Would Native American society have changed without European interference?
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twovultures
Donor
You might be interested in this article on indigenous-influenced architecture in Bolivia. I think it's an interesting window into what an industrial or post-industrial ATL Native American culture might produce, aesthetics-wise.
No horses? My, the Plains Indians (I am unsure what the terms are for Native Americans of this area when taken as a whole. Forgive the use of the word.) would be far different than what we now think. Also, I wonder who would end up winning in those wars in eastern Canada and the U.S. east of the Mississippi. A lot of the tribes did make trade with Europeans be dependent upon them helping them in their wars. Might be some of those tribes in the Northeast still collapse, as they had a practice where the losing side in a war gave up people to the winning side to make up for the dead. After a couple of wars this is... Well, I don't think it worked in the long run.
The Inca were at LEAST nearing Roman levels. Other areas, such as the Northwest, Mississippi basin, Pueblo-Navajo area, and the Mexican lowlands, were also rapidly nearing civilization. IMO, within 200-300 years, the Native American societies would have been nearing Feudal European levels of tech, though perhaps not Age of Exploration European tech. Really, the only reason why the Inca fell was because the Spanish caught them literally at the weakest moment in their entire history.
No they won´t, the Incas lacked so many stuff the Romans had is not even conceivable to say so, you could say they paragon ancient empires but not Rome. And even IF they were you don´t evolve in mere centuries when you could easily collapse for a reason and another.
Magical123
Banned
As I myself stated they were progressing it was just going to take a very long time for them to become Europe's equals in the technological and social sense-multiple millennia
Without horses they've got a hard road to go down. Everything from agriculture to war is going to be a whole lot more difficult without animal power.
Hell, you can't even domesticate buffalo because they get stomach worms when they get sedentary (solved by modern medicine). You have the added bonus of them being able to just wander away without a person being able to do much about it. They also rut up their pens because they do this goofy thing where they try to roll on their backs and use the Earth like a scratching post and just end up leaving a large ovoid pit in the soil.
But realistically at some point somebody will figure out bronze working and things will start chugging along. Pots, pans, nails, fishhooks, and plows will cover every inch of the continent within a few decades of them figuring it out.
Hell, you can't even domesticate buffalo because they get stomach worms when they get sedentary (solved by modern medicine). You have the added bonus of them being able to just wander away without a person being able to do much about it. They also rut up their pens because they do this goofy thing where they try to roll on their backs and use the Earth like a scratching post and just end up leaving a large ovoid pit in the soil.
But realistically at some point somebody will figure out bronze working and things will start chugging along. Pots, pans, nails, fishhooks, and plows will cover every inch of the continent within a few decades of them figuring it out.
Are you referring to the Beaver wars? Or some other conflict that they were in the middle of when First Contact was made?
There is evidence of Bronze Working in Mesoamerica. The Tarascans were known to craft Bronze jewelry, though they did not seem to favor widespread adoption of Bronze for Weaponry. However given large external pressure, say from the Aztecs, it's likely that they may have adopted Bronze for weaponry eventually in that case.
The ones when first contact was made and the ones that went on over the century of so before the English and French got majorly involved in the area.
Yes, to the original question. No, to the next logical question, there would not be a United States of America and popular Democracy would not be a thing.
I think the Pacific Northwest would have something like traditional Russian architecture going, with the crazy impressive and huge wooden buildings. Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd see something like that (but with a different aesthetic) amongst the Great Lakes, northeast, and pretty much everywhere outside the Plains and Southwest.
someone on here once noted that 'doing a Bronze Age' would be harder in the Americas because there weren't a lot of places where the stuff to make bronze were conveniently close together... it would be doable, just slower...
It would be hard to pull off, mainly due to how inconveniently mineral deposits are spread across the Americas, often in combinations that prevent a more comfortable founding of widespread New World metallurgy. Here's a convenient list of discussions we've had on the topic over the years. Recently, we've talked a lot about making bronzemaking more widespread, or even having native cultures in North America go from the Neolithic/Chalcolithic to the Iron Age by discovering bog iron deposits and inventing bog iron metallurgy.
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