North America with Another 500 Years

Industrial Revolution doesn't mean instant conquest. Look at China, Persia, or Ethiopia. 500 years for the Amerindians doesn't just mean scientific or population differences, it also means political differences. In OTL the Iroquois confederation was formed almost too late to make any difference. But if there is political unity during those 500 years under some centralized power the Europeans would not have such an easy time, whether they have machine guns or not. Political unity counts for a lot when involving survival as a people. The amerindians did not have that OTL. I disagree that Guns Germs and Steel are the only things that make a difference in domination, they do make a huge difference and no doubt the Europeans would have an upper hand. The problem is political developments are really hard to predict as AH, and often they seem like simple hand waving fiction.

Well, Peru has mountains. There's that.

But yeah. If someone, say the Chinese, turns up in the 1990s.... Oh dear that would hurt.
 
If by the first golden age, you're referring to the Mexican incursions in the Early Classic by Siyah K'ak', then you might be mistaken as it is highly debatable whether the advances are purely thanks to him or coincidental. The only sure thing is that he got the Mayans to advance militarily. Concerning a Maya renaissance, it's possible but you'd have to end the conflicts between the Cocom and Tutul Xiu if you want any stability in the region. Although there were about 18 or 16 independent states, they could unify under a somewhat religious ruler, the Lord of the Katun, chosen among the governors of the most prestigious cities. This guy was the most powerful person in Postclassic Yucatan, although he ruled for only 20 years before another was chosen.

But you are right about them getting better soil techniques, they already learned from their mistakes. The Postclassic Maya made less colossal structures which took lots of stucco to make. They could easily advance even more, and as you said expand their "empire" through trade beyond the Ulua rivers in Honduras. Also, it is highly probable that the civilizations of the American Southeast will advance to the level of Mesoamericans, probably with Mayan contacts as they were the most renowned seafarers in the area. Literacy via the Mayan script would spread after the so-called Renaissance, as it is partially syllabic than the Mexican scripts and therefore more adaptable.

As the major copper users of Mesoamerica were the Maya (they used copper weapons and made much jewelry from copper) and the Tarascans, it is likely that they'd dominate the area, although what happens to the Nahua and Central Americans after the likely fall of the Mexica is debatable. The Mexica however are not likely to keep the Triple Alliance together, or at least not Mexica-dominated. You can't keep a tributary empire together by threats of destruction for too long. Although the Tlaxcalan Alliance is more likely to fall first to the Mexica, who would then likely fall apart from the inside.

Northern America is likely to see the spread of Mississippian influences, and through them Mesoamerican influences. Bronze weapons however might not be as popular as other things as it is harder for semi-nomadic people to use due to the time it takes. Either way, the existence of the Plains people as we know them are completely butterflied away. The Sioux and Cheyenne and others did exist, but they were farming folk, not the horse culture so highly revered by Americans.

As noted by others, Amazonians are also likely to rise to greatness, more so than the Inca. While the Inca rulers die away and the empire splits apart, the Amazonians are gonna keep on living the high life with their advanced agricultural techniques.

It sounds like you know something about the Amazonians which I do not.
 
Wait, wait, go back. What if the Inuit had gotten their hands on domesticated reindeer? IIRC, the Kalmyks right across the Bering had had them for upwards of a thousand years. All it would take would be one tribe making an unusual migration.

Then, the Eskimos are suddenly the only people on the continent with riding or pack animals, with access to large scale domesticated meat, with milk to drink.... Oh my. If only they'd had time!

Well. I think I can see what I need to do.
 
Not sure if you can ride a reindeer, and just about every other tribe (Inuit included) already used dogs as pack animals so reindeer wouldn't be very unique. Also, what I meant about the Amazonians was that before Contact it can be assumed a great many of them were farming folk, who used slash-and-char techniques to enrich the soil even better, preserve more forest, and they wouldn't have to keep going from plot to plot like slash-and-burn does. However, these people are largely unknown. They only ever met Europeans once (possible, not even that sure), which was a brief encounter with the explorer Francisco de Orellana.
 
Given something like the Horse Plague [?Has that TL died?] with a pre Columbus Date.

Europe turns inward, Population drops, Expansion is into depopulated areas, there is a rise in religiosity, drop in trading & moving around, less spread of Ideas.

It may take up to a hundred years before Europe recovers. After recovery Europe will again head south along Africa.
However without someone like Prince John the Navigator, pushing it will be a lot slower.

I see the Europeans reaching the Americas in the mid to late 1700, with OTL 1600's technology. and finding something like the Bronze Age NAmerica TL, America.

This will lead to a - OTL Africa - type of Contact/Settlement.
 
Well, Peru has mountains. There's that.

But yeah. If someone, say the Chinese, turns up in the 1990s.... Oh dear that would hurt.

What about the Mountains? That was they're strength, with many varieties of climates open to them within relatively small areas trade is thus a requisite of their society. The Incans succeeded because they turned the variety of different tribes and groups into a unified economy. That worked out because of an immense bureaucracy that organized the economy. When there is no Inca to organize it the whole system would fall apart. I think though that the complexities of the mountain system would breed a fairly ambitious middle class.
 
Wait, wait, go back. What if the Inuit had gotten their hands on domesticated reindeer? IIRC, the Kalmyks right across the Bering had had them for upwards of a thousand years. All it would take would be one tribe making an unusual migration.

Then, the Eskimos are suddenly the only people on the continent with riding or pack animals, with access to large scale domesticated meat, with milk to drink.... Oh my. If only they'd had time!

Well. I think I can see what I need to do.

The Esquimaux would get about as far as the Saami did in Europe. Meat is nice, but agriculture is much more useful.
 
OK, let's imagine China showing up in 1992, even with early 1700s tech. Mexica, Maya, Peru: I could see them all holding out at first. They're big, strong civilizations, and the Chinese guns, germs, and steel are going to take bit longer to do their tricks than they did for the OTL conquistadors.

Fine.

Problem: The B.C.-to-California coast. Wonderful weather, fertile farmland, and some of the most isolated and defenseless tribes in the whole New World. Even before the Chinese start on the major irrigation projects (and they would -- this is the Chinese we're talking about), they could cram 10 million people up and down that coast in short order. The capital, of course, would be New Kinmen (Golden Gate). ;)
 
Not sure if you can ride a reindeer, and just about every other tribe (Inuit included) already used dogs as pack animals so reindeer wouldn't be very unique. Also, what I meant about the Amazonians was that before Contact it can be assumed a great many of them were farming folk, who used slash-and-char techniques to enrich the soil even better, preserve more forest, and they wouldn't have to keep going from plot to plot like slash-and-burn does. However, these people are largely unknown. They only ever met Europeans once (possible, not even that sure), which was a brief encounter with the explorer Francisco de Orellana.

The big ones you can. The Evenks in Siberia did it quite frequently. I mean, you can't very well do a cavalry charge, but you couldn't do that with horses at first, either.

Well, sure, sounds great, but none of that is going to help them much in the long run unless they can put together a population big enough that you can still run an agricultural town after 95% have died.
 
What about the Mountains? That was they're strength, with many varieties of climates open to them within relatively small areas trade is thus a requisite of their society. The Incans succeeded because they turned the variety of different tribes and groups into a unified economy. That worked out because of an immense bureaucracy that organized the economy. When there is no Inca to organize it the whole system would fall apart. I think though that the complexities of the mountain system would breed a fairly ambitious middle class.

You seem to be arguing something, and it's implied that I said the opposite, but I certainly can't see what.

I was just pointing out that the Incan Empire (or more likely after 500 years, the post-Inca region) would as in OTL have the advantage of some geographic protection. Even in OTL that helped a lot dealing with Spanish on horseback.
 
The Esquimaux would get about as far as the Saami did in Europe. Meat is nice, but agriculture is much more useful.

Wrong.

The Saami had Russia and Sweden to their south. Those were countries, and even before statehood, they were more populous tribes with better weapons and more (and better) domesticated animals.

The Eskimo would have literally thousands of miles south to expand into before they reached areas where farming was even remotely possible. Before that they'd just be rolling straight over the Athabascan and Algonquin hunter-gatherers in their way. No hunter-gatherer society that far north could compete with their nutritional base, they'd be bred out, lose wars while outnumbered, or be absorbed. The only long term solution would be to adopt the reindeer themselves.

On top of all that, farming in the more northern areas was both very recent and (except for the St. Lawrence river valley) very low-return. Tiny farming villages on the upper Missouri aren't going to be enough to stop pastoralists, not when the entire Plains are natural pastoralist territory. And if the Eskimo show up by, say 1000, none of those most northerly areas would be practicing farming yet.

What's more likely to stop the Inuit is the reindeer themselves. Reindeer seem to be a very climate dependent species, and while they have been brought to Iceland, Alaska, South Georgia, et cetera, they have not been successfully raised in very southern climes. The southern limit of reindeer cultures would likely match the OTL wild distribution of caribou (generally held to be the same species).

It'd be vaguely parallel to the situation with cattle in central Africa in our TL. In that case there was a disease barrier to bringing cattle east and south from Nigeria, so even though the pseudo-San and sort-of-Pygmies on the other side were hunter-gatherers, the Bantu couldn't exploit their population advantage. Well, until genes for immunity spread through their cattle anywho.

Hrm....

I seem to have hijacked my own thread. How about that. :rolleyes:
 
OK, let's imagine China showing up in 1992, even with early 1700s tech. Mexica, Maya, Peru: I could see them all holding out at first. They're big, strong civilizations, and the Chinese guns, germs, and steel are going to take bit longer to do their tricks than they did for the OTL conquistadors.

Fine.

Problem: The B.C.-to-California coast. Wonderful weather, fertile farmland, and some of the most isolated and defenseless tribes in the whole New World. Even before the Chinese start on the major irrigation projects (and they would -- this is the Chinese we're talking about), they could cram 10 million people up and down that coast in short order. The capital, of course, would be New Kinmen (Golden Gate). ;)

Ayup. Boom.

I actually disagree somewhat about the larger, more civilized cultures. China wasn't exactly 1700s England in terms of developing and spreading new technologies, but it certainly did a faster job than the Amerindians.

By 1992, the germs will have a little more variety, while the Amerindians will most likely be no more immune. But the guns and steel of the Chinese will have come rather a long way. In Mexico and Peru, best case, the local empires will have traded turkeys for llamas, corn for potatos, and invented the wheel. That would be a tremendous difference, but it's not going to cut it against 18th century-ish technology. Not if someone wants to go conquering.
 
OK, so let's say you have Inuit covering pretty much all of OTL-Canada. There's no way to hold them
together as a single nation or even a single ethnicity. You're talking 10 million square kilometers, without any written language and without any hints that the Inuit were going to make the leap to large-area forms of government (almost no non-agricultural societies have pulled that off). Because of the ecology, you're also talking extremely low population densities -- even in OTL 2009, with international trade in food, there are only about 1 million Canadians living north of 54N.

If they do move south, the Bantu scenario (ethnic splintering and partial assimilation into local cultures) would represent the upper bound of possibilities, not the lower bound. All it would take is for a couple of their far more populous southern neighbors to start farming, or to domesticate the reindeer themselves, and their advantage is gone, and the Inuit are hemmed in again. Maybe if you gave the Inuit 500 years over both the Old World and the New World, but if they're on a level playing field with other Natives, then why would you expect it to turn out drastically different from OTL?
 
You seem to be arguing something, and it's implied that I said the opposite, but I certainly can't see what.

I was just pointing out that the Incan Empire (or more likely after 500 years, the post-Inca region) would as in OTL have the advantage of some geographic protection. Even in OTL that helped a lot dealing with Spanish on horseback.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as argumentative. I just really like Incan history, so I tend to want to talk about it.

Yeah given 500 years of population growth, political development, and technology invention it's likely the Andes, the Amazon, Mexico's central region, and maybe the great lakes and region could probably survive in some fashion as native states. I mean in OTL urban native areas did survive for many years after contact. (The Mayan, the Nahautl, Incans) Other areas were more likely to be destroyed and a scattered.

So where might new urbanized areas be after 500 years?

Amazon: their advanced agricultural techniques led to very dense populated areas OTL, with 500 years of development. I expect more trading contacts, greater centralization of power, and technological developments as well. Their cities would still likely be made out of wood, but with increasingly large trading reach they may have access to the Caribbean.

Great Lakes Region: 500 greater population would lead to geographical expansion as well. Trails marked in OTL might become roads. Metal working could easily develop or be gained from trade.

Mississippian zone: Very urbanized on contact, disease wiped them out. This is an example of an urbanized area that never survived.

Southwest: Urbanized that did survive, gave the Spanish a run for their money. With development I believe that this region not be able to sustain the increase of population. Like the Anasazi found out excessive development led to their COLLAPSE (jared diamond) so perhaps this area is an exporter of people. Through war, or settlement, or slavery.

California: densely populated OTL could turn into urbanized area with centralized power. The Chumash were pretty impressive.

Ok I think that urbanization would form a ripple effect.
 
I think you think that we disagree more than I think we disagree.

I'm not arguing you'd have some sort of enormous Eskimo Empire of the Americas [TM]. In fact, why bother with one? It's no less fun to speculate about a massive cultural zone of post-Inuit reindeer herders stretching from the Arctic Circle to Washington and Quebec. The Inuit languages would diverge into a myriad of forms as time and contact with other groups took their effect (incidentally much like the proto-Indo-Europeans).

Some other groups would probably adopt the reindeer before they were overrun from the north, creating new nomadic people for the Americas. In places where reindeer and bison could coexist, the question would become whether one can hunt from reindeer-back. If so, we'd have pseudo-Sioux pounding across the north plains. Certainly in those few areas where corn farming and reindeer overlapped, settled cultures would develop in very different (and maybe linguistically independent) forms.

There would be a rather singular arrangement in such a North America, with the northernmost farming societies being in a much better position than those further south, but not necessarily able to spread their economy to new areas.

Fun, fun, fun!
 
I think I may be causing confusion because the Inuit scenario would essentially be an entirely different time line. My apologies if so.
 
Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as argumentative. I just really like Incan history, so I tend to want to talk about it.

Yeah given 500 years of population growth, political development, and technology invention it's likely the Andes, the Amazon, Mexico's central region, and maybe the great lakes and region could probably survive in some fashion as native states. I mean in OTL urban native areas did survive for many years after contact. (The Mayan, the Nahautl, Incans) Other areas were more likely to be destroyed and a scattered.

So where might new urbanized areas be after 500 years?

Amazon: their advanced agricultural techniques led to very dense populated areas OTL, with 500 years of development. I expect more trading contacts, greater centralization of power, and technological developments as well. Their cities would still likely be made out of wood, but with increasingly large trading reach they may have access to the Caribbean.

Great Lakes Region: 500 greater population would lead to geographical expansion as well. Trails marked in OTL might become roads. Metal working could easily develop or be gained from trade.

Mississippian zone: Very urbanized on contact, disease wiped them out. This is an example of an urbanized area that never survived.

Southwest: Urbanized that did survive, gave the Spanish a run for their money. With development I believe that this region not be able to sustain the increase of population. Like the Anasazi found out excessive development led to their COLLAPSE (jared diamond) so perhaps this area is an exporter of people. Through war, or settlement, or slavery.

California: densely populated OTL could turn into urbanized area with centralized power. The Chumash were pretty impressive.

Ok I think that urbanization would form a ripple effect.

Yes to all. Good stuff.

The southwest is unfortunately a delicate environment, which makes any society there vulnerable to upheaval, and (as you say) too much success. With more technology they could do more, but I suspect it would take a couple collapses for that sort of innovation to be decisive. It's really dry. :)

California could host some sizable polities, but first you need to get someone to start farming. In OTL it was more cut off from Meso-American culture than was upstate New York. That about says it, no?
 
hm...this idea really intrigues me...one idea I have is perhaps, given the extra couple of centuries, that when the old world does make contact with the new, you have a scenario that has similarities to how Europe handled Africa and how they handled Asia (i.e. more urban and developed areas like the Andes, Amazon, Mexico, Mississippi, ect. may be treated in a fashion similar to China, Japan, India, ect., while more succepatable areas resemble Africa at the turn of the 20th century...)
I also have one little area I want to address, that of the tribes of the SE United States (specifically the Cherokee). AKA the "Five Civilized Tribes," they're regarded as examples of tribes who attemped to modernize. The reason I bring up the Cherokee is that they went to great lengths to become a modern nation (the syllibary comes to mind but I'm sure there are more things). Everytime I think of the Cherokee I think of the Japanese and how they adoped many western ideas to modernize. My question is did the drive for modernization in the Cherokee Nation, among others, exist in their culture (y'know, the ability to change and adapt in the face of external pressure, ala Japan)?
 
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