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.
Well for starters, central Mexico doesn't lose 3 months of growth a year to snow and the Aztec were able to get two crops per year out that is a pretty big non-technological advantage. For another, Tenochtilan's density is also product of not being connected to the major epidemic belt running from Lisbon to Pusan without one of the major density dependent killing forces does allow you to maintain urban growth for a long time when other cities depopulate thanks to a 30% mortality rate with the black death.
Another shot is just like I said, they had a compulsory labor society and used a lot of inefficient manual labor. Building and maintaining chinampa, for instance provide an astonishing return on land inputs. However in terms of labor inputs there are woefully inefficient, and hence why pre-contact civilizations only used them during periods of high population. You get a much higher economic return from having fewer people working fewer crops, but having more man-hours put into extracting trade goods (e.g. mining, cash crop cultivation, timbering).
Most of the agricultural trade goods in EU are also not conducive to Mesoamerican agriculture. Sugar, Tobacco, and arguably Cotton and Tobacco work better for trade on a monoculture plantation style system worked with iron implements. Even grain exports tend to favor Europe as corn has more limited utility for bulk transport than wheat.
Outside of farming, you run into the problem that bronze and stone just have inherent mechanical inefficiencies compared to iron and steel. Be it mining gold or lumbering timber, iron retains its edge longer and takes less work to maintain.
So let's suppose pre-contact Mesoamericans want to maximize their surplus of non-subsistence goods. Going for iron implements means they need the iron working techs which are thousands of years. Going for draft animals is impossible. These aren't something you can just "tech" to in 50 years. These are practical limitations from geography. We can note that virtually every society in Mexico adopted iron tools and horses as soon as possible, even states which retained their autonomy and cooperated heavily with the Spanish.
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.
Sorry, I had to laugh at this one. You are asking for sources when you have given zero. In any event, I just did a quick Google scholar search, that gave me:
Neumann, Frank J. 1973. Paper: A sacred material in Aztec Ritual. History of Religions 13, 2: 149:159.
I quote verbatum:
"But these uses [most non-religious uses of paper] would have required only a small percentage of the total annual consumption of 480,000 pages."
Now perhaps Neumann is in error or my quick skimming and taking the figure at face value is in error. You are, of course, free to provide superior sources, but generally 480,000 pages in an awfully large number itself for Tenochtilan (hence my comparison to London) or even the entire Triple Alliance given that you had relatively limited literacy and a compulsory labor economy (meaning little banking, credit, and the like). However, early printing presses could go through 3k pages a day, and law courts were not that far behind. We aren't quibbling about a factor of 10 here, we are talking about the Aztecs needing truly stupendous amounts of paper to say run a law court that is an improvement over the basic courts in existence in most European provinces in 1448.
As far as Quipu, you do realize that less than 10% of the information stored in that era was numeric, right? You also realize that once the Inca start dealing with similar states, their ability to deal with low information count because Sapa Inca owns everything (or just the state) is going to collapse quickly.
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.
Sigh, I never said they didn't have fractions, I said they don't have
reciprocals. Yes the Aztecs had fractional symbols according to recent research. These are quite useful. But you are limited to the number of new symbols you use (which from what I recall of the
Science article was 5 or so symbols). If you use reciprocals you can get much more accurate figures. E.g. say the Aztecs used novel symbols for 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5 and 1/6 this means that representing say 2/7ths means that they can at best approximate it as 1/4 with simple representation (an error of 13%). If you have reciprocals, you can use any fractional quantity to precision. Linear combinations of reciprocals (a method used by the Babylonians) allowed for extremely quick and fairly quick computation of every ugly fractions (like say 29/113). With the limited notation system the Aztec used right up until conquest, they aren't going to be able to achieve financial precision as great as Europe/Asia's and they aren't going to be able to calculate things like cantilever forces anywhere near as closely.
The Aztecs not having artillery - no catapults, trebuchet, or ballista there. Why? In part because they lacked the tools needed to easily make them (bronze takes poorly to repetitive wood working) and partly because they had little need of them. Of course, artillery is going to completely hose Aztec fortifications and the shock component (let alone some grape grounds) are going to obliterate Aztec battle formations.
As far as boats, well they are using dugout canoes and lack the tools to do better as well.
Parabolas are inherently useful. They, after all, describe formulas for area in relation to one unknown. From the math problems shown about 5 years ago in science they sure appeared to be using a lot of approximation to compute areas that are relatively simple with simple parabolic functions.
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.
Awful lot of talk with no sources there. We now most natives adopted the Horse whenever they could. Swords, like all iron implements, are more useful than obsidian for most tasks because they provide more reliable cutting power. We have no record (at least of which I am aware) of the use of atlatl after about 1600 as, shockingly most natives had adopted European weapons (every surviving atlatl I could find was one preserved as a Spanish curio).
Look, I'm not saying Europe just rampaged through, but seriously the natives weren't idiots. Iron stays sharp longer and they bought, stole, or borrowed iron tools whenever they could. Likewise, using draft animals (oxen, horses, donkeys, etc.) was done when possible as well. I mean even moving silver and gold down the Camino Real is unbelievably easier with draft animals. Pleas enlighten me, which Mesoamerican polity turned down steel? Iron? Horses? Cows?
You make a very odd case: Spanish technology is not significantly more advanced than native but Spanish technology is so much more advanced that they banned transfer and in some instances specifically transferred it to semi-nomadic populations.
A very accurate summation of your entire case.
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.
Yes and those prove what exactly? By definition such anecdotes are oddities and not representative. Pretty much once the fighting stopped (which I grant took a long time) we see the Spanish legal code move in (excepting in subordinate allied states) and European style things come about.
Of course, lest we forget. Most of the province improvements in EU were
not built by the Spanish either. New Spain was an extractive economy and most of the high tech European improvements didn't get built there until fairly late in the time period.
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?
As you have not posted a single source, I cannot give your claims merit given that they contradict published peer reviewed articles. Lacking sufficient paper, yes the Aztecs will be less efficient. Lacking broad based literacy and a common linga franca in Latin (e.g. at least everyone Catholic can write to each other), that will significantly impair the function of long range haulage, banking, and tax collection (particularly once you move past compulsory labor and in kind taxation).
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."
How many years, in general, do you believe the native nations should be behind in technology?
Okay now take that number. Divide it by say 20. That should give us a fairly rough idea of how many tech levels behind the Mesoamericans should start.
Most historians date the rise of Mesoamerican civilization to around 200 BCE while an at least comparable western civilization arose by 2000 BCE (arguably both came earlier but whatever definition shouldn't change the relative value and I'm being REALLY generous here). EU (largely) abstracts technology to a linear progression based on average monarch strength as I understand the model. This suggests that extrapolating from some starting tech at the dawn of civilization means that Europe should be around 90 tech levels ahead (along with the rest of North Africa, Asia, India, etc.). I'll need some serious analysis of why the Mesoamericans should be able to adopt technologies that everywhere else took thousands of years in just decades.
Saying that the Aztec (or anyone else) getting to tech levels around where Europe is extrapolated to be in 1400 (e.g. tech lvl 2) by 1500 is pretty dang generous. Now I would love for there to be options for the native civilizations that represent their real potentials - they should, say be able to spend monarch points to explore and colonize (no ocean going boats) one province at a time. This would be in keeping with the semi-nomadic nature of the northern Mesoamerican "states" as well as allowing for more settled states, like the Aztecs, to spend their pre-contact time expanding outward. Likewise, being able to use some special mechanic to represent the irregular warfare that really slowed Spanish conquest rather than pitched battles, that would also be good. I'm even okay with spotting the Mesoamericans huge amounts of tech because it is boring as heck to play forever at tech zero.
But let's be honest, the Mesoamericans weren't supermen and without contact, wouldn't have made significant progress on long distance haulage (no draft animals), artillery (math, wood working tools, metallurgy), naval transport (wood working tools, math), bulk mining, . If anything these very key areas in EU would be ignored because they have no viability for the Mesoamericans precontact. Paradox is being ahistorical - by giving the Mesoamericans a fighting chance at hitting the 15th century before the Europeans arrive.
More important than making the Mesoamericans fun, is to make sure that most of the time they end up like in history - becoming an extractive economy for some European AI. That shouldn't be too hard, but I also don't want Spain to have to import half its army to take the place. My preferred method is to say, yeah you will have tech zero forever until contact ... but here are bright shiny ways to spend monarch points until then. Some that are actually useful at say increasing your fortifications or subjugating your neighbors or colonizing outwards (with having AI limitations to keep the gold flowing to Europe) or perhaps building some sort of religious unity (like Patriarchal authority) that comes in handy when the Europeans come.
e.g. 10 monarch points = 1 point of religious unit, declaring an irregular [flower] war where you can fight enemy troops but neither side can capture territory costs 5 religious unity (numbers from thin air). This allows you to gain prestige and military tradition prior to contact and to slow European expansion after by mimicking the tactics that actually worked.
DCD: Differet tech groups make sense because tech serves three purposes:
1. It defines the types of things you can build (ships, armies, province improvements).
2. It defines the modifiers you get (number of ideas, PE, TE, morale).
3. It defines the actions you can take (blockade, explore, monopolize, etc.)
These should be related prima facea. Of course if you do that, that means that you have to have some fudge factors if you want someone to have differing access to different aspects of these. E.g. if you want Mongols to be able to force march (land tech X) but have inferior infantry (land tech X - Y) you need a bivariate function. Having different units lets you grant nations abilities that might make sense without the corresponding unit strengths (e.g. China might be able to build a military academy before it gets to western parity for infantry strength).
Frankly, I'd far rather have this system than one where I'm stuck forever with gimped options just to ensure that my deservedly crappy units stay crappy.
