Mississipian, Natives, and metal

OP here
I'm not contesting pic related, I am genuinely curious about why metalurgy wasn't present when settlers arrived in XVth century

t.not some stormfag twitching to yell "muh white superiority"

>the copper age was not a sign of advancement from the neolithic, it's a very malleable metal

lol

I have read about them some time ago, their art reminds me of Mesoamerican stuff,it'r really weird

you could assume copper is a stepping stone for bronze, it seems tin was mined as early as 1000 bc in central america, so these vast trade network would have made the spread of bronze possible

but thanks for your explanation, I had never stopped to consider the effects of LIA outside of Europe

>mfw when a single volcano eruption may have shaped world history

Well back in those days info didn't get passed around all that well. So there were a lot of times when if one group did have an advancement and nobody else really picked it up for whatever reason and that group falls apart, well that advancement is kinda forgotten.

Wouldn't surprise their might have been trade ties considering they we're both on the gulf coast. Might've had some maritime trade

Things is, mississipian civs were known, maybe mainly, for the extentiveness of their trading and cultural network, so I'm sure the isolation argument holds in this case

*so I'm not sure

That looks rather aztec-like, did they had any contact with the mesoamericans?

The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization,centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddohad had a taste for massive architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, enormous monuments. After Soto’s army left,notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas,the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto’s(1539)and La Salle’s(1682)visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000—not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies-was wiped out” because diseases spread more quickly and easily through dense cities than hunter-gatherers.

One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many simultaneous plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough—all rained down on the Americasin the century after Columbus. (Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In contrast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine, even if it was their only real weapon against disease. They boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside. In Indian New England, Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, wrote in Manitou and Providence(1982), family and friends gathered with the doctor/priestat the sufferer’s bedside to wait out the illness—a practice “that could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.”

It's also known that those 20+ diseases put a different circumstance than just a single disease origin epidemics europeans could suffer against the multiple types epidemics that spread all over the populations quickly.

I was able to work on copper before it's not too hard of a material.

That isn't to say I don't think Mississippian civilization isn't "advanced" (I personally hate the word though) but rather the conditions of coppercraft in North America isn't attached to "civilization".

Again just look at copper Cree

This was truly the end of the world for them.
Apocalypse.
>plague
>plague
>plague
>plague
These who not die from 1st, get weakened for a 2nd.
Whole families dead.
Whole society collapse.
Crafts and knowledge disappear because there is no survivors.
All hope lost.
Truly the end times.

>When the conquistadores
>the Natives had none of this.

Peru had cities and bronze.
Meso had cities, and more copper than bronze, but still bronze.
Mississippian cultures persisted until 1650.

Learn some fucking history instead of fuckposting.

Black people made those items

Wow, I knew deaths were masive, but holy shit this explains a lot
a 90%+ population decline is even worse than the late ice age collapse, truly apocalypse

Didn't they get totally wiped off the face of the Earth by disease when Europeans came? I imagine that would put a damper on one's civilization

copper was "native copper" basically surface deposits, from what I've heard, it was very pure.

there wasn't much in the way of Tin or bizmuth though, at least not in the same easily accessible form that copper was found in, so bronze wasn't possible.

the difficulty of transport was also a key thing, I don't think native north Americans had any domesticated animals beyond dogs. and the area of easily accessible copper was in the Great lakes region which has a very different climate than the Caribbean or gulf-coast.

There was something like bronze toolmaking in the andes region (pre-inca).

It was the closest thing to the apocalypse in history. Then when the settlers arrived they saw people living in huts and hunting with stone spears and assumed that that was how it had always been for the Amerindians. When in reality what the vast majority of Europeans encountered in the Americas was the Mad-Max esque post-apocalyptic shitshow.

It's really easy to lose a knowledge.
Romans used high tech concrete, yet their heirs, without even a critical discontinuity and despite an important population, lost this knowledge for dozens of centuries.

the sad part is that we've lost the histories or records of many of those civilizations.

Either from idiots who burned the books because they looked scary, to those societies lacking writing or books to begin with, or had them written in a form that basically rotted/washed away with time to be unrecognizable to later european settlers.

What this means is we get a completely stupid and easily romanticized view of native americans, at least in the context of popular narratives.

If not diseases whole colonization attempts would probably fall short.
Whole conquest too.
It was only possible because diseases open the door .
Loss of population, social unrest, civil wars.
At last Inca would probably easily resist if not civil war and death of royal family that decapitated their highly centralized leadership.
It would be interesting world.

You're grossly overestimating the populations and political unity of the Indians, m8o.

Look it would be similar to Asia colonization.
Landing Europeans found native states in high state of disarray or wiped out.
Sure it would look different in XVIII/XIX century with all that technological advantage but earlier?

Mississippian culture lasted until the 1600s

Binford already answered that on the 60s, it way harder to obtain and make than just using lithics, if a new tech isn't that efficient why bother using it, especially when you are a fucking neolithic farmer.

This. It's actually kind of funny seeing exactly how uniformed people on this board are sometimes. "Archaeology as Anthropology," which talks a lot about the old copper culture, is probably the single most famous archaeological article, and it was required reading in every undergraduate archaeology course I've had a connection to.

Besides the added hardship of getting and manufacturing the metals, they were also less functional than lithic tools (copper is softer than stone and can deform pretty easily). In the Americas, copper seems to have always been used for decorative purposes, and people eventually stopped caring about devoting effort to making shiny shit out of copper.

There was never an advent of bronzeworking in North America or even copper melting so it ended up being more of a hassle to hammer out a copper tool than it was to just make a groundstone tool. Copper still saw a lot of use in ornaments like your pic but after the paleolithic and early archaic it wasn't really used for tools that often.

Jewish shill

...

the introduction of corn and the bow and arrow did a real number on their particular way of life. They used the spear and atlatl before that.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodland_period#Subsistence_Strategies
>In coastal regions, many settlements were near the coast, often near salt marshes, which were habitats rich in food resources. People tended to settle along rivers and lakes in both coastal and interior regions for maximum access to food resources.[9] Nuts were processed in large amounts, including hickory and acorns, and many wild berries, including palm berries, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries, were eaten, as well as wild grapes and persimmon. Most groups relied heavily on white-tailed deer, but a variety of other small and large mammals were hunted also, including beaver, raccoon, and bear. Shellfish formed an important part of the diet, attested to by numerous shell middens along the coast and interior rivers.
>Coastal peoples practiced seasonal mobility, moving to the coast during the summer take advantage of numerous marine resources such as sea mammals and shellfish, then moved to interior locations during the winter where access to deer, bear, and anadromous fish such as salmon could see them through the winter. Seasonal foraging also characterized the strategies of many interior populations, with groups moving strategically among dense resource areas.

>even copper melting
incorrect