To What Extent Could the Aztecs/Incas Have Adapted Spanish Technology?

It can also spread far beyond its original area of infection. Measles hit the Inca Empire well before the Spaniards turned up. In addition, the Mississippi mound builders were wiped out without the Europeans knowing that they existed.
Wrong, there were several expeditions into the American southeast that ran into the Mississippian cultures and interacted with them. The Narvaez expedition ran into them, and the diseases were actually introduced and spread by the later De Soto expedition rather than before.
 

Winnabago

Banned
It still comes down to what they know. A shipbuilder is going to be more useful than a peon who could not empty sand from his boots unless the instructions were written on the bottom.

Also, there will be resistence to new technology. If you think that it is dishonourable for people to ride to battle on an animal, you may put all your captured horses into one big stew instead of rasing cavalry.

Finally, if the Spaniards are in small numbers and thus get their arses whipped, their technology could be seen as having no value whilst on the other hand they will make very nice sacrifices to the gods.

Sure, but even with an unskilled Spaniard, there's the helpful fact that he's got connections in Cuba and knows Spanish, meaning that even if he can't teach you to make steel he can help you buy some and train you to use it.
 
Night of Tears and Cortes is killed, the Spanish and Tlaxcalans flee back to Tlaxcala where Xico II successfully turns most of the Confederacy against the Spanish and Imprision them but they escape taking casualties where they flee to Maxi's Tlaxcala city but the Spanish are spooked and attack then flee to the coast to the Totonacs. Meanwhile the Mexica are getting their stuff together and putting down would be revolts and raiding the Tlaxcala. Somewhere in this chaos Navarra is also killed. The surviving Spaniah on the coast in Veracruz build a ship to set sail for Cuba but Xico shows up and fights with the Totonacs and burns the Spanish fort.

Everyone puts the screws to the surviving Spanish the Aztecs managing to snag most of the Horses while the Tlaxcala have most of the surviving Spanish and their equipment. They start things slow with developing bronze, particularly with Crossbows and over the years as skirmishes continue with progress with Iron.

Meanwhile Cuba is wondering what the bloody hell happened to their men and dispatches another expedition including Pizzaro to find out what happened. Possibly they decide to head north from Panama and run into the Mixtecs and Zapotecs who have started getting the Knockoffs so when the Spanish arrive they are ambushed with Pizzaro captured among others killed. Though at least half of the expedition manages to make it back to Panama and report their losses but also include reports of sickness amongst the natives. As Smallpox has gone and swept through the population, to the north the bigger Mexica, Tlaxcala, and even Tarascans having to deal with it including civil revolts and the movement of increasingly belligerent Otomi and Chichimecha peoples moving across the region. Of these the Mexca abandon much of their southern territories to consolidate.

Returning to the root of things the Spanish send a much less beligerant expedition to make contact with the Totonacs where they discover surviving Spanish close to a decade later.
 
Night of Tears and Cortes is killed, the Spanish and Tlaxcalans flee back to Tlaxcala where Xico II successfully turns most of the Confederacy against the Spanish and Imprision them but they escape taking casualties where they flee to Maxi's Tlaxcala city but the Spanish are spooked and attack then flee to the coast to the Totonacs. Meanwhile the Mexica are getting their stuff together and putting down would be revolts and raiding the Tlaxcala. Somewhere in this chaos Navarra is also killed. The surviving Spaniah on the coast in Veracruz build a ship to set sail for Cuba but Xico shows up and fights with the Totonacs and burns the Spanish fort.

Everyone puts the screws to the surviving Spanish the Aztecs managing to snag most of the Horses while the Tlaxcala have most of the surviving Spanish and their equipment. They start things slow with developing bronze, particularly with Crossbows and over the years as skirmishes continue with progress with Iron.

Meanwhile Cuba is wondering what the bloody hell happened to their men and dispatches another expedition including Pizzaro to find out what happened. Possibly they decide to head north from Panama and run into the Mixtecs and Zapotecs who have started getting the Knockoffs so when the Spanish arrive they are ambushed with Pizzaro captured among others killed. Though at least half of the expedition manages to make it back to Panama and report their losses but also include reports of sickness amongst the natives. As Smallpox has gone and swept through the population, to the north the bigger Mexica, Tlaxcala, and even Tarascans having to deal with it including civil revolts and the movement of increasingly belligerent Otomi and Chichimecha peoples moving across the region. Of these the Mexca abandon much of their southern territories to consolidate.

Returning to the root of things the Spanish send a much less beligerant expedition to make contact with the Totonacs where they discover surviving Spanish close to a decade later.

Pizarro was mayor of Panama City in 1520.
 
The sling was a common weapons in North and South America. What they needed was better sling-bullets. Since antiquity there was no comparison between lead and stone sling-bullets.
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Apparently some Greeks, at least, used cast pottery sling shot. But I agree lead makes a better shot.
 
Pizarro was mayor of Panama City in 1520.

Putting him in a perfect position to come up from Panama. Though the Panama expedition would happen a few years later. Information and logistics moving much slower in this time frame .
 
Assuming that they defeated the initial Spanish invasions, to what extent could the Aztecs and/or Incas have made use of Spanish knowledge or technology?

I think the Incas are a better bet by far.

There are posters on this site far more knowledgable than me on this subject, but the Incas seem to have had a number of advantages the Aztecs lacked.

They seem to have dominated their political environment, with far less powerful external enemies that the Spanish could ally with against them.

Their core territory was exceptionally defensible.

And they were a very new nation. At the time Colombus landed there would have been many Incas alive who remembered a time when the Incas were a small power among many. That means they were still figuring out how to run an empire and trying new solutions. Much less cultural resistance to new things.

They really had massive bad luck with their encounter with the Spanish during their civil war-induced epidemic. An Inca state with slightly good luck instead could end up with an Inca on the throne that was inclined to learn from the Spanish. Especially if the Spanish managed to score a few victories where they were outnumbered.

An Inca empire that turtles in the mountains and launches an organized policy of learning "secrets" of the invaders could...well do a lot better than OTL.
 
my first thought is 'more than they did in OTL, but not enough to overcome the Europeans'. If the first conquistador expeditions had failed, with lots of Spaniards captured, the natives could have learned to adopt more than they did (as others have noted, horses were pretty easy. And they might have gotten their hands on cattle, sheep, and pigs later on). However, Europe has too many advantages for them to overcome that easily, and once they really get on the conquest path, they'll overcome the natives sooner or later.

And horses may not have been that easy, it occurs to me... they'd have to capture a stallion and mares to get a breeding population, and I'm not sure if the average Spanish conquistador expedition took those along (were most of the warhorses geldings?)

Except with most of the conquistadors captured who's conquering, I mean there wheren't that many conquistadors OTL and a lot who did go only went because the first couple had been massively successful. If they're failures then it's unlikely they'll be continuing for years to come.
 
Except with most of the conquistadors captured who's conquering, I mean there wheren't that many conquistadors OTL and a lot who did go only went because the first couple had been massively successful. If they're failures then it's unlikely they'll be continuing for years to come.

true, but I think rumors of mountains of gold in the new world will draw the Europeans into trying again, and if they really put the effort into it, they'll win.
 
true, but I think rumors of mountains of gold in the new world will draw the Europeans into trying again, and if they really put the effort into it, they'll win.

Except the myth of mountains of gold were started by the conquest of the Aztecs?
 
Except the myth of mountains of gold were started by the conquest of the Aztecs?

That's not actually true, but I think the conquest of the Aztecs was the first time (significant) gold was found, and considering everything else that occurred during the Cortes expedition, I'd imagine Spain would be hesitant to send anyone into mainland Mexico for a while still. After all, Cortes wasn't even supposed to be there. Other regions, though - that might be a different matter.
 
Theres an ISOT novel, The Other Time by Mack Reynolds and Dean Ing that basically goes there. While a timeshifted archeologist is an 'easier' catalyst, it's only borderline asb that the Aztecs could pull a similar trick on their own.

It's certainly easy to get Cortez defeated, and, since his expedition was unauthorized, the Aztecs would have had breathing room to try new techniques. Assuming they spared some of the more skilled soldiers, introducing wheeled vehicles and iron, probably even steel isnt a total stretch. And, yes, theyd probably need a blacksmith to teach them.

Sure, theyll be technologically far, far behind the Spanish, but even with the massive pandemics coming, they out number them massively. Whether they can hold out in the long run is an interesting question, but at worst they should be able to get the kind of status British India had, governed and oppressed from afar, but native structures largely staying intact, rather than otls total Spanish takeover.
 
I don't think they had a chance honestly.

Even if you believe that the 90% cumulative casualty rates from the Columbian epidemics are an overstatement, the Indigenous Americas will have negative population trends for centuries. This is true even without outright Spanish conquest. The Inca had their first major smallpox epidemic before the Spanish conquest, and plagues essentially depopulated Eastern North America by the time the Mayflower landed on Plymouth rock. Scattered trading/slaver missions will be enough to cause continued plague exposure, which will over a period of years to decades wipe their way over the entire settled/agricultural core of the Americas.

With cavalry, Native Americans didn't need high population numbers to reach near military parity. The Mapuche, as noted, figured this out, as did tribes in the U.S. Great Plains. The introduction of horses to the Plains was fascinating, because there was only around a century of diffusion between the Spanish teaching some Pueblo fieldhands how to tend horses and their filtration into the Canadian prairies.

That said, the areas it took off were places where there was lots of flat land and available wild pasture. In contrast, the Inca, and to a lesser extent, the Aztecs, were in highlands where horses were simply not as valuable in terms of mobility. To top it off, many fields will be abandoned during this period, particularly in Central Mexico, which will lead to forest expansion, which is again poor terrain for horses. There just isn't enough advantage in reaching parity in terms of cavalry for them.
 
With cavalry, Native Americans didn't need high population numbers to reach near military parity. The Mapuche, as noted, figured this out, as did tribes in the U.S. Great Plains. The introduction of horses to the Plains was fascinating, because there was only around a century of diffusion between the Spanish teaching some Pueblo fieldhands how to tend horses and their filtration into the Canadian prairies.

That said, the areas it took off were places where there was lots of flat land and available wild pasture.
Also, the land is not naturally for farming say the Deep South is. Ranching is fewer low in numbers of colonists than full scale agriculture.

In contrast, the Inca, and to a lesser extent, the Aztecs, were in highlands where horses were simply not as valuable in terms of mobility. .
More intense agricultural areas favour the Spanish because it will support more colonists and thus more attractive to them.

Not withstanding the Cortez's native allies, the Spanish technology was a great equaliser against the Incas and Aztecs. However, they need manpower ie colonists if they are not to be run out as Cortez was on his first expedition. That means some form of colonial city, which means agriculture. If you look where the Spanish and English first made inroads, it is what they could raise crops.
 
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