No.66529
Yeah its weird to think that the Americas had a medieval and ancient history when we usually just think about it from 1491.
The etymology of California is kinda interesting it comes from Kalifa, a romanticized female Caliph from a Spanish epic.
No.66530
I largely agree with Gibbon's thesis on Christianity being a prime cause of the Fall of Rome. I feel like pop history wants to make a morality tale out of Rome losing its morals and being punished with fall. When Caligula was only the 3rd Emperor, and Nero the 5th. While the last century of Emperors were concerned with hammering out the correct definition of The Trinity. Reading any primary sources from the last 150 years, and Christianity is the giant elephant in the room. This was a cultural revolution in value-systems and societal organization.
It just feels like people already have the narrative they want, before even bothering to look at the data of the Roman Empire.
I admit when I was in high school, I had a similar narrative although for me the loss of virtue came with the fall of the Republic, in that sense it would make sense that Caligula was only the 3rd Emperor. But I'm not a teenager anymore. And the more I study history, instead of heroes and villains, the only lesson I can take from it is "it's complex".
It's like the more I study history, the less it teaches me. Those of us passionate about history we want to argue that it has so many lessons, and it's more than just a bunch of dates and facts. And yet when all I can say about history is "it's complicated", then yes in some sense history is just dates and facts, not a morality tale. Even if those facts are now understood in complex sociological statistical trends. Well I got a little carried away from my original point, but point is history isn't a morality tale to teach us virtue.
No.66531
>>66530Damn, man. You got me.
Have some Bronze Age Near East stuff.
No.66532
>>66530Both takes are stupid and simplistic. You can have lessons from history but you need the correct mindset and not apply dumb modern morals.
No.66535
>>66524In _The collapse of complex societies_, Tainter mentions three different such societies in the area near California: Casas Grandes, the Chakoans, and the Hohokan.
No.66537
What I find kinda funny is "widely rejected" language families for most world regions are like these gigantic super-families linking Basque and Chinese or something absurd.
And yet for Native American languages just linking all the tribes of Texas together is considered an overreach. I guess things really fragmented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_language_families#Widely_rejectedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coahuiltecan_languages No.66636
They say it is not clear why mankind started using agriculture instead of keeping a nomadic lifestyle. This is what I think.
First off, the changing, now warmer, climate stimulated a great deal of diversity, which in turn encouraged a growth in human populations. This growth in turn put a lot of stress on that same diversity that made it possible, the megafauna, such as mammoths and sabertooths was hunted to extinction. There was a world filled with humans everywhere, but whereas in summer they covered all latitudes, in winter they moved towards warmer lands, crowding them and pressing them further for resources.
Several forms of cultivation already existed, both of annuals and perennials, but here some groups noticed that where a river once flooded, very rich, fertile, clear and well irrigated soil remained, and grains were particularly fit for this disturbed soil which was flooded annually and so annuals were the best option to grow in this environment.
The next step was made possible by the capability to store grain, and because grain was easily stored and relatively abundant, especially because humans had other food sources such as fishing, hunting, and foraging, they could save such grains for the winter. This encouraged them to settle permanently near these alluvial plains, to require them to build granaries, and eventually to build walls to keep nomads from taking their grain, as well as long-term armed forces to defend from such nomads.
The abundance of food increased the populations of these people, which was also encouraged by the amount of labour that agriculture started to require, leading to large households to work the fields, a natural division of labour based on family hierarchy, and so on.
Eventually the growing population was itself pressed for cultivable land, which lead to clearing land for more grains, and to seek the expansion of the now aggregated households that made up the first proto-states, which had to vie with others for cultivable land, or to seek alliances that grew into more powerful states, and eventually kingdoms and empires.
This seems likely, on the grounds of the current ideas on civilization growth. This is probably close to the more or less accepted view. But I do wonder, given this, how come the origin of agriculture is so widely disputed? I know my understanding is limited, so I may be missing something.
No.66667
I constantly ponder about pre-Columbian transatlantic contact. Did the Vikings really only get as far as Newfoundland? Did other old world cultures such as the Celts, Romans and Phoenicians visit or even colonize the new world? Does the Solutrean hypothesis have any merit? We know that Polynesians visited South America and in doing so contributed to the genetic makeup of the areas they visited. What if the Americas is the story of the combination of many different populations coming together and forming a more or less homogenised new race.
No.66735
>>66734Obviously in reference to the era before the one that began when the Romans introduced a new lunisolar calendar or whatever
No.66736
>>66735No, it's Judic rejection of Christ
No.66737
>>66736We're in the 2029th year since his birth.
No.66744
>>66733without roads, wheels aren't terribly useful
you also need an axle, tools to shape all this stuff, further joinery to make something of a cart on top of the wheels
and even after all that brainpower, the wheels cant turn, really it makes sense no one made a wheel for a long time
No.66745
>>66744by the wheels cant turn i mean like the cart cant turn or steer, the wheels are fixed