[Aztlan] Wheels in Mesoamerica

Tue Aug 15 08:21:22 CDT 2006

Jeff and others:

  In China the palaquin was the only method of transport people  to weddings etc., or goods (as in Europe with the shoulder bars that held a basket on each end, ie for stone, dirt or in Europe, milk). This was before the wheel came, not into being, but into use. . . .the Aztecs and the Maya, just did not make that changeover.

  Dea

Jeff Baker <jbaker at ecoplanaz.com> wrote:

I have several comments I wanted to make in regard to this thread.

First, I don't think that human powered wheeled vehicles are necessarily a huge advantage over the use of packs strung over the back. Even the mildest slopes are going to cause problems with the use of something like a wheelbarrow. Years ago, I worked for awhile on a construction project. Being the lowest ranking person on the project, my job mainly consisted of providing the carpenter's with the supplies they needed, and when I wasn't carrying wood all over the place, I was put to work dumping sediment around the foundation using a wheelbarrow. The following comments are based upon that experience.

For short distances, the wheelbarrow is quite useful, but if I was to being given the choice between transporting 70 lbs of rock/dirt in a wheelbarrow or in a pack attached to my back for a distance of more than a couple hundred feet, I would choose the pack. Bringing in dirt/rock from outside of Teotihuacan to the pyramids in the center of the city would require a couple km of walking. Pushing a wheelbarrow would be a lot more tiring than having a 70 lb load on your back. In addition, if you were to use a wheelbarrow during the construction of the Sun or Moon Pyramid, ramps would had to have been built up the sides of the pyramid. This poses several problems: (1) At fairly shallow slopes (even 2 degrees) pushing a wheelbarrow up a slope becomes increasingly difficult. (2) Until the earth used on the ramp would get compacted, the wheels would be continually sinking in to the ramp. Even in well-traveled areas, mounds of dirt will contain soft spots that the wheel of a
 wheelba!
rrow will easily sink into. A log or roller that covers the entire width of the ramp, such as those proposed by the Egyptians for building pyramids or by the Olmec for moving giant heads) would not pose the same problem. The weight of the roller would be spread out of a wider area.

Turning specifically to Mesoamerica, while I would agree that the absence of visual images of wheels at Teotihuacan can not be used to argue against the use of the wheel, I think the absence of visual representations of the wheel in the Maya Lowlands is a strong argument against the use of the wheel in that area. The corpus of images on vases, walls and in other media is quite extensive in the Maya Lowlands and shows a variety of different activities taking place.

Additionally, as noted by Caroline Dodds, there is no mention by the Spaniards of any wheeled vehicles at the time of the conquest. I seem to recall that at least one wheeled toy came from a Late Postclassic context in the Gulf Coast (although, my memory could be wrong on this).

To argue for the use of the wheeled contraptions at Teotihuacan, one has to assume that (a) wheeled contraptions were used over a very limited area in Mesoamerica; (b) they also had a very limited temporal distribution.

In regard to Teotihuacan, are any of the roads paved with stone, or cross stone outcrops? If so, I would expect the regular use of wheeled vehicles to leave grooves in the pavement. This happened in the Old World. 

It is clear that Mesoamericans understood what a wheel was and how it works, but I don't think that human powered wheeled vehicles posed an advantage over the use of a tumpline to induce people to use wheeled vehicles instead of tumplines. 

In regard to this latter statement, I should note a conversation I had on a plane about ten years ago. When the individual I was sitting next to found out I was an archaeologist, he started debating with me over whether wheels were present in the New World. I brought up the argument that they weren't used because of the absence of large domestic mammals. This gentleman pointed out the use of rickshaws in east Asia. I mentioned to him the relatively late development of rickshaws (post 1850). As we were talking about this, another man in the same row interposed his comments. This third person was an engineer, and he mentioned that prior to the development of the rickshaw there were some developments in wheeled technology that made wheeled vehicles more efficient. Unfortunately, I no longer remember exactly what the "new technology" was (new ball bearing technology or springs in the vehicle?), but whatever the technology was it helped to reduce the friction that occurs while a
 !
vehicle is moving. 

My two cents on the subject.

Thanks,

Jeff

Jeffrey L. Baker, Ph.D
Archaeologist
EcoPlan Associates, Inc.
701 W. Southern Ave., Ste. 203
Mesa, Arizona 85210
480-733-6666, ext. 126
(FAX) 480-733-6661

-----Original Message-----
From: aztlan-bounces at lists.famsi.org [mailto:aztlan-bounces at lists.famsi.org] On Behalf Of Steven Zoraster
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 3:38 PM
To: AZTLAN at lists.famsi.org
Subject: Re: [Aztlan] ReL Wheels in Mesoamerica

> These cultures included demonstrably brilliant engineers and
> craftsmen who eagerly incorporated countless technological
> refinements into common practice.  So we're left with only two
> reasonable explanations:
>
> 1) Wheels *were* in common use, but left no archaeological traces
> (that we have found so far, anyway).
>
> 2) Wheels were not in common use due to some cultural or
> technological factor we have not yet discovered.
>
> Either way, it's a fascinating puzzle.

This ongoing discussion reminds me of a paper available online titled "King Kong and Cold Fusion: Counterfactual Analysis and the History of Technology" by Dr. Joel Mokyr from Northwestern University.*  Despite the humorous title, it is serious look at the development of applied technology. The author argues that such development is stochastic and not - or only weakly - deterministic, even for two cultures having access to roughly the same technological data base.
(* http://tinyurl.com/n53bp )

Abstract:

How "contingent" is technological history? Relying on models from evolutionary epistemology, I argue for an analogy with Darwinian Biology and thus a much greater degree of contingency than is normally supposed. There are three levels of contingency in technological development. The crucial driving force behind technology is what I call S-knowledge, that is, an understanding of the exploitable regularities of nature (which includes "science" as a subset). The development of techniques depend on the existence of epistemic bases in S. The "inevitability" of technology thus depends crucially on whether we condition it on the existence of the appropriate S-knowledge. Secondly, even if this knowledge emerges, there is nothing automatic about it being transformed into a technique that is, a set of instructions that transforms knowledge into production. Third, even if the techniques are proposed, there is selection which reflects the preferences and biases of an economy and
 injects!
another level of indeterminacy and contingency into the technological history of nations.

>From the Conclusion:

The history of useful knowledge and science in China, then, is a good example of an "alternative" route that knowledge can take in different settings. It is easy and indeed tempting to attribute the differences between the growth of S in China and that in Europe entirely to different institutional settings and social environments or even the differences in geographic endowments. But this ignores the path-dependence, that is, sequential nature, of S. The evolution of useful knowledge is a stochastic branching process: each step is conditioned by the state of knowledge at that time, and the direction of movement has a contingent element. By allowing for the possibility that at any point the evolution of knowledge could have gone on to a different branch than it actually did, we are implicitly allowing for a world that "knows" nature in a different manner than we do and thus exploits it in very different way. This, perhaps, is an appropriate way to think of how knowledge might
 !
have developed in China or pre-Colombian America without the West.

Steven Zoraster

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