[Aztlan] Aztlan Digest, Vol 39, Issue 7 Wheels

[rod44 at comcast.net]

We all got into a long discussion on "Maya wheels" here last year which I'm not going to repeat, but to mention that as discussed the issue is not wheels but wheeled vehicles. This requires: axles (which are not efficient until the discovery of bronze), bushings (or other anti friction devise), steering, power, etc. 
J. Rodriguez PE 


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 



Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" 


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 








--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**--**