I’m back at Chaco and giving tours again, so I’m once again being exposed to visitors’ common questions and preconceptions in a way I haven’t been in a long time. One thing that seems to surprise a lot of visitors is the fact that the Chacoans apparently had no knowledge of the wheel, or if they did have such knowledge they didn’t apply it to transport any of the many things they brought into the canyon from distant sources. (People are also sometimes surprised to learn that they didn’t have draft animals either, which I find a bit surprising myself since I tend to think of that as common knowledge.)
I think it’s actually not difficult to see why the Chacoans wouldn’t have seen any use for the wheel even if they somehow knew about it, and the lack of draft animals is the key to understanding why. (This is admittedly a bit speculative on my part, but I think it works.) Without big, strong animals to pull wheeled vehicles, any efficiency gains from them in terms of human labor would be decidedly non-obvious. The only type of wheeled vehicle that would really be effective using only human labor would be the wheelbarrow, and while this may provide some efficiency gains over carrying goods by hand I don’t think they would have been clear enough to compensate for the increased effort involved in building the thing, especially given the often rough and broken terrain of the Southwest. Even the Chacoan roads, which may or may not have actually been intended for use in transporting goods but certainly could have been so used once they were built, were actually not as level and easy as people often assume, although they were more level than the surrounding terrain. Most of the effort put into the roads went into clearing the surface and defining the curbs, but grading of the cleared ground surface was typically not done and the road beds follow the underlying terrain for the most part. This was fine for foot traffic, and definitely an improvement over the uncleared surrounding terrain, but it wouldn’t have been particularly suitable for wheeled vehicles. Furthermore, the vaunted straightness of the roads would actually have made them even less suitable for wheeled vehicles or draft animals, given the common practice of handling steep cliffs in the path of the road with stairways. Good luck getting a cart up or down one of those!
The lack of draft animals and the unevenness of the terrain have also been posited as reasons for the lack of wheeled vehicles throughout the Americas. While the terrain would not have been an impediment everywhere, such as in the Yucatan where the terrain is generally flat and the roads built by the Maya were much more elaborate and level than anything seen around Chaco, in highland areas like Central Mexico and lowland areas covered by dense vegetation such as those along the Gulf Coast of Mexico the maneuverability of a person on foot would likely have been far more important to efficient transportation than any increase in efficiency resulting from wheeled vehicles in the absence of animals to pull them. Gordon Ekholm of the American Museum of Natural History, whom we last saw discovering atlatl finger loops, discussed many of these issues in an interesting article from 1946 about the wheeled toys found in various parts of Mexico, which demonstrate that at least the Mesoamericans were in fact aware of the wheel even though they didn’t use it for any practical purpose. These clay toys, in the form of animals with wheels in place of feet, had been found in widely scattered parts of Central and Northeast Mexico, from Oaxaca to Veracruz, and while the axles connecting the wheels to the feet were apparently made of a perishable material like wood and did not survive, the fact that one example was found in situ with the wheels in the proper position led Ekholm to conclude that they definitely were originally wheeled. Robert Lister (a very prominent figure in the history of Chacoan archaeology who also did some work in Mesoamerica) followed up on Ekholm’s article shortly afterward, noting the apparent presence of similar wheeled toys in West Mexico and referring to the discovery of copper examples in Panama as well.
Ekholm’s article provides a solid discussion of the implication of these toys for Mesoamerican technology and general anthropological understanding of technological development. He discusses the lack of draft animals and the difficult terrain, but ultimately concludes that the main factor preventing more widespread use of the wheel was likely a cultural and technological conservatism that privileged the old way of doing things, which in this case meant carrying goods on people’s backs, over an untried new invention like the wheel. He attributes the origin of the idea of wheeled toys to pure invention, probably stemming from experimentation with the round spindle whorls that are very common Mesoamerican artifacts. It’s not clear just how far this idea spread, and to my knowledge there is no evidence that anyone in the Southwest was aware of it, although some of the ceramic animal effigies found at Chaco and elsewhere do bear some resemblance to the Mesoamerican toys. Ekholm makes a convincing case that despite the ingenious nature of these toys, without suitable social and ecological conditions for the wider adoption of the technology it remained more of a curiosity than anything else.
Basically, without draft animals, the idea of making a big vehicle like a cart which could carry a heavy load more efficiently than a person could would be unlikely to have occurred to anyone, because such a cart would still have to be pulled by people. Or, in other words, if you have a cart but not a horse, you are, well, putting the cart before the horse. And who would do a thing like that?
Ekholm, G. (1946). Wheeled Toys in Mexico American Antiquity, 11 (4) DOI: 10.2307/275722
Lister, R. (1947). Additional Evidence of Wheeled Toys in Mexico American Antiquity, 12 (3) DOI: 10.2307/275708
Weren’t dogs used as draft animals in some places?
I’ve been told (by a jack Mormon) that the Mormons migrated West with hand carts because they didn’t have enough oxen. But you know, Mormons.
According to Bulliett’s “The Camel and the Wheel” wheeled vehicles were relatively unimportant in the world of Islam during a long period, including the period when it was the world’s most prosperous civilization. Water transport and pack animals were relied on for transport. Wheeled vehicles were known and used, but were not of key importance.
Diamond’s “Gun’s Germs’ and Steel” ascribes many aspects of life in pre-Columbian America to the absence of animals usable as draft animals. (Diamond’s book is overstated but full of facts and ideas.) Only llamas were tamable and large enough, and they’re usually used as pack animals like camels anyway. (Actually, caribou are the same as reindeer, which have been used as pack animals and in fact were so used by the Finns in their pre-WWII winter war against the USSR.)
In many areas before there were good roads (and during much of prehistory) ox carts were more important than wagons drawn by horses. Oxcarts were extensively used in Minnesota up until 1870, when the railroads finally reached the NW of the state.
A wheeled vehicle could be used to combine the strength of several people to move an especially heavy object, which might be useful even without draft animals.
I’ve heard this technological gap discussed in reference to the building of Mesoamerican pyramids, with the explanation that the wheel was never employed because no one spent much time thinking about how to make the work that slaves do easier.
Wow, comments! Haven’t gotten a lot of those around here recently.
Weren’t dogs used as draft animals in some places?
Yes, especially on the northern Plains, where they were used to pull a travois before the introduction of horses. Plains dogs were bigger than the dogs in Mesoamerica and the Southwest, however, which were much too small to pull anything significant.
According to Bulliett’s “The Camel and the Wheel” wheeled vehicles were relatively unimportant in the world of Islam during a long period, including the period when it was the world’s most prosperous civilization. Water transport and pack animals were relied on for transport. Wheeled vehicles were known and used, but were not of key importance.
I’ve heard this too, and specifically that the sandy deserts that the overland trade routes crossed would have been extremely difficult for wheeled vehicles. In that context camels obviously work much better.
A wheeled vehicle could be used to combine the strength of several people to move an especially heavy object, which might be useful even without draft animals.
True, of course, but I don’t think that would have been obvious to someone unfamiliar with wheeled vehicles. After all, if you’re going to need a bunch of people to carry something anyway, you could just have them do it by hand and not bother building the vehicle.
I’ve heard this technological gap discussed in reference to the building of Mesoamerican pyramids, with the explanation that the wheel was never employed because no one spent much time thinking about how to make the work that slaves do easier.
Interesting. I hadn’t heard that, and it sounds pretty speculative, but at least for Mesoamerica there might be something to it. There are also major construction projects thought to have been built by more egalitarian societies without the wheel, however, and it wouldn’t explain them.
Is there any obvious reason why bison aren’t suitable for use as draft animals?
It takes a very specific set of traits for an animal to be suitable as a draft animal (or domesticated for other purposes), and most animals, including Bison, just don’t have the temperament for it.
M/tch is right. The reason bison aren’t suitable for use as draft animals is that they can’t be domesticated.
So it’s just a genetic accident that cows were domesticable and bison aren’t? Somehow I had imagined that 10,000 years ago cattle were also more irritable and dangerous and it had been bred out of them, but I guess it’s hard to imagine how the domestication process got started if their behavior wasn’t fairly tractable to begin with.
So it’s just a genetic accident that cows were domesticable and bison aren’t?
Pretty much, yeah. It’s interesting that so many Old World large mammals turned out to be domesticable, while their nearest New World equivalents were not. I’m not up on the latest research on the beginnings of Old World livestock domestication, but there has been a ton of genetic research on this sort of thing lately. The Old World/New World split is of course not absolute, and there are some examples of New World animal domestication such as the llama, but in general it just seems that there were more animals available in the Old World that had suitable temperaments to begin the domestication process.
What of Diamond’s hypothesis that the domesticatable new world animals were simply killed off? Easy to domesticate –> easy to hunt.
There could be something to that, but then why didn’t it happen in the Old World too? Maybe Diamond addresses that; I haven’t read any of his books.
Oddly, the wheelbarrow needed a genius to invent it, so the civilization had to wait for Blaise Pascal.
People generally think the wheelbarrow was invented in china somwhere around 100 AD, but there are documents from greece around 400 BC that are argued to mention them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelbarrow