sindri42: triple-fae-goddess:tikkunolamorgtfo:fieldbears:fullmetalquest:robotsandfrippary:99laundry:
sindri42: triple-fae-goddess: tikkunolamorgtfo: fieldbears: fullmetalquest: robotsandfrippary: 99laundry: gogomrbrown: I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization. When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day. Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time. Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool. They’ve also recently discovered a lost Native American city in Kansas called Etzanoa It rivals the size of Cahokia, which was very large as well. Makes me happy to see people learn about the culture of my country :D Also, please remember that the idea of a nomadic or semi-nomadic culture being “less intelligent”, “less civilized” (and please unpack that word) was invented by people who wanted to make a graph where they were on the top. Societies that functioned without 1) staying exclusively in one location or 2) having to make complicated, difficult-to-construct tools to go about their daily lives… were not somehow less valid than others. This is why I fucking hate it when Europeans make jokes about how they have “more history” than the Americas. “This church is older than your country hahaha.” Actually, it’s older than the country you put there, massacring millions in the process, but go off, I guess. Currently taking a college course which revolves a ton around these topics!! I love it. The early colonists in what is now the east coast of the US marveled at how the forests seemed to just be waiting for somebody to move in, looking more like carefully tended gardens than untamed wilderness. They interpreted this as evidence that this land was a gift to them from the heavens, giving them fertile fields already ready for their crops and their homesteads. The truth is that there were people living there just a few years earlier who had in fact been carefully tending that land, right up until they disappeared. The native tribes and nations were for the most part ravaged by plague. There were definitely some deliberate attempts at genocide and relocation, but those were small scale, things which would never have been possible if the colonists were fighting against the full might of the great native american nations instead of dealing with a relatively tiny number of survivors. Fatality rates in some regions were upwards of 95% before they even saw a white man. The americas had virtually no resistance to plagues, because a plague does not evolve naturally. Think about it, a virus or bacterium is completely reliant on its hosts to move, the reproduce, to survive; any disease which kills its host is a failure and will die out soon afterward. So where do they come from? Almost always a cross-species jump. A slight mutation that turns a disease which made a cow or a pig moderately sick into a disease that kills humans by the millions. In Europe and many parts of Asia, it was customary for cities to have mixed populations of humans and livestock in close quarters, so these rare mutations happened relatively often, leading to a lot of dead people… but leaving the survivors with a certain degree of resistance to similar disasters. In the Americas, very few of the native animals were really suitable for domestication, so it was rare for humans and livestock to live in particularly close quarters with one another (until horses got imported; the surviving natives fucking loved those). So those cross-species disease jumps just didn’t happen, and in turn plagues just weren’t a thing in the americas. Until suddenly, they were and nobody was prepared. It’s been noted that Americans have a cultural obsession with the apocalypse. So much of our media is centered on how people would survive some event which totally collapsed our society, how we would rebuild on the ashes of a dead world, what a new society would look like if it was made by a handful of scavengers picking at the bones of a vanished culture. I suggest that this is because we are the post-apocalypse. Our country is so “young” because it did not rise until the powerful nations who had ruled over this continent died, until an unprecedented cataclysm upended everything which had come before and left their ruins waiting for us to move in. -- source link