Could the Mississippi-Missouri river system have become a cradle of civilization?
- Thread starter SavoyTruffle
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A timeline where the Americas is home to a number of Bronze or even the occasional early iron age civilizations by the time of contact with the old world could be interesting. Even if their land transportation is limited to Llama or elk carts.
That POD has been discussed ad nausem on this forum, and yet I can't see a general answer relating to how these cultures would develop outside their interactions with Europeans. It's the kind of POD that can only truly be answered by a TL, a normal WI would get bogged down in speculation.
Domesticated animals are not strictly necessary for civilizations, if both the Aztecs and Inca could do it, why can't the alt-Mississippians? Plus it would have massive butterflies reverberating throughout the whole continent, not just the Mississippi Valley.
Humans have been growing and selecting Old World fruits and nuts like apples and pistachios for millennia and we still largely haven't been able to break them of their alternate bearing habit. The problem is physiological: energy expended towards fruits and seeds in one year means less energy available for the production of next year's flowers (which are typically formed the year prior in many temperate trees). Native Californians planted and/or encouraged the growth of oaks, which go through the same cycles, in large numbers across the state, and IIRC supplemented their diet in leaner years with bulbs, tubers, and seeds.
I don't think anyone has mentioned American lotus (Nelumbo lutea) or wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) as potential carbohydrate crops. Perhaps parts of the Mississippi-Missouri system could have been home to a civilization mirroring the lower Yangtze valley with a semiaquatic agricultural system based on Zizania rice, American lotus, and wapato instead of Oryza rice, Asian lotus (N. nucifera), and Chinese arrowhead (S. trifolia).
No, as has been mentioned many times in this thread, it does not. Animal domestication (and husbandry in particular) needs agriculture first. Civilization itself needs agriculture, and unfortunately agriculture is something people seem not to be all that interested in, but its critical.
Thank you! I hadn't been thinking about Lotus or Wapatos when I made my post a while back, but they'd certainly make another welcome addition to Mississippian agriculture alongside Zizania and Apios Americana. Typha (and a few other water plants) could make for some other supplements to that kind of semi-aquatic set up.
No whats been show is that there is no consensus in this tread about it, I obviously i and they think they do, you think they don't.
It's important to note that it's just inherently more difficult in North America to get an advanced metalurgical civilization precisely because tin is so inaccessible. While its hard to do a precise calculation (would be curious if there are any out there), bronze and later iron tools are just tremendously useful labor-saving devices, and the man hours they save can be devoted towards more specialized tasks. They have a revolutionary impact on economies.
Copper culture? Sure, you can get there, copper's super easy to work alongside gold and lead, and you can make some nice shiny alloys out of them of moderate usefulness. But bronze is where its at. Copper, gold and lead are shiny and they're better in some applications than stone but not by a whole lot. Bronze, on the other hand, is a real game changer, and a game changer that it's pretty simple to arrive at once you've figured out copper, gold, and lead. And once you've gotten bronze, which requires a moderate amount of skill to smelt and work, you've opened the door to the much more difficult but infinitely more useful iron. But before you get there, you really need bronze. And to make bronze, in addition to developing a copper culture, you need tin. Most of the Fertile Crescent's tin came from Afghanistan - a hard trip no doubt, but doable. But the only massive tin deposits in North America are to be found all the way down in Bolivia - a longer ways as the crow flies, and through much more difficult terrain.
Copper culture? Sure, you can get there, copper's super easy to work alongside gold and lead, and you can make some nice shiny alloys out of them of moderate usefulness. But bronze is where its at. Copper, gold and lead are shiny and they're better in some applications than stone but not by a whole lot. Bronze, on the other hand, is a real game changer, and a game changer that it's pretty simple to arrive at once you've figured out copper, gold, and lead. And once you've gotten bronze, which requires a moderate amount of skill to smelt and work, you've opened the door to the much more difficult but infinitely more useful iron. But before you get there, you really need bronze. And to make bronze, in addition to developing a copper culture, you need tin. Most of the Fertile Crescent's tin came from Afghanistan - a hard trip no doubt, but doable. But the only massive tin deposits in North America are to be found all the way down in Bolivia - a longer ways as the crow flies, and through much more difficult terrain.
I finally looked into the effects of meningeal worms on elk today and was startled to see they're apparently just as deadly as to moose and caribou. To anyone party to the many conversations here about domesticated deer, this is really weird. Moose and caribou have historical range maps delineated by white-tail and their snail and slug cohosts. Elk just don't at all, either historically or with the small surviving eastern herds.
I'm trying to look into whether it's a matter of diet. It may be that moose and caribou simply feed in more risky ways if brain worms are in the environment.
If not, it would imply that additional factors are at work limiting the northern deer from coming south. Hard to imagine what those might be. On the face of it most of Appalachia looks like good moose country, for example.
It took a lot of attempts, but I did find a solid veterinary account of how MWD impacts untreated llamas. They're much more vulnerable than cattle or horses, but on the other hand some animals do apparently survive, and a fraction of those can continue working and breeding effectively. Pretty big implications for any timeline in which llamas or alpacas end up in North America (like my long slow project): a serious learning curve will be required for care to avoid disease, they are more likely to be a priest's animal than a peasant's, they won't revolutionize economies overnight if mortality is high and specialized husbandry needed, and they may go through an intense evolutionary filter given the small numbers that breed after a case of worms.
I wonder what could plausibly survive just on the equivalent of the OTL Japanese shipwrecks. Perhaps some fishing equipment? Chickenpox lasts forever and can crop up as shingles. If one stretched the point, how much could a handful of surviving Japanese fishermen do in a PNW environment if everything worked out just perfectly?
Once maritime trade links are established between the Americas, I can’t imagine it would be that big of a problem-the eastern Mediterranean imported tin from Britain, so it’s not like long-distance trade in tin hasn’t been a thing once it’s known how important it is.
I do wonder if Distichlis_palmeri could be domesticated in North America considering it's both drought resistant and can absorb water, plus you can harvest salt from it.
Apparently you can make alloys similar to bronze from metalloids like arsenic, phosphorus and Silicon but that opens up a whole other can of worms and would probably be even harder.
In-thread it's been mentioned that there is tin in Alabama and the western Carolinas. Are you implying it wasn't accessible to pre-modern methods, or were you unaware of it.
Mesoamerica was beginning to work bronze at the fringes. Where were they getting the materials?
Kinda picturing the Amerindian's having vaguely Polynesian or styled ships when maritime trading kicks off.
That’s a pretty badass idea, if I ever get around to writing a pre-Columbian TL I’m gonna crib that.Kinda picturing the Amerindian's having vaguely Polynesian or styled ships when maritime trading kicks off.
Animals aren't critical for civilization to develop, Mesoamerica is literally the perfect example of which, but if we look at the development of civilization literally anywhere on the planet its easy to see that civilization came before domesticated animals and after agriculture. People can argue that fact as much as they want, but they're wrong about it.
Two things: firstly, the Eastern Mediterranean only started importing bronze from the British Isles in the very very late Bronze Age, basically right before the collapse. Really, it was more of an early Iron Age thing than anything. The overwhelming majority of tin came from Afghanistan - there was more of it, it was higher quality, and most importantly in order to develop a sufficiently advanced/rich set of cultures to justify that sort of long distance intensive trade, the civilizations of the Near East first had to develop over 1500-2000 years using Afghan tin. Only then do you see economies willing to take on the tremendous risk involved in such a long-distance maritime trade network, and even then it wasn't particuarly prominent.
Secondly - and perhaps more important - Britain has the advantage of being, y'know, on the water. It's not hidden in a god-forsaken jungle behind some of the highest mountains in the world. That inherently makes the project far more difficult.
As I understand it, those deposits are fairly small and fairly low quality, not really enough to feed or sustain the development of complex societies.
Mesoamerica, presumably, was getting those materials from the same sorts of deposits as those in northerly North America - local low quality, low size deposits. As a matter of fact, those are the same sorts of places that the Mesopotamians (and the rest of Eurasia) were getting their tin from at first - small local deposits of low quality. Making that initial leap into bronze working at its most basic isn't super hard. What's really hard is sustaining it at the levels needed for it to make a really large impact on a society's economy, and in order to do that you need it in very large quantities and you need it to be of a very high quality. I'd argue that the reason the Mesoamericans nor any other society fully made the leap despite having played around with copper and gold for millennia is because they didn't have as "easy" of access to massive tin deposits as the Eurasian societies did.
So what you end up with is a series of basically stone age, arguably chalcolithic societies where primitive bronze working exists at the fringes from time to time but lacks the impetus/ability to flourish into a fully developed metallurgical complex. Now, those sorts of societies can still be super interesting (as Mesoamerica shows us), but I don't want us to get too ahead of ourselves on the complexity of an earlier Mississippian complex. If anything, it' kind of boring to insert bronze working in the same way that the "American Horses Survive" POD is boring - if you're interested in all that nonsense, go hang out in Eurasia.
The horse was domesticated thousands of years after other domestic animals were, among a society which was already pastoralist and therefore had experience with domesticated animals (as Larson and Fuller note in their article The Evolution of Animal Domestication, the horse passed through the directed pathway). Pastoralism of course originated in response to the animal domestications that had occurred in agricultural settings, so the horse or camel while unique cases aren't really examples of pre-civilization domestication, just one in response to civilization.
So something similar to Mesoamerica but with a few extra pieces of technology thanks to the larger population size a Mississippi civilization would have?