Aztec/Maya and the lathe?

An instructive thread. Guess the A's & M's were limited to slinging snake dung; bulls & horses being unknown to neither the Aztec Association of Woodturners nor the Worshipful Company of Mayan Turners. Are we coming full _circle ourselves?

Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter

It is fairly well documented (now) that Mayan culture was a victim of nothing more exotic than bad weather, ie. draught, which was some 7-12 years long and destroyed their agriculture base so they basically starved to death. Up until that time they subsisted quite nicely on a maize diet with fish. Not to mention a little coca enema from time to time for the priesthood!

Didn't help them when the canals dried up, though.

BTW, no Pre-Columbian society used the potter's wheel. All known ceramics were formed by coiling, hand-molding or shaping around basketry forms then burning out the basket. This includes vessels, figurines and smoking pipes.

Now think about it for a minute...."Smoking Frog" comes up with this great idea, a round thing that will make loads easier to move because it will roll along the ground and the load will be borne on top of it. But he thinks about it for a few minutes and says, "No, that'll never work efficiently until the Mixtec Memorial Parkway is built. I guess I'm just a few hundred years before my time."

Do you think Mesoamerica is a swamp? There's lots of solid ground. Jungle doesn't preclude wheeled transport either. However, not making the connection (mentally) between the wheel in abstract (like the calendar) and a more practical application >does< preclude using it for that application.

I really doubt that if someone came up with an idea to ease their burdens that would have been as revolutionary as the wheel, they would have abandoned the idea because they lived next to a mudhole.

There is no Mayan or contemporary Spanish evidence to support this...hypothesis.

Nope. No potter's wheels.

Don't even get me started on the Mormons. The Utah Faction still controls many of the regulars here in this forum. Nish and those Godless Canadians would have destroyed this group long ago were it not for my vigilance in pointing out the bigamist conspiracy. God Bless, Al Kyder

Waterloo, for one.

Aut inveniam viam aut faciam

You're probably right, at that- it is just a hypothesis, after all. My thought was that it is rather unlikely that they spent enough time observing the sky to make a calendar of any sort without noticing that the celestial bodies were moving in a circular fashion. I'm no expert, but it seems like a fairly basic conclusion that a round calendar based on the heavens would have a central point around which the edges "revolved" While that doesn't make a wagon, it is a wheel of sorts.

Ok- I thought I had seen some, but it could certainly have been made by other methods. Aut inveniam viam aut faciam

Much of Aztecia _is_ a swamp--they liked to build on islands in lakes.

And much of the rest of the area has moist soil conditions for a significant portion of the year (can you say "rain forest"?). Further, anybody who has maintained trails will tell you that wheeled vehicles, even relatively gentle ones like mountain bikes, can start erosion patterns that if not dealt with can make a significant mess of trails in such benign localities as New England. The traffic of a large city moving loads over those same trails on wooden-wheeled wheelbarrows would create a quagmire fairly quickly.

Doubt whatever you want to. It only eases their burdens if they can actually use it. If they have to do ten times as much work preparing surfaces for it to run on than they save by using it then it is not a good deal.

Could have slung jaguar dung, or panther piss for that matter.

They already had domesticated turkeys and also along the coast ate fish. The Aztec also cultivated Spirulina a high protein algae which they grew in the surrounding lakes. Aztec also cultivated Amaranth one of the few grains which is high in complete proteins. Incas had domesticated the Guinea Pig as live stock food source as well as cultivated a grain Quinoa which is also high in complete proteins. Mesoamericans had plenty enough protein in their diet to stay healthy.

Spy in Hawaii