[Aztlan] Aztlan Digest, Vol 39, Issue 6, Response to Message 2, item 1)

[Ronald.L.Canter at faa.gov]

On Wheels.
      Concerning the use of wheels, I recently finished reading "Men of
Salt" about salt mines in mid-Sahara in the present day.  Benanav, the
author, noted that originally wheeled chariots were used to cross the
Sahara.  After the domestication of camels, wheeled vehicles were abandoned
since camels worked much better, ie. fewer people died.  Interesting, but
more relevant was the salt miners preference for camels over modern trucks.
It is not traditionalism or taboo.  Even now, the economics of salt mining
favor camels, which are far cheaper to acquire, fuel, and maintain.
      I read Marisol Rincon's dissertation on Maya fortifications with
delight and a feeling that it was long overdue.  The Chichen seige towers
were amazing.  I notice that they had a light frame, so they could have
been hand-carried laying flat to the front lines, then tipped upright, and
secured with lines or weights.
      In the Maya highlands, the rugged terrain would have made wheeled
vehicles impractical.  In the lowlands, the wet season mud even now makes
traveling most roads a slog for much of the year.  Without beasts of burden
(or gasoline engines) to pull them, wheeled vehicles wouldn't have had any
advantage over porters on land, and wouldn't even come close to equaling
canoes on water.  As for using wheeled carts to transport building stone,
the stone size in Maya structures suggests hand-carrying by a small team,
and there are no wheel ruts in the plazas or sacbeob.  Contrast this with
Roman roads.  The Egyptians used boats and sledges, not wheeled wagons, to
move their much larger building stones.  Bottom line is that wheeled
vehicles are just part of a larger economic system.  They are not practical
in some systems, and  the Mesoamerican seems to be one of them.

Ron Canter




                                                                           
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             02/06/2009 01:00          Aztlan Digest, Vol 39, Issue 6      
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 20:15:20 +0000
From: Mark C <dustmop at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Aztlan] Aztlan Digest, Vol 39, Issue 4
To: "Foundation for Adv. of Mesoamerican Studies"
             <aztlan at lists.famsi.org>
Message-ID: <COL106-W2931504231F268FCFF0080ABC00 at phx.gbl>
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Dear Listeros - I have two items I would like to respond to in brief: 1)
The long-accepted idea that the Ancient Americans did not utilize the wheel
seems incredible in view of the now decades-known fact of the use of wheels
on small animal figurines, which may have been toys or funerary offerings.
They have been found in Tres Zapotes, Veracruz, Mex., in Cihuatan, San
Salvador, and in Yaxchilan, Chiapas, Mex. In fact, it has been determined
that the Mesoamericans knew five different ways to attach an axle,
indicating skilled technical understanding of the concept. (See "Wheeled
Toys in Mexico" by Gordon F. Ekholm in American Antiquity, 11. 1946. Also,
"Salvadoran Varieties of Wheeled Figurines" by Stanley H. Boggs in
Contributions to Mesoamerican Anthropology, Pub. No. 1, Miami: Institute of
Maya Studies of the Museum of Science, 1973.) It is unlikely that the basic
mechanical principle of the wheel was understood, but never used in larger
applications. Rather, lack of the w!
 heel seems to be one of those ideas that was purported to be true long ago
and no one ever challenges. I think it is more likely that the wheel had
religious significance, e.g. representing the Sun God, as in Egypt, and was
not allowed to be used other than for building sacred edifices, and that
same type of religious proscription applied to portraying the use of the
wheel. They did build the sacbeob that could have been used for wheeled
transport, and there are thousands of miles of similar highways in South
America. Also, if their wheels were made of wood, they would have
disintegrated along with other wooden implements over the centuries. I am
thinking that with the end of pyramid building and the need to move huge
building stones, the prohibitions remained in place even if just in the
minds of the people, and the wheel was no longer used in the post-classic
and later. There were also those gigantic stone wheels found in South
America with square axle holes found in them!
 . I know that many cultures today still use a simple forehead tumpline
 (mecapal) even though they have wheels being used all around, even on
cars, etc., so that is no proof that they did not have the wheel, or that
they needed draft animals to need or have the wheel.

Mark Cheney