Advanced Technologies found by first Europeans on their arrival in the New World
Advanced Technologies found by the first Europeans
Mexico
· Extraction of dyestuffs from insects, roots, leaves, barks, identical to Chinese processes.
· Lacquer and boxes using complicated technology identical to Chinese methods.
· Mirror manufacture very similar to Lamaist designs
· Copper technology similar to Chinese
· Aztec papermaking – Similarities in bark paper production and usage in Mesoamerica and Asia, during the late Mayan period: http://muweb.millersv.edu/~columbus/data/art/TOLSTOY1.ART – · Jason Patterson
· Metal working (Gary Jennings, Howard Smith)
· Evidence that the Chinese could have introduced distillation of alcohol to Mexico before the Spaniards arrived: The stills used by today’s poorest Mexican peasants to produce their local alcoholic drink, mescal, are very different from the copper batch stills the Spaniards brought over in 1631 but are very similar to the Chinese still from Anhui Province pictured by Joseph Needham in his book Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West. Also, the State of Oaxaca, which is far from Colima, had a local Mixtec language name for the act of distillation, in 1578. At that time, trade was only beginning and new technology could hardly have found its way hundreds of kilometers inland and been integrated into the culture so as to have a specific name. Perhaps the process had been introduced to Mexico by the Chinese before the Spanish arrived. (Catherine Illsley (Ethnobotanist)
Article in the Scientific American Volume 15, Number 1 on “Life in the Provinces of the Aztec Empire”. Archaeologists discovered bark beaters for the manufacture of paper out of the bark of the wild fig tree in the town of Yautepec in modern Mexico. The article says: “The Aztecs used paper to make books of picture-writing and to burn in ritual offerings.” This happened in the 15th century before the European arrived there. This suggests that the Chinese must have been there some time earlier and settled there and taught the local people the technique of paper making. In addition, the Chinese used to and are still burning faked money and gold ingot made of paper in ritual offerings. (Wai Yeung)
South America
Peru
· Inca cotton
· Inca roads using cement – road systems longer than those of Rome
Bolivia
· 300 year old aquaculture system covering 500 square kilometers in the Amazon – A Chinese system? (Richard St. George)
A vast, 300-year-old system of fish farms has been discovered in the Bolivian Amazon by an American team. The weirs and pools stretch over 500 square kilometres, and would have supported many more people than can survive on the land today. “This is out of all proportion to anything we’ve known before. The technology is straightforward but the scale is extraordinary,” comments Warwick Bray of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Native inhabitants of the Baures region built weirs in zigzag patterns across the savannah. The weirs channelled fish into traps and ponds during the annual flooding of the land.
These pools then acted as dry season stores, providing long term sources of protein to support a complex society, says Clark Erickson of the University of Pennsylvania, who led the research. The conventional view is that seasonally flooded savannahs are suitable only for cattle grazing, not for cultivation. But Erickson hopes intensive aquaculture, providing high levels of protein, could be reintroduced, and help repopulate the area.
“Archaeology can provide models for sustainable development based
on past uses of the land,” he says.
Tonnes of snails
Archaeologists have known about the earthworks in the Baures region since the late 1950s. But Erickson is the first to identify them as the remnants of a giant fishery. He says the fish weir system is similar to ones used by people in Bolivia today – but on a far grander scale. The weirs are 1 to 2 metres wide and 20 to 50 centimetres tall. They change direction abruptly every 10 to 30 metres. At each kink in the weir there is a funnel-like opening leading to circular ponds up to 2 metres deep and 10 to 30 metres in diameter. The Baures savannahs are still covered with a thin sheet of water every rainy season, says Erikcson. And the low earthworks would have controlled the movement of fish, across the land.
Erickson estimates that 1,000 kilograms of fish could have been produced per hectare of pond each year. The ponds would also have provided hundreds of tonnes of Pomacea gigas edible snails. Erickson’s team found vast numbers of snail shells beside the abandoned ponds.
Early reports from travellers in the region describe a densely populated area.
“Today this region doesn’t have much of a population. But the
earliest accounts by European travellers suggest the people had worked
out a way of feeding bigger populations than they can today,” says Bray.
The populations would have been devastated by disease brought by
the Old World explorers, Erickson thinks. But he hopes that fish farming
based on the ancient approach could support a large population again.
Source: Nature (vol. 408, p190) Emma Young
Australia
· Eel production near Warrnambool – Heather Builth
· A reader reports about visiting a site in Dampier, Western Australian in about 1978/9. where they had been cataloguing Aboriginal rock carvings on stones for the Western Australian Museum. In a nearby area the sides of low hills were striped with rows of loose-stone terraces up to a hundred metres long. A guide said that the WA Museum was trying to verify that crops had been cultivated there by Aborigines, who had hitherto been classified as hunter-gatherers, with no evidence of their having remained in the one place for long. Could these have instead been the terraces upon which crops were grown by Chinese visitors from Zhou Man’s expeditions? – Richard Lynam
Iceland
· Iceland was first settled just prior to 1,000 A.D., and the voyages to Greenland and America took place about a generation later. Thorvald Erikson, younger brother of Leif Erikson, who led the first expedition to Greenland, was killed in a fight with Indians in Fall River, Mass. Their party was ambushed by Indians who had the use of gunpowder. His widow was among the party that experienced the gunpowder attack, so the date could not have been later than about 1100 A.D. How did these Indians have access to gunpowder, a Chinese invention? – Joel Carlinsky
Rennaisance Europe
A reader has recently been speculating on the development of Fine Art in Europe and the West from the fourteenth century to the present day. In particular it is to do with the theories of artist David Hockney in his book and TV documentary “Secret Knowledge.” Hockney was puzzled by the sudden change in the ability of artists to render reality in their paintings from the 1300s into the 1400s. Hockney describes how an abrupt change occurred early in the 1400s – from portraits that were simple & ‘naive’ to portraits that were stunningly accurate in their photographic qualities, virtually overnight. He also discovered that this change first occurred in Flanders before spreading southward to Italy by the 1500s. During the course of his investigations, he narrowed the change down to the artists: Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin, and Van der Weyden, and to the date 1430! What he then went on to research and prove was that these and subsequent artists used – and kept secret – optics ; i.e. lenses and concave mirrors that, together with a darkened ‘tent’, the artist could use to project an image of his subject onto a canvas and therefore paint an optically accurate portrait or still life. Reading 1421 and Hockney’s book together has led a reader to speculate that perhaps the Flemish artisans had gained access to advanced optics (concave / convex mirrors etc) not through their own invention nor via the Middle East and silk road, but via a possible direct Chinese fleet connection. We await further research with interest – Rob Gudan
