[Aztlan] "WHEELS" - In Reply to Villas

[kim Goldsmith]

I think you are right up to a point, at least at some
sites about the wheel being used for special projects.
However, Teotihuacan is a city that, as I mentioned
before, was totally paved over for 24km and included a
series of labarynthic very FLAT streets and alleys
(with the exception of the Ave. of the Dead) which
would have been ideal for the pushing/pulling of
little handcarts for people doing things like selling
door-to-door or doing trash collecting, etc.

Not having beasts of burden is not a deterrent for
using carts or "wheel barrows".  I'm sure you have
used one in your garden or milpa and realize how much
more you can get done (faster too!) by that method
than you can with baskets of dirt/stone/etc. carried
on your head or back.  Not to mention the
wear-and-tear that it saves on your body.

Plus, I must point out to you that we don't "KNOW" for
a fact that those wheeled animals were toys.  It is my
heavy suspicion that it was so, but to state that we
"know" is taking an awful lot for granted.

I think as archaeologists we need to get away from
simply accepting what has been general "lore" in the
older bibliographys.  So much more excavation and
information has come to light since the early days of
this relatively young discipline.  Remember the time
when they thought that Teotihuacan was a "...peaceful
society with no wars or human sacrifice"?  What we
know about it now couldn't have strayed farther from
that line of thinking.  I could give many more
examples of this - - following the "old school" crowd
without thinking (and most importantly, REASONING) for
ourselves is just bad policy.

I would also venture to say that in archaeology, we
can BARELY ever "safely say" ANYTHING about what we
are trying to interpret, especially for those
civilizations for which we have lost all of the oral
and written tradition.  Archaeology boils down to our
best educated guess about things that in many cases we
know little or nothing about, and for which we often
have scant remains and poor preservation circumstances
from which to try to make any deductions.

Logic, cool-headed reasoning and much more care in not
simply taking things for granted will get us farther
in this discipline than anything else.  Archeology is
like math, and once you come to a bad assumption,
everything that you then add on to that will also be
wrong.

All the Best to You,

KIM

Kim C. Goldsmith, Ph.D.
Archaeologist
Teotihuacan
  MEXICO


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