A man rebuilding the last Inca rope bridge
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
I am curious on the idea that wheels would not have been helpful? I get that full blown carriages and such would have been a bit of work to use, but it isn't like a wheel barrow isn't already useful.
I'm also curious on how they wound the rope without some sort of wheel involved?
And I'd expect anything like this to be more than a 1 man job! Apologies if I implied otherwise. I'd expect even using wheels for the turning that you would need more than a single person.
It is obnoxious how hard it is to search on why they would have never invented a wheel for the spinning of thread. AI seems to insist that spinning wheels are directly the result of carting wheels. I'd expect even wheels for a pulley system would have helped with the hanging process.
The Inca used spindles for spinning thread, which apparently was sufficient for their needs. And the wheelbarrow is, interestingly (TIL), a relatively recent Old World invention, with the earliest depictions from 2nd century AD China. Even the chariot didn't arrive in the Old World until the early 2nd millennia BC. And the chariot wasn't invented by the Egyptians or Chinese, but by peoples in the Eurasian Steppe. (Who probably not coincidentally were some of the first to domestic horses? More primitive wheeled carts were much older but also contemporaneous with emergence of other domesticated draft animals like oxen, I think. Smaller animals can draft, but the utility is severely diminished beyond very favorable terrain.)
Rigid, authoritarian societies also seem to have a lot of problems inventing new things, especially disruptive things.
James Burke's "Connections" is a great history of invention.
I haven't read that book; maybe that's pointed out as one of the reasons it can take so long for an invention to appear in history. The stars have to align. It's rarely if ever enough to create a working implementation, let alone merely conceive of it.
And I guess it's probably also worth considering that notwithstanding all the advanced knowledge pre-Columbian civilizations had, they were still nonetheless millennia behind the Old World. The Old World was highly interconnected even 4000 years ago, and even if the New World had the equivalent of the Silk Road, there were just fewer people, fewer civilizations, and fewer cycles of civilization building to shake things out.
[1] Even open sourcing it doesn't help. If I had a nickel for every cool open source project I've noticed that gained huge mindshare and was thought to be novel and heretofore unimplemented approach, yet actually had a substantially similar if not identical 20+ year old implementation sitting on some on old SunSITE FTP server or as a PoC for some ACM paper published circa 1970-1999....
I'm not sure evidence can easily sustain this. Even putting aside the kind-of-tautological "rigid societies don't invent disruption" sentiment.... not only is "authoritarian" a pretty vague phrase in terms of economics, but we have a good deal of evidence of societies we mostly consider authoritarian inventing plenty of "disruptive" things. Just not a generally beneficial sort of disruption.
Super authoritarian and yet super invovative.
Directly to this thread, nobody is claiming they didn't use tools. The question is specifically why they never invented a specific tool. My specific question is why the cart wheel needs to be a prerequisite to a spinning wheel.
The common answer is that you don't need carting wheels without drafting animals. My question is why does that preclude pulleys and spinning wheels? They seem they should be unrelated.
Pulleys, in particular, seem an extension of levers more than of carting wheels.
Considering the large stone structures and pavilions they built, they sure could have used a wheelbarrow.
Their "roads" were impassable by wheeled vehicles, but I suspect that passable roads were a consequence of wheeled vehicles, not a prerequisite.
Thinking more on it, I confess the "they had wheels in toys" is actually more confusing than not. I would think it common for toys to mimic non-toys.
On hilly terrain, wheels simply aren't the best thing to use—you can't fully sustain the weight easily pulling up the hill as opposed to standing on the incline. Meanwhile we have tons of evidence of people used as couriers for relatively heavy items with a specific sort of framed backpack.
The lack of pack animals is a real thing, but domesticated horses would have seriously struggled even if they magically appeared in the pre-colonial incan empire. Even today, transportation by donkey sans-cart is often the easiest way to move a bunch of stuff around the andes without prepared roads.
But, yeah, my short dives show the same. It is generally held that carting wheels weren't useful due to lack of draft animals. I just find that reason awkward with how useful manual applications of the wheel are for me. Dolleys and wheelbarrows are the easiest example, of course. But pulley systems in general are super useful. And don't, necessarily, need a draft animal.
They did have spinning pottery wheels, just not load-bearing ones.
Still seems a little surprising they would not have invented pulleys. They clearly had good experience with ropes.
Granted, if you can just throw more people at the problem, I fully agree that a team of people will be faster than a single person with a wheel barrow. But, that has more to do with it being a team than the barrow.
My curiosity was more on the very heavy ropes. I'd assume that you would benefit heavily from a geared like setup to run the spinning.