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The Polynesian history of the (european) middle ages keeps getting more interesting and mysterious. Evidence for polynesian contact with the Americas is mounti
by netcan 9y ago
The Polynesian history of the (european) middle ages keeps getting more interesting and mysterious.
Evidence for polynesian contact with the Americas is mounting. Regardless, the medieval coonization of all the pacific islands is evidence of seamanship and navigation skills European mariners didn't achieve until well into the age of sail. European sailing was much more trade/cargo oriented & we know a lot less about "pre-contact" polynesian maritime cultre so it's hard to do put the technologies side-by-side. That said, it looks the polynesian ability to aim for and land on small remote islands circa 300CE was not surpassed by any other culture until the 18th century.
Then there's the strange case of Easter Island with it's giant stone statues. Giant stone statues & "how-the-f%£$-did-they-do-this" megalithic monuments have existed for a long time (EG the sphinx), but these are usually produced by populous civic cultures. "High civilization" to use an out of date term. For a tiny island to produce this kind of an artistic culture without obvious predecessors or descendants is strange.
As always in prehistory (in the literal, "before written records" sense), what we know is very little. But, it wouldn't be hard for me to believe that surprising numerical or mathematical systems existed there. It's a culture that has surprised us to the point of disbelief several times.
- openasocket 9y agoI'm having trouble imagining a society with mathematics (beyond just counting) but not writing. Are there other known examples?
- panglott 9y agoThose don't seem related to me at all. Quipu was an Incan record-keeping system that we don't understand well. Abaci are very ancient calculation devices that don't use writing. The oldest Mesopotamian and Roman versions were just a table with pebbles on it. And that's where we get the word for "calculate".
- openasocket 9y agoThey aren't required, it's certainly possible to have a number system and not a writing system. But for anything where you need to do non-trivial arithmetic or accounting you can't just do all that in your head and memorize the results. You need some way of recording the results in a persistent way, even if it's just tallies carved into a piece of wood. And I imagine any culture that figures out a recording system for numbers would pretty quickly (in historical terms, so like years or decades) develop a writing system. I could be wrong of course, I haven't really formally studied ancient history. Aside: Is Quipu not a writing system? I thought there was some evidence indicating it was.
- panglott 9y agoPebble-tables are fine for that, but don't leave a persistant record. Mostly when I hear "writing system" I think "linguistic writing system", a writing system for language, rather than "mathematical writing system". But IIRC a number of writing systems started off first as mathematical record systems before developing to encode linguistic information. Maybe a good example is cuneiform, which started off as tally marks in balls of soft clay stored in jars, for tax purposes, which developed symbols for encoding what kind of goods were being counted. Quipu may be similar, with more nascent development as a linguistic system.
- jacobolus 9y agoAs far as I know the invention and use of counting boards went hand-in-hand with written (cuneiform) records. Or at least, we don’t have any evidence of earlier positional counting boards, only artifacts like tally sticks and piles of (non-positional) tokens. The Sumerian society that developed cuneiform numeration/writing was a large bureaucratic urban society built on complicated debt/taxation/social organization.
- acjohnson55 9y agoPolynesian history blows my mind. I was reading about it a few months ago, which introduced me to the concept of thalassocracy. It blows my mind how sophisticated their navigational skills were, and how they transmitted the information without writing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassocracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassocracy