AH Challenge:

What would be required to change so that in the post-Columbian age, a group of Indians with a more Old World-esque manner of warfare would come along? Indians didn't really fight wars to conquer and subdue their enemies and make them their slaves the way Europeans and even the Chinese did.

So, what would be required to change so that Europeans run up against a group if Indians that plays by the same rules they do? Bonus points if this is around the time of the Conquistadors or Bandereintes. Even more bonus points if it happens around the 1600s at either Jamestown or Plymouth.
 
Sustainable life in one place

For example, the Mandan, Hidatsu (sp ?), Assinboin etc all lived in log huts and settled communities for a part of the year...THEN went off on their annual great buffalo hunt

The concept of territory equals state rather than people equals state needs to be at the core of any change

Wonder what could have been done with something like Cahokia if it could have found a way to survive

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 

Philip

Donor
Develop Eurasian style agriculture. This will provided both the population and territorial needs to drive the military development you want.
 
Develop Eurasian style agriculture. This will provided both the population and territorial needs to drive the military development you want.

I would rather have that change without leaving the entire world losing 9/10 of the people there. Eurasian-style agriculture means the Indians give presents to the Europeans of similar magnitude to what the Europeans gave them.
 
Robert L O'Connell theorises in his book Ride of the Second Horseman; The Birth and Death of War that Eurasian warafre became so violent because of the great cultural divide between nomad herders and sedentry farmers. Nomad herders had the great military advantage of horses and compound bows, and saw farmers as animals who dug in the dirt, not people worthy of mercy, so they raided and killed them orgiastically. The farmers, who saw the nomads like vermin to be eradicated where possible, had to energise their own methods of fighting to cope with with the nomads military advantages. The result over the millenia fight in the most violent means possible with the aim of total annihilating victory. In the absence of this farmer-herder, military imbalance needing to be countered paradigm, American societies didn't evolve such ruthlessly effective fighting methods.

So the PoD needs to be introducing them to such methods on a less anniliating scale prior to the permament arrival of the Europeans in 1500ish. Perhaps the Vikings in Vinland could introduce such methods in 1000ish, and the Chinese during their mooted forays to America in pre columbian times. The peoples who encountered Eurasian warfare could pay it forward by using what they learned to defeat their local rivals, until the more energised warfare became standard procedure throughout the Americas some 500 years later.
 
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