Inventing the wheel.
Aug. 4th, 2021 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungI was reading about Machu Picchu and Inca stonework last week, and came across the hoary old colonialist talking point that the Incas did not invent the wheel. Being in a "go down internet rabbit holes" mood, I found myself reading various explanations for why precolumbian Americans, despite having wheeled figurines (see: image here and writeup here and early prototype pottery wheels (the kabal/molde, never scaled those figurines up or broadened their application to transport. Very few of the explanations sat well with me.
1 Lack of draft animals: handcarts and wheelbarrows, sans horses or oxen, are a huge step up from carrying cargo on your back. The lack of large domesticated animals in the Americas isn't germane.
2 Terrain issues: There was no way anybody in the Andes was going to think a wheeled handcart would be useful, but central America does have *some* flat places, and the Mayans made nice flat roads between their settlements. Not germane.
3 It was cultural: One site claimed the Maya and Aztecs believed that carrying heavy loads on your back was sacred, so they didn't scale up their wheeled figurines because of religion. This irritated me a lot. Yes, humans think up lots of weird rationalizations for doing something one way rather than another. But downtrodden workers told that their misery and suffering is pleasing to the Gods? Are going to invent a new religion. This explanation stinks.
4 Eventually I came across an article that looked at the question from the opposite direction: why did it take such a long time for people in the Fertile Crescent to invent the wheel? They had lots of flat land, big strong domesticated animals, and cities that needed to import lots of food over significant distances way back in 7000 BCE. From examining ancient ceramics we know that pottery wheels were a thing in the region by 4500, but it took another thousand plus years before wheeled vehicles appear. What was the hold up?
The article argues that the blocking issue for wheeled vehicles was the wheel-axle interface. It's easy to build a wheeled little figurine like the ones in the above picture, but once you start trying to make a cart that can move cargo, you need the rotating part and the non-rotating part to fit together perfectly, with minimal play but also minimal friction. Too tight, the wheel doesn't turn easily; too loose, it wobbles and breaks. The round peg of the axle and the round hole in the wheel (or axle and cart body if you go with a rotating axle) must be perfectly matched, perfectly smooth, and small enough to minimize friction yet large enough to be sturdy. The factor that made that possible in the late 4th millennia but not before, the article says, was bronze tools.
I say, close but not quite. The article makes the mistake of assuming that metal tools were a revolutionary world-changer, when actually stone tools continued to be used by people that had access to bronze for millennia after the start of the "bronze age." Stone was vastly cheaper, not that much worse than bronze in many applications, and could do things that metal could not (see the introduction to this book: https://books.google.com/books?id=MnqDijFSlJAC). And there's the problem that civilizations in Central America had bronze for a thousand years before the colonizers showed up, but still no wheeled vehicles.
People are far too easily hypnotized by simple, single-factor explanations. The development of the wheel was a coming together of multiple factors.
1. Mucking around with the spindles used to make thread for cloth gave people the concept (this is probably where the wheeled figurines in the Americas came from. I've found some references to wheeled figurines in the Old World, but haven't been able to determine if any have been found from before the first wheeled vehicles).
2. Impatient potters invented a rotating work surface for making coiled pottery more quickly, then realized that if they spun the pot they were working on, they could shape the spinning clay and this was easier than shaping a coiled pot. Which led to a quest for faster ways to spin clay. Incremental improvements led to actual potter's wheels, with a freely spinning work surface on an axle. (the engineering problems for a potter's wheel are not nearly as daunting as for a cargo-carrying wheeled cart - lower weight, with strain along the length of the axle instead of at right angles to it)
3. People tired of moving heavy things with sledges on rollers saw a potters wheel and started experimenting. Repeatedly, over centuries. Many failures ensued.
4. The arrival of bronze tools may have been a factor in finally putting that experimentation over the top.
Central American pottery wheels were still at the "spin the pot relatively slowly while laying coil" stage when the Spanish arrived. Not all the pieces had come together yet, and thanks to the conquest, they never would.
(extra bits that I found while writing this but that didn't fit are in comments)
1 Lack of draft animals: handcarts and wheelbarrows, sans horses or oxen, are a huge step up from carrying cargo on your back. The lack of large domesticated animals in the Americas isn't germane.
2 Terrain issues: There was no way anybody in the Andes was going to think a wheeled handcart would be useful, but central America does have *some* flat places, and the Mayans made nice flat roads between their settlements. Not germane.
3 It was cultural: One site claimed the Maya and Aztecs believed that carrying heavy loads on your back was sacred, so they didn't scale up their wheeled figurines because of religion. This irritated me a lot. Yes, humans think up lots of weird rationalizations for doing something one way rather than another. But downtrodden workers told that their misery and suffering is pleasing to the Gods? Are going to invent a new religion. This explanation stinks.
4 Eventually I came across an article that looked at the question from the opposite direction: why did it take such a long time for people in the Fertile Crescent to invent the wheel? They had lots of flat land, big strong domesticated animals, and cities that needed to import lots of food over significant distances way back in 7000 BCE. From examining ancient ceramics we know that pottery wheels were a thing in the region by 4500, but it took another thousand plus years before wheeled vehicles appear. What was the hold up?
The article argues that the blocking issue for wheeled vehicles was the wheel-axle interface. It's easy to build a wheeled little figurine like the ones in the above picture, but once you start trying to make a cart that can move cargo, you need the rotating part and the non-rotating part to fit together perfectly, with minimal play but also minimal friction. Too tight, the wheel doesn't turn easily; too loose, it wobbles and breaks. The round peg of the axle and the round hole in the wheel (or axle and cart body if you go with a rotating axle) must be perfectly matched, perfectly smooth, and small enough to minimize friction yet large enough to be sturdy. The factor that made that possible in the late 4th millennia but not before, the article says, was bronze tools.
I say, close but not quite. The article makes the mistake of assuming that metal tools were a revolutionary world-changer, when actually stone tools continued to be used by people that had access to bronze for millennia after the start of the "bronze age." Stone was vastly cheaper, not that much worse than bronze in many applications, and could do things that metal could not (see the introduction to this book: https://books.google.com/books?id=MnqDijFSlJAC). And there's the problem that civilizations in Central America had bronze for a thousand years before the colonizers showed up, but still no wheeled vehicles.
People are far too easily hypnotized by simple, single-factor explanations. The development of the wheel was a coming together of multiple factors.
1. Mucking around with the spindles used to make thread for cloth gave people the concept (this is probably where the wheeled figurines in the Americas came from. I've found some references to wheeled figurines in the Old World, but haven't been able to determine if any have been found from before the first wheeled vehicles).
2. Impatient potters invented a rotating work surface for making coiled pottery more quickly, then realized that if they spun the pot they were working on, they could shape the spinning clay and this was easier than shaping a coiled pot. Which led to a quest for faster ways to spin clay. Incremental improvements led to actual potter's wheels, with a freely spinning work surface on an axle. (the engineering problems for a potter's wheel are not nearly as daunting as for a cargo-carrying wheeled cart - lower weight, with strain along the length of the axle instead of at right angles to it)
3. People tired of moving heavy things with sledges on rollers saw a potters wheel and started experimenting. Repeatedly, over centuries. Many failures ensued.
4. The arrival of bronze tools may have been a factor in finally putting that experimentation over the top.
Central American pottery wheels were still at the "spin the pot relatively slowly while laying coil" stage when the Spanish arrived. Not all the pieces had come together yet, and thanks to the conquest, they never would.
(extra bits that I found while writing this but that didn't fit are in comments)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-08-04 02:38 pm (UTC)