subject, there were some changes we wanted to make to the original scenario. The first was to have the Arawaks develop their navigational package sooner, but also slower and more staggered. They invent outriggers ~1 CE but then it takes them until ~500 CE to both steal the cotton plant from the Mesoamerican peoples and start making sails out of it. Then they improve upon that a little later by creating double-hulled catamarans for long blue-water voyages.

The second change that was mentioned was to push back the Mesoamerican discovery of Bronze to 850 CE and make it a little slower to disseminate.

The third change was to have the *Arawaks on their way to recovery following the collapse of their civilization by the time the Spanish show up... which could butterfly a number of things. The Spanish are still going to kick their trash but it will be different than the original sequence of events.

We might have to focus on the *Arawakan period at first to see if any other changes are necessary. In the earlier thread I mentioned Nicaragua as a possible important early *Arawak colony where they could obtain needed obsidian to level the playing field with the Mayans and other Mesoamerican peoples before adopting bronze later on. That could have many knock-on effects. We also talked about rewriting the history of the Incan Empire completely and inventing a score of Amazonian kingdoms of which we know little about but which will surely have an impact on the timeline. The pre-1492 part of this timeline was to be revamped considerably.

If no-one objects, I would like therefore to propose we begin on reworking the entire BANW timeline from 1 CE - 1492 CE. I don't want to spend that much time on it, and we certainly should keep true to the original where it makes sense, but that's where we should start. Agreed?

[Screvier20]

I've started rereading BANW stuff it's been an long time. Your are about it being really disorganized.

I do like your the changing of the time period of the Arawaks developmet their navigational package. 500 CE did seemed an bit late in the original scenario moving it back to 1 CE is an good idea. For one thing the Amazon part will need to been completely rewritten will what has come to light in the last 10 years.