I am not sure how relevant metallurgy, which may be a good watershed marker for the western world progression relates to military capability anyway.
As the pike line style warfare that the Western world followed reached it’s evolutionary dead end in WWI, and modern techniques like drones strikes seem to mirror the methods Native Americans were debased for using.
Also it ignores that Algonquin Farming was using fertilization and other techniques which where only to come into common use in Europe much later. They also used methods like companion planting which were only duplicated by crop rotation much later. There are also documented accounts of the settlers noting how moccasins were superior to the poor quality boots the Europeans used.
I am not saying that the native populations were as technologically advanced, just that focusing on a small number of advancements that favor the Europeans is probably special pleading. As the Musket was not superior to the Bow as a weapon, the advancement into the iron age probably wouldn’t have significantly changed the balance of power. I am pretty sure a 90%+ loss of population would dramatically impact any societies ability to offer a reasonable defense.
To clarify more, As the rifle was not available for skirmishers like the riflemen during the revolutionary war, the colonial forces would have
Musket
Bayonet
The main methods they would use were
Standing in ranks
Trading volleys
Bayonet charges
As the Native population didn’t have the historical limitations to enforce this type of engagement, they would act more like skirmishers, and while the colonial forces had advantages due due to the length of the musket acting like a pike the native forces would have an increased rate of fire and being more dispersed the volleys of fire from muskets would have less impact than with another force using the same tactics.
It may be useful to remember than Bayonet’s in this era plugged into the muzzle of a musket. With a plugged muzzle, the weapon could either be used to shoot or to stab, but not both at the same time. This only changed after 1671. Maximum fire from a well trained musket handler was about 3 per min, but seeing as many of the settlers were not highly trained it is highly unlikely that they came close to this rate of fire.
So you have a dispersed force, with more range and a higher rate of fire. The only advantage seems to be the noise that a musket would make, but this would probably lose it’s value fairly quickly.
It is also probably useful to remember that part of the reason that earlier settlements failed was due to a high mortality rate.
I keep coming back here to hopefully learn about some tech advantage that I am missing, but I am not seeing anything that seems like it would have provided a massive advantage in the absence of the population loss caused by the spread of disease.
But I do see a lot that would fit the *never get involved in a land war in asia * concept had the populations not been destroyed by disease.
Personally, I feel the Incas had a better shot. Their core territory was exceptionally defensible and less ideal for the spread of diseases, they were a large united polity with few enemies able to contest their power, and they were still a young setup figuring out how to do things as an empire. Flexible.
The conquistadors really lucked out there, with good help from the epidemics.
Yes, it appeared they were going that way, but the number of utilitarian objects is very samll. This is like saying King Tut was Iron age because he had a iron dagger.
Bronze tools or weapons were extremely rare in the Americas.
It also could penetrate the wooden armor that they were using at the time. It may have even been able to penetrate the tops of the wooden walls of the Indian villages. This would have made it ideal for covering fire to protect warriors trying to cut holes in the walls while under fire.
Cold-worked iron doesn’t qualify, as any Inuit could tell you.
I would still classify them as Bronze-age *equivalent *even if they had zero bronze tools rather than just a few, based only on the degree of metalworking sophistication in their gold pieces.
Certainly early English settlers and traders with their muskets, small in number, could not have fended off all out attacks from larger forces of Native Americans. We don’t know what happened in Roanoke but it might have been that. But the English would have come back with more guns, and the tactics to use them to an advantage. They kept growing in number and they ended up confronting the native population in skirmishes before going on all out attacks like the raid on the Pequots (aided by the Mohegans and Narragansetts). I think muskets did play a role, they were effective enough when used in large scale attacks or when used in close quarters to defend against raids. But it was not just the muskets which made the difference, certainly not as effective in mass killing as disease. The quality of firearms would improve over time, but more than that was the growing number of Europeans on the continent who were carrying them.
Many natives actually did fight off the first waves because early muzzle loading weapons could be outmatched by natives. The Maori of New Zealand for example, fought off the British for a time. T
The natives of Taiwan were holding their own until the Japanese used poison gas.
In the US southwest the Apache fought off the Spaniards and later the Mexicans but they lost later to the Americans with repeating rifles.
The Hawaiians managed to keep their independence until the 1920’s.
I would say even going into the 1800’s a native american warrior was one to one, still better than the average US soldier of the era. Indians were much better fighters on horseback, could live off the land, were better at stealth, and could fight better hand to hand. Often their weapons were even better since they often traded for the best repeating rifles while the US Army cavalry was often equipped with retrofitted civil war era rifles turned into breech loaders.
BUT, they lacked large scale tactics necessary to win a war. For example they would not attack when they should. They could not organize large forces over maybe a 100 or so (Custers stand was a fluke). They had no bases for resupply. And their just wasnt ever enough of them.
In the southwest the Apaches and Comanches were such good fighters it was only when the army used indian scouts were they beaten and Geronimo didnt surrender until 1886.
We have to be careful; it isn’t necessarily the case that the natives were using only their original weapons against European invaders.
The Maori, for example, adopted with great enthusiasm gunpowder weapons (muskets and shotguns) and used these in fighting with the British (and each other):
Similarly, Native North Americans adopted with great enthusiasm two military technologies introduced by Europeans (the horse and the gun) - and used them against Europeans.
Note upthread the vast effort, for example, the Iroquois put into getting early muskets.
I think these were the reasons. The disease obviously made things a lot easier, but even without it, the natives :
a. Didn’t have organized agriculture
b. Didn’t have writing
c. Didn’t have manufacturing
d. Didn’t have firearms
Organized agriculture meant that over time the colonists could develop much higher population densities. This also meant they could stay and defend one place instead of always being nomadic.
Writing meant you could organize large formations of troops by sending supply orders and requests for more men and pay them and all that. This meant you could outnumber the natives massively in battles.
Manufacturing is what you needed in order to have adequate supplies of firearms and ammunition. In later battles, some indian groups did get their hands on firearms, but they couldn’t keep them supplied.
With all this said, if it were not for disease, maybe the Indians could have adapted and gained these things. I mean the actual India today would be immensely harder to conquer that it was just 50 years ago.
Cool, thanks, it’s always a great day when I learn something new like that - I was aware of Inuit whalebone armour and wooden armour in the PNW, but this Woodlands slat armour wasn’t something I’d encountered before.
And natives in what’s new the US/Canada did have organized agriculture, or at least a lot of groups did. Along the east coast at the time of first contact, you find what’she called, after the Iroquois name for it, “Three sisters” agriculture, so called because it’s based around three staple crops; corn, beans, and squash, which they got from Mexico.
Before that, the east coast of the US was the home of what’s called the "Eastern Agricultural Complex ", based around cultivating a bunch of crops native to eastern North America (squash, sunflowers, goosefoot, little barley, knotweed, maygrass, and sumpweed), which for the most part was replaced by the three sisters.
Looking around, it seems no actual examples of woodlands wooden armour survived to the modern day - there are some beautiful PNW examples, but they kept the tradition of making such armour into the 19th century.
My guess is the early adoption of firearms is to blame.
Heh, this far underestimates the population densities, pre-epidemic, of north American natives - who, as others note, did indeed have organized agriculture (as well as urbanism in some places! The city of Cahokia, for example, though it seems to have been abandoned before the Europeans arrived, had an estimated 6- 40,000 native inhabitants:
Part of the “Mississippian Culture”, which definitely lasted well into the contact period:
True, they lacked writing - but in other respects were quite reasonably “advanced”, having a network of urban centers, political organization, production of pottery and other goods, and of course large-scale, organized agriculture.
It seems that the climate change of the “little ice age” had a severe impact on their culture (major cities such as Cahokia were abandoned, etc).
We have only one significant account of contact between Europeans and Mississippians - De Soto’s Expedition. The record of that expedition shows De Soto’s men encountering a densely populated landscape of villages and towns. However, his men managed to bring epidemic diseases with them …
Edit: as I’ve noted elsewhere, “lack of firearms” isn’t as major a factor as may be thought, since the natives of the woodlands for example very quickly acquired firearms!