More advanced pacific northwest civillation

It's a pretty rugged area, and you'll need a good cereal that can work in the cooler weather.
You don't need a cereal.
It's hard to really postulate alternate domestications. You can either handwave or come up with an introduction, but it's hard to imagine a land or seaborne introduction of potatoes before the modern era.

You lack of pseudo cereals áre disturbing, The best crop You could get in the are in Amaranth,The plant Is Marvel, practícaly a wild plant, one that in fact Is considered a invasive especie,becuase how easy is to growth one. A plant that give you per acre more grain and calories than any other cereal(except maize), have all The essentials amino ácids for antes Human diet and it could Even be used as substitute of meat (essay direct download). And The best of all Is native of the zone, so Any importation or trade from The south Is unnecessary.
Truly the Spanish suppresion of The cultivation of this plant in América Is but one of the examples of Lost cultivars and thecnologies that happened
 
However it wouldn't be improbable for them to develop civ by acdienlty finding a way to farm the wapotos as it unlikely but could happen what other thing could they domesticate have a new type of cereal or better boats that allow them to fish of the coast could it be possible for root farming to increase to another level that becomes more like farming and in wetlands areas there was a native cattails used a lot they also could be domesticated like the wapitis
 
You lack of pseudo cereals áre disturbing, The best crop You could get in the are in Amaranth,The plant Is Marvel, practícaly a wild plant, one that in fact Is considered a invasive especie,becuase how easy is to growth one. A plant that give you per acre more grain and calories than any other cereal(except maize), have all The essentials amino ácids for antes Human diet and it could Even be used as substitute of meat (essay direct download). And The best of all Is native of the zone, so Any importation or trade from The south Is unnecessary.
Truly the Spanish suppresion of The cultivation of this plant in América Is but one of the examples of Lost cultivars and thecnologies that happened

Oh, agreed. If you're going to postulate alternate domesticates in the Americas chenopodium and amaranth cultivars are absolutely the way to go. Potatoes are just perfect for Pacific Northwest climate, soil, and lifestyle.

However it wouldn't be improbable for them to develop civ by acdienlty finding a way to farm the wapotos as it unlikely but could happen what other thing could they domesticate have a new type of cereal or better boats that allow them to fish of the coast could it be possible for root farming to increase to another level that becomes more like farming and in wetlands areas there was a native cattails used a lot they also could be domesticated like the wapitis

Again, any alternate domesticate you come up with will just have to be a handwave.
 
I wonder what would happen if you had some contact between some group and the Spanish in the 16th century (as early as possible post-Inca), and they somehow received potatoes (and maybe some other crops) from them. Perhaps they could enslave the Spanish and have them grow said crops (while the rest harvest fish and plants in the traditional manner), which would give whichever tribe started it a substantial bounty of food.

The Spanish did introduce the ozette potato in the late 1700s.
 

You lack of pseudo cereals áre disturbing, The best crop You could get in the are in Amaranth,The plant Is Marvel, practícaly a wild plant, one that in fact Is considered a invasive especie,becuase how easy is to growth one. A plant that give you per acre more grain and calories than any other cereal(except maize), have all The essentials amino ácids for antes Human diet and it could Even be used as substitute of meat (essay direct download). And The best of all Is native of the zone, so Any importation or trade from The south Is unnecessary.
Truly the Spanish suppresion of The cultivation of this plant in América Is but one of the examples of Lost cultivars and thecnologies that happened
Oh, agreed. If you're going to postulate alternate domesticates in the Americas chenopodium and amaranth cultivars are absolutely the way to go. Potatoes are just perfect for Pacific Northwest climate, soil, and lifestyle. quote
So let say Amaranth and the wapota were both domesticated where would this domestication happen in the overall pacific northwest stretching from Alaska to northern California where would it most likely happen in would it happen simulatntsy in multiple regions or in just on spefic area with nothing else really developing around it?
 
So with the necessary species that would be domesticated where would this most likely happen in multiple places or would it just happen on one river like the Columbia or Fraser river and would this be a nile lake civ or never progess beyond simple agriculture. What tribe is bests suited to domesticate this species?
 

Zachariah

Banned
I'd say that the biggest things which they lacked IOTL were genetic diversity (as a result of a relatively small founding population, and genetic isolation from the Old World); and following on from this, urban population centres, with established cross-continental trade routes linking them with one another. Native American civilizations for the most part seem to have been far more independent, tribal, self-contained and isolationist as a result, with the few exceptions to this, such as the Incans arising too late to make the difference. Given the geography of the Americas, maritime trade routes would have been the most viable option to facilitate this. And the most notable thing which Native American civilization lacked, which proved to be so all-important in disseminating wealth, resources, technological, scientific and military advancements across the Old World, was a thalassocracy; look at the list of examples, and you'll notice that not a single Native American thalassocracy ever arose. No Native American seafaring cultures which could have plausibly formed a Thalassocracy ever managed to achieve the levels of cohesion required to qualify, with the candidate which arguably came closest IOTL, the Haida, coming no closer to achieving this than the early Vikings did, with tribal factionalism and infighting severely limiting the reach and influence of the Haida (which resulted in the Koryaks splitting away, losing their ties and links with the Haida, and in doing so, cut off the last and only established maritime trade link between the Americas and the New World, roughly 10-5,000 years ago).

So, then, how about this for a POD to help remedy both big issues; find some way to unify the proto-Haida clans on one of the major islands in the Haida Gwaii archipelago, and from there, unify the multiple Haida clans under a single Emperor (or rather, as a matriarchal civilization, an Empress), expanding the area of its rule to encompass the islands of OTL's British Columbia and the Alaskan Panhandle- essentially, developing the Haida into a matriarchal Amerindian Japan analogue. ITTL, the split between the Haida and the Koryaks of OTL's Kamchatka Krai (as well as the Nivkh people of northern Sakhalin and the Amur River estuary, who are also now believed to have been originally colonists from British Columbia) either never happens, or their territories are conquered and their tribes assimilated by the Haida, in much the same manner as the Japanese did with the Australasians across Saikaido, and at a similar juncture (1,500-1,000 ya). And in doing so, TTL's Haida Empire's thalassocracy spans both continents, with its naval territories extending across the Sea of Okhotsk, making it a neighbor and direct trade partner of the Japanese (with potential scope for the Ainu to develop their own Ryukyu Kingdom analogue themselves as a result of this, with the trade route through their archipelago enabling them to capitalize, become intermediaries and form a thalassocracy of their own).

As such, ITTL, a Trans-Aleutian inter-continental maritime trade route- essentially, the same deal as OTL's much later Maritime Fur Trade- is firmly established between the Pacific North-East of Asia and the Pacific North-West of the Americas by the Native Americans themselves, 1,000 to 500 years earlier than it was IOTL, making it a contemporary of the European Hanseatic League (and using this analogy, also making this solution potentially viable even if the original Haida Empire has already collapsed and fragmented by this stage, so long as enough of the port market settlements and the trade connections between them still remain). Or, indeed, to the Viking settlements on Newfoundland. And in doing so, this 'Aleutian Interchange' brings them up to a similar level roughly on a par with those of the Japanese and Koreans over the course of the next few hundred years, with these technological developments (along with domesticates, crops, inter-racial merchant-native populations, Old World diseases, and earlier resistance to them) spreading southwards, along the Pacific coast, and eastwards, to Native American tribal groups further inland, through the Haida's trade links. Would this suffice?
 
I just feel like it would be near impossible for them to retain control over areas in the other side of the pacific I could see a Martine trade start but after that it would be hard and the only way for the Haida to stay together would probably to just have them a devolp agriculture so that tribes didn’t have more incentive to break apart b have them get work crop that could grow well in the Pacific Northwest c both have them develop agriculture and get tech and crops from the olds world and then finnaly get cut off just because of the sheer distance but they could start establishing river cities and coastal cities up and down their homer region eventually starting to have civ of other tribes adopt and do the same thing
 

Zachariah

Banned
I just feel like it would be near impossible for them to retain control over areas in the other side of the pacific I could see a Martine trade start but after that it would be hard and the only way for the Haida to stay together would probably to just have them a devolp agriculture so that tribes didn’t have more incentive to break apart b have them get work crop that could grow well in the Pacific Northwest c both have them develop agriculture and get tech and crops from the olds world and then finnaly get cut off just because of the sheer distance but they could start establishing river cities and coastal cities up and down their homer region eventually starting to have civ of other tribes adopt and do the same thing
They don't have to though. Even if this empire did break apart at a later stage, or if it never exists at all, the important thing would be establishing this trade route in the first place. Here's a map of the trade networks of the Old World:
Radhanites2.png

So, what we're doing is essentially extending the Japanese branch of the Maritime Silk Route, via Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands and the Aleutian Islands, across to the Pacific North-West. And via the trade route, you'd get cultural and genetic exchanges with East Asia, especially Japan and Korea, uplifting the Pacific North-Westerners to a higher tier of civilization, in much the same manner that the extension of the Maritime Silk Route to Japan via the Korean Peninsula uplifted the Japanese through cultural and genetic exchanges. Because really, if you compare the level that the Pacific Northwesterners were at with that of the Japanese during the Final Jōmon period, there isn't much difference between them. This semi-sedentary culture led to important population increases, so that the Jōmon exhibit some of the highest densities known for foraging populations. Genetic mapping studies by Cavalli-Sforza have shown a pattern of genetic expansion from the area of the Sea of Japan towards the rest of eastern Asia. This appears as the third most important genetic movement in Eastern Asia (after the "Great expansion" from the African continent, and a second expansion from the area of Northern Siberia), which suggests geographical expansion during the early Jōmon period. These studies also suggest that the Jōmon demographic expansion may have reached America along a path following the Pacific coast.

So this isn't a matter of distance, or a stab in the dark. This actually happened IOTL- the natives of the Pacific Northwest already have significant admixture with the Jōmon Japanese, one of the key reasons why they suffered a lower death rate from the Old World diseases introduced by the European colonials than any other Native Americans. But this expansion, the 'Jōmon Exchange', happened too early on IOTL, and ended too soon, for any of the technological, agricultural and social developments which Japan picked up later on in the Yayoi period to make it across to the Pacific Northwest. By establishing the trade route to the Americas, via this route, as a natural extension of the Japanese branch (and thereby adding the Pacific Northwest's massive deposits of silver, gold and jade as trade commodities to the Old World, thus making this branch far more lucrative and greatly enriching the Pacific Northeast as well) you'd remedy this situation, and allow them to replicate the transition which Japanese civilisation managed to make courtesy of the trade route, from the equivalent of the Jōmon era to their own equivalent of the Yayoi period. This would include transitioning from a hunter-gatherer society courtesy of the introduction of an irrigated, wet-rice culture from Korea and Japan, via the Kuril and Aleutian Islands, into the Pacific Northwest. The shift from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural diet on the islands, with the introduction of wet-rice agriculture, led to the development and growth of a sedentary, agrarian society in Japan, and in the rapid increase in population, from roughly 75K people in the late Jōmon period to over 1.5M people by the end of the Yayoi period, and to over 4M people by the end of the following Kofun period.

For comparison, the Northwest Coast American Indians had a native population of about 250,000, with a near-identical hunter-gatherer culture of clans (likely no coincidence, given the prehistoric Jōmon expansion into the Pacific Northwest), that reached a considerable degree of sedentism and cultural complexity, to that of late Jōmon period Japan, and those of the Satsumon, Okhotsk and Ainu. In essence, the historical native population of the Pacific Northwest, pre-contact, was roughly four times the pre-contact native population of the Japanese archipelago, with a near-identical society and civilization level. So, the same transition could realistically increase the population of the Pacific Northwest by a similar margin in a similar space of time; a twenty-fold increase to roughly 5M people, over the course of the next 600 years or so. Along with the same transition to the Iron Age, with the introduction of metallurgy. Even if the Pacific Northwest remains a land of hundreds of scattered tribal communities and statelets at that stage, with frequent conflicts between them and a society characterized by violent struggles, it'd still be no different to the status quo in Japan as the same stage in its own history, 2-300 years earlier. And by the time the Europeans were scheduled to arrive, circa the 1700's, you could easily have at least two or three Japan-analogues, similarly or only slightly less advanced than Japan courtesy of the cultural and technological exchanges provided by the maintaining of the Maritime Trade Route having kept them up to speed with the Japanese, with the total population of the Pacific Northwest easily standing at 50-65M; or, to put that into perspective, roughly twice that of contemporary Japan, and 8% of the world population, comparable to those of the Spanish, French and Holy Roman Empires combined.
 
exactly what is the most northern point that the potato could grow in Alasksa?

IIRC it can grow as far north as Fairbanks and maybe even further north, depending on soil and amount of sunlight (south facing hills). Presumably the locals would need to supplement their farming with other activities (like raising caribou alongside more traditional lifestyles).
 
exactly what is the most northern point that the potato could grow in Alasksa?

As far as actually doing any good at all, it would have to be on the parts of the coast that have a Pacific Northwest type cold temperate climate, just because that's the only places where people are going to be able to remain sedentary at all. Just because you can theoretically grow potatoes in the permafrost belt doesn't mean that you're going to have agricultural civilization there.
 
IIRC it can grow as far north as Fairbanks and maybe even further north, depending on soil and amount of sunlight (south facing hills). Presumably the locals would need to supplement their farming with other activities (like raising caribou alongside more traditional lifestyles).

The only area where there's any amount of farming in the interior isn't near Fairbanks, it's around Delta Junction. It may be hypothetically possible to have a potato patch in your backyard in Interior Alaska, but that's not the same as farming or in any way relevant to a population becoming sedentary.
 
The only area where there's any amount of farming in the interior isn't near Fairbanks, it's around Delta Junction. It may be hypothetically possible to have a potato patch in your backyard in Interior Alaska, but that's not the same as farming or in any way relevant to a population becoming sedentary.

Is there a reason other than the obvious economic issues of farming in Interior Alaska? Climate-wise, the two look about the same and both are in the Tanana Valley.

But what I imagined isn't so much a completely sedentary civilisation, but more like other marginal agricultural peoples in the Americas, where they had to frequently supplement their diet with more traditional hunting and gathering. This would be during the lengthy period outside the growing season. Ideally they'd domesticate caribou (or borrow it from some group who did) as well. I'd love to see a Lands of Ice and Mice-style domestication/enhancement of certain Arctic plants, maybe inspired by their use of the potato, but that's probably asking for too much.

The end result is a much higher population density in the region, although it would still get decimated by disease.
 
Is there a reason other than the obvious economic issues of farming in Interior Alaska? Climate-wise, the two look about the same and both are in the Tanana Valley.

But what I imagined isn't so much a completely sedentary civilisation, but more like other marginal agricultural peoples in the Americas, where they had to frequently supplement their diet with more traditional hunting and gathering. This would be during the lengthy period outside the growing season. Ideally they'd domesticate caribou (or borrow it from some group who did) as well. I'd love to see a Lands of Ice and Mice-style domestication/enhancement of certain Arctic plants, maybe inspired by their use of the potato, but that's probably asking for too much.

The end result is a much higher population density in the region, although it would still get decimated by disease.

I'm not really sure why you and I have to have this conversation about how Alaska is not virgin farmland awaiting the plow every time it comes up. Delta is a hundred miles from Fairbanks and the soil profile and exact details of climate are different. And of course the Delta farming project was pretty close to being a total failure. No one is really growing anything out there anymore.

The reason it's silly to expect potatoes to make a difference in interior Alaska is because populations were highly nomadic and had no tradition of gardening at all. Potato patches require some degree of active tending, so they don't make any sense for people who travel hundreds of miles over the course of the year following caribou herds or berry harvests.
 
I'm not really sure why you and I have to have this conversation about how Alaska is not virgin farmland awaiting the plow every time it comes up. Delta is a hundred miles from Fairbanks and the soil profile and exact details of climate are different. And of course the Delta farming project was pretty close to being a total failure. No one is really growing anything out there anymore.

Probably because it's a subject I'm interested in, and curious to know how I might be wrong. I'll note that I've learned at least as much on this site as I did completing a history degree (even considering all the books I read), and my professors were some very smart people too. Really, it's similar to the endless discussion on the American Civil War and the World Wars in parts of this site albeit a very niche subject. Personally, I don't recall discussing Alaskan farming more than 2 or 3 times in the past, and at least once it was in the context of Japanese colonisation which is different than OTL's subsidy-driven Alaskan farming. And 20th century Anglo farming vs. Meiji/alt-Japanese farming vs. indigenous farming are three different subjects.

Otherwise, the climate doesn't seem too different between Fairbanks and Delta, at least not compared to other agricultural regions. And a 20th century Anglo farmer has different concerns from an indigenous group which is farming for extra calories. A map of USDA soil types shows the two places have similar soil types.

The reason it's silly to expect potatoes to make a difference in interior Alaska is because populations were highly nomadic and had no tradition of gardening at all. Potato patches require some degree of active tending, so they don't make any sense for people who travel hundreds of miles over the course of the year following caribou herds or berry harvests.

We know lifestyle changes in indigenous America occurred, so if the coastal Alaskans have potato farming, I could see it potentially spreading inland and correspondingly resulting in a population expansion. Since you'd be tending potatoes for the 3-4 months of growing season, you wouldn't be able to hunt caribou as efficiently, which perhaps would mean you'd want to corral them more and maybe eventually domesticate them with all that entails. The expansion of agriculture happened like this in the northeastern United States/Maritimes, so it could happen in Alaska in a place like the Tanana Valley which is at the edge of potential land for farming.

It really isn't fair to call these alt-Indians a "more advanced" civilisation, but it's a civilisation which would likely be greater in numbers, even after the inevitable mass death from disease. No, it won't be "Tenochtitlan on the Yukon", but it would be more important than OTL.
 
A greater population along the rivers probable means more metal working and more metal entering the trade network.
That could also mean a greater possibility of somebody mixing tin and copper to discover bronze.

Though something I've been thinking of, it might be the Pacific Northwest was too productive.
You had conflict, but no real pressure to centralize and expand as far as I know.
 
Maybe have th region be more violent maybe have more people from Alaska or California come north causing the kick for centralization
 
Top