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Some of this information is a bit outdated. Horses were reintroduced by Spaniards, but precolumbian mobility was not what we'd call minimal today and adoption
by AlotOfReading 2y ago
Some of this information is a bit outdated.
Horses were reintroduced by Spaniards, but precolumbian mobility was not what we'd call minimal today and adoption of horses in the plains was deeply tied to political changes from Spanish colonialism in the southwest. As one example, people would make annual pilgrimages hundreds of miles across the desert from modern Phoenix to the gulfs of California and Mexico. People in the Northeast would travel hundreds of miles on their waterways for social visits. There was a vast trade network spanning the continent from the arctic down to South America, and the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Epidemic disease also didn't spread in advance of European contact. The demographic shattering diseases that led to those (fairly questionable) population loss figures happened after sustained European contact. Some regional disease slightly preceded contact, but we think they were fairly minor events demographically. Textbooks and popular media haven't caught up with the new work in this area though, like: https://doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.79.3.487 https://doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.79.3.487
- throwup238 2y ago> Epidemic disease also didn't spread in advance of European contact. The demographic shattering diseases that led to those (fairly questionable) population loss figures happened after sustained European contact. Yup, the biggest killer - smallpox - was probably introduced by Pánfilo de Narváez‘s expedition to arrest Cortez’ while he was already well into his campaign to conquer the Aztecs, decades after Columbus. Europe and North Africa were experiencing their own sporadic outbreaks at the time and it’s likely that a slave named Francisco Eguia brought it over Several of the indigenous people in the Caribbean were already wiped out because of the awful conditions of their enslavement by this point.
- bboygravity 2y agoDIdn't Columbus essentially wipe out natives on the Carribean Islands though through a kind of forced labour (mining) genocide (with the "help" of disease)? And Cortez wasn't exactly a passive visitor either? Sure the diseases might've helped speed things up, but both of them seemed to be on a pretty intense and efficient pillaging, killing and raping spree. Where Cortez even went to great lengths to not only wipe out the natives but actually also destroy any trace of their largest city.
- krapp 2y agoThe crazy thing about Columbus (well, one of many) is that Spain explicitly forbade him to take slaves in the Caribbean, they wanted the natives Christianized and the land colonized. Columbus just did it anyway, and shipped over boatloads of slaves they didn't even want.
- Unbefleckt 2y agoFrom my reading I understand that the Aztecs and Inca people never met, how did this trade network span the continent?
- mkl 2y agoThere were lots of other groups of people in between. Even if only neighbouring people traded with each other, the trade network could still span the continents, with some items moving much farther than the individual people.