Did the Americans spin cloth? If so, they may have used a spinning wheel-easy to make the transition from spinning wheel to chariot.
Are llamas just unsuitable to harness? Or are they light animals who lack the strenght to pull a heavy load?
Did the natives of Australia develop the wheel?
I don’t know much about them. But maybe the leap to harvesting the power of the wheel is simply bigger than we realize.
Homo Sapiens have been around 200,000 years or 150,000 depending on how you look at it. It took a long time to develop the wheel. If it took the Eurasians all that time, maybe we should not be surprised that the isolated populations failed to come up with a usable wheel.
Jim
Isn’t it a pyramid thing; you need a basic density of static, non-transitory population interacting and eventually you’ll turn up an Einstein?
I don’t know about the rest of the country but in Ohio there were some serious roads built between indian mounds. They stretched across the state into Kentucky. I would expect that to lead to the use of wheels at some point.
There were quite a few civilizations in the Americas that would qualify.
but the Meso-Americans did build pyramids. There were large cities. So that can hardly explain it. The simple answer is that it wasn’t developed because there was no need for it. Same with writing: writing systems were only developed when there was a need for accurate transmission of messages over a larger distance. IIRC, Jared Diamond (in Collapse, which is an awesome book) argues that the meso-americans didn’t have the wheel because where they were at, roads were none too feasible, what with the up-hill/down-hill aspect. Also, apperently there were animals readily available to do the carrying & moving around. So who needs a wheel if you’ve got a lama.
I believe the wheel was developed more or less simultaneously (in the grand scheme of things, that is) and independently in a bunch of places. One of which was Mesopotamia. Also, IIRC, it wasn’t as arid at the time; much more forest, actually, than today, and not all that desert. Ironically, the Middle East, which gave us so much, could never develop any of those things under the current environmental circumstances again.
How many early North American civilizations had slaves?
Whoops, but in my defense, you were responding to someone else, so I didn’t see it at the time.
Um, cite? The Conventional Wisdom, as I learned it, is that there was nothing but open land in North America, with no cities, just a few hunter gatherers farting around. Only recently has that been seriously challenged (outside of academia).
If you really want to learn about this, I suggest the book *1491 *by Charles C. Mann. As far as the trade not being intercivilizational, many inland tribes in North America had shells that they could not have gotten without trading with peoples on the coasts. There’s a lot of examples like that. To quote from First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, Second Edition, by Colin G. Calloway (another good resource), page 27, emphasis added:
Cahokia, for instance, was a market center with trade routes linking it to most of the continent. Between farming, trade, hunting, and fishing, it’s not that unbelievable that cities of tens of thousands of people could exist.
I’ve done a lot of outdoor hiking and backpacking in my life. During that time I’ve stepped on a lot of roundish rocks that have caused my feet to roll out from under me. Given that early Americans spent all of their time walking off road it’s hard for to understand how someone couldn’t put have that concept together.
But then native Americans didn’t seem to have invented chairs either, which I find very odd.
Chiming in to add another plug for the *1491 * book. I just finished it and it was fascinating. Most of what I thought I knew about the residents of the western hemisphere seems to be wrong.
It’s not so unclear in the case of Tenochtitlan, is it? The government would go to war and bring back supplies of Soylent Green, at least enough to satisfy the warlords.
Thank you, Dopers! I shall add 1491 to my list. 
I certainly cannot give a definitive answer to Cal’s OP, so I’ll throw this in:
Recently, I finally got around to reading War of the Worlds. A detail in there is worthy of mention here: the Martians didn’t have wheels, yet they could go around invading other planets. However fictional, Mr. Wells was putting some effort into thinking of genuinely alternative ways of problem solving, and he didn’t feel that wheels were a given.
A fantasy written by a man now dead, but it provides a notion that the wheel was a nonobvious kind of thing.
You may proceed to tear me apart for my weak premise.
Its not fair to pick only the Americas out,SubSaharan Africa and I’m pretty sure the peoples of the Pacific islands including the Maoris(Oceanians?) plus as **WhatExit **said the Australian Aborigines didn’t develop the wheel.
Is there any connection that at least some of those cultures failed to discover the plough?(plow)
It’s not a weak premise. I was thinking about TWOTW when I formulated this. But it seems awfully artificial. This is why the Martians had tripods instead of wheeled vehicles, but wheels seem like suich a straightforward and obvious thing that it boggles the mind that Martians wouldn’t have them and use them (They DID use circular motion, after all – their spacecraft were sealed with circular screw-plugs). It was just one wy pf Wells making the Martians alien. (I note that, in the recent Spielberg adaptation, the Martians were fascinated by a buctcle wheel in the basement of the house, an obvious nod to the book).
But, as I say, circular motions are sort of natural and obvious. Once you know about them, it seems perverse to not use them. And American Indians DID use circular motions and objects – their pottery and baskets were round, and required circular motions to create them. They use pump drills and created round beads from them. They constructed round medicine wheels. The Goddamned Aztec Calendar Stone is a gigantic wheel. It was probably rolled into position. So why don’t any American civilizations have practical wheels?
Wheels only work with something to pull/push/torque them, right? No animals in the Americas that could do the job, besides people, so why not just skip the machine and use some captured slaves?
3 things I remember from 1491, but as i don’t have the book on me, I can’t give a proper cite:
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Incas (Maybe this was some Mayan people, I can’t recall) did use the wheel for kids’ toys!
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Incas had a vast system of highways. However, many included long stairways, and the best way to traverse these was by llama. In fact, when the Spaniards came, they immediately ditched their horses in favor of llamas (and their steel armor in favor of the Incan woven armor, for that matter.)
google image search for ‘inca highway’
- The Incan Empire was an empire, not a kingdom. It was comprised of various cultural groups. The same is true of the Aztec Triple Alliance. Think about the Roman Empire as an analogy. It was a vehicle for cross-cultural pollination
Except for the Mayans, American civilizations were rather brief, and it does take a civilization to provide incentive to increase the productivity of hired labour by developing a tool to do so.
And frankly, while we may seek to ascribe the invention of the wheel to Egypt or Mesopatamia or what ever, The credit most likely belongs to an obscure and gifted individual with too much idle time on his hands.
Bottom lline: No good domesticable draft animals.
Deer, wapiti, elk, moose – surely you jest!
Bison – ever try tgo convince a bison to do something it doesn’t want to? Not domesticable.
Llamas – great animals, and probably could be used as draft animals, They were used as pack animals by the Quechua and others. But llamas are natrive principally to the Andes and the adjacent plateau areas. As noted, the Inca “road network” included stairs, ramped areas, and such, not predominantly horizontal vehicular routes – walking leading pack animals worked better than having people pull carts.
North American horses, camelids, proboscideans, and South American litopterns all died out during or at the end of the Pleistocene, before domesticating animals took hold.
I remember seeing that the ancient inhabitants of the American South West had roads;these were discovered quite recently. What they were used for is a mystery.
Good to see everyone repeating the party line. I think most of you are not reading the OP – just the thread title.
1.) What about Potter’s wheels, whixch many suggest predate the use of wheel as transportation (often by thousands of years). Both Americas have a long tradition of very expert pottery.
2.) Draft animals aren’t obviously needed for wheeled items.