WI: Industrialised Pre-Columbians?

Precolumbian societies were extremely advanced. IIRC Tenochchitlan was the largest city in the world when a couple hundred fundamentalist bandits with a microscopic superweapon landed to destroy everything. Of course, the Aztec themselves were nearly as savage, and in some ways more. These were two very nasty people, and also very advanced.

The problem, however, is that human beings migrated to the Americas so darn recently. Combine this with the geographic barriers of the Americas, since they are mostly laid out on a north-south axis, as described by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. This geographic orientation applies to Africa as well, but not Eurasia.

One possible PoD is a huge (but not too huge) asteroid landing in the middle of the Mediterranean sometime between the Punic Wars and the Reconquista. But how could we know whether this stops the European juggernaut, or simply delays it to come back even more terribly than the one we know?

Even if the Indians have an industrial civilization, they are not likely to have the necessary immunities to resist, without terrible casualties, a visit from the filthy gods from across the sea.

There's also the question of the Chinese, whose civilization seems less expansionist by nature--probably because it achieves such a magnificent equilibrium by itself--but sooner or later they are going to cross the great ocean if nobody else will.
 
Yes, the diseases would remain a major, major problem, but the challenge of the OP is simply whether they could industrialize prior to the arrival of Columbus. That said, it is still rather surprising and almost a fluke of history that there are no native nations still remaining today. There were many points in OTL where one could've survived against the flow of European immigration, but for various reasons they all collapsed. Now, in my timeline (that I doubt I'll ever resume work on) I might have a method for some surviving states without drastically changing their technology upon European arrival. But if they were somehow industrialized at that point, their chances of survival increase that much more, despite the diseases. Although 90-95% of their people did die from disease IIRC, it didn't happen all at once. The initial outbreaks didn't completely break the backs of most, save for the Mississippians and Amazonians for some reason.
 
They developed agriculture just fine in most places south of Canada...

I don't deny they developed agriculture. The problem is they developed it thousands of years later than the people of Eurasia did. That pushed their entire development back by those same thousands of years.

the problem in that regards was more of a lack of resources. It's why the Anasazi "vanished", and why the Classic Maya superpower cities were abandoned. They just couldn't sustain their populations on the amount of food they could grow in the area. Mississippians and Amazonians may have had less problems in this regard, but I don't know how long either of them were building cities.

Actually not true. The Anasazi grew plenty of food, but their primitive agricultural methods gradually ruined the land, and they weren't advanced enough technologically to survive when a major drought hit. They were also hampered that there were not other major agricultural peoples around who could have sustained them by trade in foodstuffs (as happened in the Middle East during some major droughts in the Bronze Age, for example) when the droughts hit.

As for the Classic Maya, evidence is turning up with increasing regularity that it was a combination of internecine warfare, plus the aforementioned depletion of the land and lack of resiliance during a long dry spell due to primitive agricultural methods, which caused the fall of those cities.

Internecine warfare, primitive agriculture, and lack of trading partners able to sustain them during the drought times, seems to have done in the Mississippians too, although the Mississippians were still, in some areas, a going concern until DeSoto wiped them out.

The agriculture practiced in the Americas was very basic and quite primitive compared to that practiced in Europe and Asia. The reason for that is that it was invented in the Americas much later than it was in Eurasia. They simply didn't have the time to develop the advanced methods the Old World peoples did.

The achievements that everyone points to when they say the Native Americans weren't backward were all things that had been achieved in Eurasia thousands of years before. Yes, the peoples of the Americas accomplished great things. But when you really look at them, they were primitive. Yes, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities on Earth when the Spanish arrived. But it was built by primitive methods (people carrying loads of stone on their backs, etc) that the great civilizations of the Old World had abandoned over 2,000 years before. And Europe had produced a city even larger (Rome) some fifteen centuries before. Yes, the Mayans were great astronomers. But the Babylonians and Chinese were too, thousands of years earlier.

It all comes down to when you start on the road. If you start early, you will reach your destination early. If you start late, you won't. And due to factors which the Native Americans really had little control over...the size and shape of their landmass, and the animals and plants within it...the Native Americans got a very late start.
 
The achievements that everyone points to when they say the Native Americans weren't backward were all things that had been achieved in Eurasia thousands of years before. Yes, the peoples of the Americas accomplished great things. But when you really look at them, they were primitive. Yes, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities on Earth when the Spanish arrived. But it was built by primitive methods (people carrying loads of stone on their backs, etc) that the great civilizations of the Old World had abandoned over 2,000 years before. And Europe had produced a city even larger (Rome) some fifteen centuries before. Yes, the Mayans were great astronomers. But the Babylonians and Chinese were too, thousands of years earlier.
People usually bring up Pre-Columbian achievements when others try to assert this idea that Old-Worlders were "superior". That said, you are viewing progress too linearly or Euro-centrically if I may say so myself. They were more advanced in some ways, less so in others. They were not great metal-workers or farmers (except maybe the Amazonians in regards to farming, but not sure), but they had better doctors than Europe, great at math, and even had stuff like compulsory schooling for all children regardless of class or gender. Progress isn't a "I have this, you don't, I'm better" kind of thing. 1491 makes that point abundantly clear. But that is all irrelevant anyways.
 
In a work of fiction or movie, but in reality how will the knowledge expand past a localized area? Also do ALL Phoenician or Norsemen know who to mine and smelt iron?
Actually, most Icelandic farms had smithies. Of course, there's a big difference between bog iron, which is what they knew and iron ore. The biggest DIS advantage with the Norse is getting them in contact with people who did copper smithing.

Phoenicians. I didn't say it was likely... Besides, I'd bet that if a whole shipload survived (or most of one), that SOMEONE would know enough. OTOH, they have to 1) find locals who know smithing 2) convince them they should be friends 3)....

As for it spreading - once one group has iron weapons/tools, they'll have a significant advantage - either they spread or someone else steals the secret. Certainly, the knowledge will spread (possibly over the course of a couple of hundred years).

Actually there were iron deposits relatively nearby which could have been obtained by trade or conquest.

The problem with iron smelting is that it requires the creation of very high temperatures in your smelter/forge. In the Old World, people gradually figured out how to do this during the course of the Bronze Age, through their experiences in smelting copper and bronze, but it took them a couple of thousand years.
Indeed. There is some evidence that iron was used as a POOR substitute for bronze for hundreds of years, simply because the alloying metals (mostly tin, occasionally arsenic) were so rare that bronze was very expensive. It wasn't until after several hundred years of experimentation that someone figured out how to make iron BETTER than bronze.

With an Andean invention of bronze ~1200, that means they might be getting iron, oh, about now.
 
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