Yes. The Tarascans were making tools out of copper and bronze.
If this is true, and that metalworking technology had been applied to weapons (replacing the flint ones in use), would there have been any great change in anything?
QUOTE]*Originally posted by Speaker for the Dead *
Here’s a simple one - where can I find a pronounciation guide to many Mesoamerican names? Heck, I can’t even pronounce Mocteuzma, let alone Atahualpa or Quetzacoutl…
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Here’s one site: http://www.mythome.org/aztecnames.html
Well “empire” and “great civilization” are not necessarily synomous :). For example the Maya were never really a unified imperial entity, though some Mayan branches did pursue local imperial ambitions of a sort. It’s hard to say if the Olmecs ever formed a unitary empire or not, but probably not. Like the Maya they represented more a cultural area that had a number ( three more or less evenly spaced big ones and a lot of little ones ) of political centers that may have formed interconnecting webs of alliances.
But they weren’t unique. Most of the Central Andes and Mesoamerica were ‘civilized’ by the time the Spanish arrived and had been for a long, long time ( at least since 250-500 C.E… ). In Mesoamerica the Toltec state and possibly the Teotihuacan state before them ( from which the Toltec may have emerged ), do seem to have been centralized empires. Also many of the subsidiary and/or neighboring “states” to the Aztecs were fairly sophisticated, including the aforementioned Tlaxcalans and Tarascans, as well as others like the Zapotecs.
In the Andean region they were all sorts of sophisticated states ( which of course mostly pre-dated or were steam-rollered by the Incas ). In the coastal river valleys were cultures like those of the Moche, Nazca, Atacameno, and Paracas. In the higlands cultures like the Recuay and Vicus, Chavin ( that straddled coast and highlands ), and large empires like those of Tiahuanaco, Huari, and the Chimu ( this last being the most significant adversary and conquest of the Incas - it was a pretty substantial state with its capital at Chan-Chan ). Contemporaneous with the Inca and to the north of them in the Colombian Andes were some fairly sophisticated cultures like the Muisca of the Bogota Valley that exported finished textiles to neighboring tribes in exchange for gold.
As for bronze-age weaponry - Nah, I doubt it would made a huge difference, though it might have helped a bit. Bronze slashing weapons would probably have been helpful, but I doubt it would have been decisive. Bronze armor wouldn’t have helped ( an arqubus bolt will go through it just as easily as cotton ) and armor wasn’t crucial anyway ( Cortes’ folk mostly discarded their steel armor for the quilted cottopn of the natives ).
- Tamerlane
The Moari of New Zealand fought the Europeans from the very first contact and were never defeated. The wars ended in a peace treaty. Whether they were eventually ‘subjugated’ by cultural imperialism is anther question, but they remain technically free to this day.