For agricultural productivity, we are going to witness the historical collapse of the Mesoamerican population base. You need a much more efficient method of farming for when you lose all those man-hours that labor intensive crops like potatoes require. Europe is very agriculturally efficient both per acre and per man-hour, the natives not so much on the man-hour side. Without iron, draft animals, etc. it will be very hard for any post contact native society to maintain its agricultural yields even without fighting a war. Certainly those same lands will be more productive if farmed with iron and draft animals. As production measures how much sugar (or fish, etc.) you can pull out of the ground (ocean). Likewise for mines, you can pull heaps of gold and copper out of the ground if you have a large enough population base, but once that base contracts, your total productivity is going to be shot and your technology will keep your production down.
This is a circular argument. You're saying that their agricultural productivity
before contact must have been less advanced than Europe because it collapsed
following contact with Europe, which you admit has little to do with their actual technology but more so with the demographic disaster caused disease and warfare. Europe faced many of the same problems well into the modern era. The fact of the matter is that several areas of the New World maintained populations that equaled Europe in density. If their agricultural productivity was so incomparable to that of Europe, then we have to ask why the difference wasn't significantly more apparent? Yes, they may have lacked draft animals and iron, but they managed quite well all the same. This might be a good reason to put them behind a few levels, but it's not a particularly good argument for making their technological progress stagnant.
The Aztecs produced about 500K pages of paper annually, this would be less than what one printing press could run through in a year in London. Running, for instance, an early 16th century law court would eat through the entire supply of Aztec paper. Given that they lacked iron, the Aztecs cannot ramp up their paper production as each page will have to be beaten by hand. Quipu are even worse, the number of man-hours needed to produce equivalent information from mass producing rope (by hand) vs writing is just insane. All the stock standard infrastructure we build in EU is going to burn through huge amounts of information storage and retrieval - law courts, markets, shipyards - each of those needs to record and retrieve more information in a year than the Aztec empire could deal with.
First off, I'm curious about your numbers. They sound slightly too specific for you just to have made them up, but they're clearly vague and incorrect. What does "Aztecs" mean in this situation? Tenochtitlan? Mexico Valley? The Triple Alliance? Mesoamerica? Does your source even tell you? There's a fairly big difference between producing paper for 200k people and producing paper for 20 million. Now, if I was to guess, you're getting this number from Wikipedia, because that's only such place I can find this reference. However, I hope that you had the good sense to check that source. That 500 sheets, actually 480, is what the Aztecs received as tribute from a handful of villages in a particular year. Nowhere there does it state that this was the Aztecs' annual paper production or consumption. If you expand your list of sources, you'll see how wrong you are. It's quite easy to find references to about half a million sheets of paper being sent to Tenochtitlan each year. You're only off by a factor of about 1000. As for quipu, I simply disagree. Not only is the production of quipu significantly easier than that of paper, but it's incredibly efficient for maintaining numeric data. Overall I find your critique here to be poorly sourced and argued.
Both had a complex understanding of math, perhaps. However we know that the Aztecs had discrete symbols for fractional notation rather than extending their number system to a general reciprocal system. Their illustrated methods of, for example, calculating the area of an irregular lot were less accurate than using reciprocals (they are something like 5% less accurate than comparable Babylonian methods and are more time intensive). I'm well aware that they were quite good at calenders, but that won't allow them to calculate parabolic curves for things like artillery aiming or shipbuilding. There are tasks that you simply cannot do with the math they had. Tasks that are integral to EU technology.
That Aztecs did indeed have a different numeric representation for fractions, although the general Mesoamerican numeral system did not. An oddity to be sure. However, there is really only one major source on this issue and if I recall correctly that source notes that the discrepancies caused by the Aztecs' odd system of fractions was fairly minimal. Additionally, exponentiation was well known to Mesoamericans and we don't know exactly how they understood negative numbers. A parabola was probably within their grasp but not something they would have developed on their own without a purpose for it. Citing artillery is useless because they didn't have any and shipbuilding in the Americas was quite different from European shipbuilding and thus a parabolic framework would serve them no purpose.
In 1590, de Zuniga began a policy called "Peace by Purchase". This involved shipping large quantities of European style goods to the Chichimeca. In 1591, this policy was expanded by bribing Tlaxcalan allies to settle in Chichimeca areas to teach the Chichimeca European "agricultural techniques". The Tlaxcala demanded swords and horses as the price for so doing. Astonishingly, this policy worked as the natives much preferred using iron tools to stone ones or copper. Likewise, farming with draft animals proved to be quite popular. This, and other such policies, were studied by historian Phillip Wayne Powell (specialist in Spanish Colonial history) and written up in Soldiers, Indians & Silver.
I'm going to have fun with this one. This is terrible cherrypicking. First, The Chichimeca were given these concessions in order secure peace after a long and bloody war that exhausted the Spanish. Second, these concessions were given under the supervision of the Spanish clergy and the Spanish brought in friendly Native allies to secure much of the colonization. Third, the Chichimecas themselves were nomadic. The weren't being seduced by
Spanish agriculture, but by agricultural life in general. Fourth, the "goods" that were shipped, such as weapons and horses, were valuable only in the sense that they were previously illegal for Natives to own. Basically, this is a severe exception that quite readily proves the rule. The Spanish denied the Natives most Spanish technology, many refused to take on the Spanish lifestyle, and it was only in moments of great stress that this policy was broken.
As far as keeping legal systems or property rights, please. Polygamy - gone. Female property rights - gone. Soldier society property rights - gone. Telpochcalli - gone. Altepetl - gone. Calmecac - gone. Look Aztec culture was a warrior society with a huge portion of legal rights tied up in religious ritual, being a Jaguar had a huge religious component that just didn't work with forced conversion to Catholicism.
I see no proof here. There are numerous works on the Spanish legal system in Mexico. One can find plenty of anecdotes where Spanish administrators are confronted with awkward legal situations as they are forced to function
within the Native legal system. The Spanish kept most of the local administrative and upper classes intact. Additionally, they tended to observe local traditions and laws
unless they worked against the Spanish or the process of religious conversion. Most of your examples fall into the latter. On top of that, many parts of Mexico and the Yucatan maintained a good deal of sovereignty well into the 16th century.
In short, no you are not correct and vague generalities protesting my specific claims aren't viable arguments. While far from ignorant barbarians, the Aztecs were a thousand years behind Europe at contact. There were generally much closer to Egypt than to Spain in terms of technology. The fact that this means that a game with technologies keyed to Spain and not Egypt means that we should expect them not to perform remotely close to the Spanish.
A specific claim could also be an exception and not reflective of the total picture. As I've already shown, both your specific and broader assumptions are questionable if not false. Saying "They didn't have paper and this makes their government less capable" is both a specific and broad claim. They did have paper. You are clearly incorrect there. When you could no longer back that up, you tried to state that they had only a little paper, but that too was false. Are you going to tell me next that they're paper didn't have the appropriate texture? Additionally, you failed to provide any factual proof that this would affect their government. Your claims about paper's affect on their administrative abilities was built solely on the assumption that they didn't have it. Now that you're aware that this wasn't true, does that make them as capable as Europeans?
Frankly Jomini, there are two type of responses that really throw these threads off course: The "You guys are just a bunch of revisionists" response and the "They didn't have X so they should have bad tech" response. The former is just uneducated and the latter is often predicated on generalities that usually don't support the conclusion. Should Natives have horses? No, logically they shouldn't. Should Natives have the same technology as Europeans? No, their technology was not generally as advanced. These sorts of things aren't what's being argued. The real question is whether they should be completely stagnant and helpless. Given that technology is portrayed as linear and not compounding, it would make little sense to make them both behind
and incapable of advancement. Should they have penalties? Maybe, but I think it's an incredibly ignorant exaggeration to make their tech rate "New World: Enjoy tech level 0 until you westernize."
