[Aztlan] The Wheels of Pluto

[Archaeology Institute]

rod44 at comcast.net on Sunday, August 27, 2006 at 5:27 AM -0800 wrote:
>-------------- Original message -------------- 
>From: rod44 at comcast.net 
>
>I've been reading all the comments on Maya Wheels recently and I think this last round "cold fusion etc." is the best.   So here's my 2 cents worth from an engineer's point of view:
>
>Technological developments do not occur from a single discovery.  It took a while before Bell put together, electromagnets, voice diaphragms, electrical transmissions, etc. into a viable Telephone   the fax machine was invented in the 1880s but it
>had to wait for tone transmission.  In other words, "DEVICES"   are the combination a complex technological combinations.  (as we all remember from "Connections" on TV).
>       The Maya obviously knew the wheel whether  they were  toys or models or both is not important.  Many toys are models ad  vs/vc.    The question is did the Maya have wheeled  vehicles , to which the answer is it doesn't seem like they did.
>To properly use wheels you need 1) reliable axles.  I don't care how strong is your wood, a wooden axle just has to be of too large a diameter, which induces extreme friction at the wheel hub.  In the 'old world' we only find dependable wheeled
>vehicles after the use of the bronze axle.  This bring us to 2) WHEEL HUBS.  If the wheel is fix on the axle and rotates on the chassis, the the differential  speed while cornering is huge, except at very low speeds and shallow radii.
>(impractical).  A differential wheel speed demands  wheels independently turning at the hub.  # this causes still large frictions on wood on wood (or even wood on bronze)    SO.... 3)  you need a bushing  (ball bearings would be nice... but that
>would be milenia  in the future)  Bronze on greased bronze is not too bad, or bronze on greased hide fixed to wood will do. 4) steering.  Except for the lightest of two wheeled cha riots, two axled four wheeled wagons are necesary, and now you need
>a steerable fr!
> ont axl
>e ... and back to the differential problem...
>5)Obviously the vehicle must move on a surface and other than light Assyrian or Egyptian wicker chariots over hard packed middle east dessert you have to wait for a Roman Road.  A good Tzac-be will do, but they were'nt that long  or ubiquitous.  
>Even Ford and Firestone had to talk "the Govmint" into paving more roads so they could sell more cars and tires. 6)  Last but not least, motive power.  Without beasts of burden the vehicle is worthless.   If you are going to use human power, well
>then the effort of building vehicles and roads is worthless.  Just have porters and at the most "travois"
>      We do have fussion reactors... but they use up more energy than they produce.... we can transmute lead into gold... but it costs more money than the gold is worth... we do have rotary engines, gasohol, and hydrogen power cells  but they are
>not efficient... YET.   It seems so was the stage of the Maya Wheel.
>J. Rodriguez
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Dear All,

	I too have followed this discussion with some interest, and have noted the largely eurocentric orientation of many of those assumptions made to date.  Why must such wheeled vehicles always be construed only in terms of European standards...and only
in terms of those more efficient mechanisms available in the latter stages of technological development?  Bear in mind that it took nearly one thousand years for the early Europeans to move from an awkward and clumsy ox-drawn four wheeled vehicle to
one propelled by horses.  During early European colonization in the Americas, many European groups made use of particularly "primitive" versions of the wheeled vehicle...and these in turn were maintained as viable through to the end of the late
Colonial era.  For example, in California and the US Southwest, or the Frontera Septentrional, "carretas" or oxdrawn wooden axled vehicles moved both people and commerce over only the crudest of tamped earth roads...such as that represented by the
El Camino Real.  Interestingly, despite the fact that the Spanish era of colonial domination ended by 1821, and the oxen-driven carretas of that era persisted through the 19th century, few if any of these wooden carts survived into the 20th century.

	To assume that Maya sacbe, or for that matter, Teotihuacan, La Quemada, Casas Grandes, Mississippian and other related transport networks were somehow inferior to European roads, or not long enough to justify the use of "wheeled" vehicles, is
another assumption that we can do without.  In my earlier reviews of such road networks (Mendoza 1997 [Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures; or 2001 [Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures]),
and in Trombold's (1991) edited collection of papers, it is clear that Mesoamerican road networks, like those of her Andean counterparts...consisted of both formal masonry, and informal tamped earth systems.  Many such Mesoamerican roads, whether
Zacatecan or Teotihucano, or Maya, could extend as much as 60 to 90 miles in their formal aspects as paved masonry elevations.  Looking at this matter from a non-Western perspective, we need to acknowledge that such contrivances as standardized
wheel hubs and axles were the product of both Chinese and Egyptian forebearers...and this only after the successful subjugation of rival kingdoms, and the establishment of a hegemonic political aparatus or empire for seeing through the enforcement
of mandates germane to such standardization across culturally heterogeneous regions such as that that would fall under the authority of the later Qin dynasty.  Moreover, we need not look any further than the Harappan civilization to once again find
an archaeological culture that left a legacy of wheeled "toys" and little else.

	Ultimately, the idea that "without beasts of burden the wheel is worthless" would again not fly in the face of the 19th century Japanese contrivance - or human powered vehicle - known as the rickshaw.  Earlier versions of the rickshaw-like vehicle
(known as vinaigrettes) predominated in France during the 17th and 18th centuries, and yet I have heard nothing of these human-powered vehicles in this discussion forum to date.  Were it not for laws outlawing the use of the rickshaw, such vehicles
would still dominate the streets and byways of many Asian countries today.  I am nevertheless reminded of a talk I attended some years ago by a prominent South American metallurgist who unabashedly proclaimed that while "archaeologists and
collectors have recovered thousands of gold plated vessels in Peru and South America," and literally thousands more have never been subjected to metallurgical analysis, "the Indians of Peru clearly never mastered the art and technology of plating
metal as we have no proof that it ever became a part of their scientific tradition."  If thousands of such "electrochemically-plated" vessels are insufficient to demonstrate the veracity of such an ancient American Indian tradition, then no amount
of discussion on this forum will ever change the prevailing double standard for ascerting the primacy of European versus American Indian standards of achievement.

	In a recent paper of mine (Mendoza 2003: "Lords of the Medicine Bag: Medical Science and Traditional Practice in Ancient Peru and South America." London: Kluwer Academic Publishers) published in Medicine Across Cultures, my review of the
archaeological and ethnohistorical literature made clear that the persistent argument that cranial trepanning was undertaken by the Indians of the Americas for the sole purpose of "releasing evil spirits" was countermanded by the large body of
quantitative evidence that in fact demonstrates that Inca surgeons, and in particular Kallahuaya surgeons in particular, had a far better success rate with surgical procedures identified with the human cranium and brain (70% success rate) versus
those far more dismal rates of success maintained by modern American surgeons through the period of the 1940s (30% success, nearly 70% mortality and infection).  Despite such evidence to the contrary, we archaeologists and ethnohistorians continue
to argue (on the basis of negative evidence) for an inferior and less sophisticated Native America...one which, like the "planet" Pluto, has since been jettisoned into oblivion on the basis of the arguments of the moment!


Best Regards,

Ruben G. Mendoza, Ph.D., Director
Institute for Archaeological Science, Technology and Visualization
Social and Behavioral Sciences
California State University Monterey Bay
100 Campus Center
Seaside, California 93955-8001

Email: archaeology.csumb at gmail.edu
Voice: 831-582-3760; Fax: 831-582-3566
http://archaeology.csumb.edu; http://archaeology.csumb.edu/wireless/


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