On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Jeffrey Kiok wrote: >> True, but they tended to come into conflict with each other. And they >> had some very real problems when they came into conflict with a >> society with higher technology (and with more diseases). > > >I'd be careful there. Yes, they came into conflict with each other. >It was not their socio-economic structure that destroyed the Native >Americans when they came into conflict with the Europeans, it was the >fact that they didn't have immunity to the diseases the Europeans >brought with them. Yup, yup. I've read /Lies my Teacher Told Me/ and /Guns, Germs and Steel/, so I know that diseases were very important, probably primary in decimating the native populations. The thing is, the technology was also important - and there the socio-economic structure was more of a problem; a society needs a higher and more sedentary population in order to compete with higher tech. The farming tribes might have been able to learn blacksmithing and other tool usage, but the nomadic hunter-gatherers would have had more problems. > In fact, one should note that in Colonial times, men like William >Bradford attributed the colonies success not to guns, warfare, or a >superior society, but rather to the fact that great diseases wiped >out the Native Americans, literally leaving cleared land perfect for >crops (which the Native Americans had been farming) for the >colonists. Yup. /Lies my Teacher Told Me/ describes how the famous Squanto came >from just such a disease-destroyed village. > Also, it should noted that in Massachusetts, it actually became >illegal to leave the town, because so many colonists fled the towns >and went to live in these Native Americans communes, never to return. >There are numerous accounts where after colonists recaptured former >colonists now living with the Native Americans, that the former >colonists did not want to return. Yes, I remember that as well. There was a certain amount of speculation that some of the notions of individual sovreignity among the early colonists arose because of exposure to the democratic nature of many of the tribes. >But I suppose this is a bit of a tangent. Never go off on tangents, which are lines that intersect a curve at only 1 point and were discovered by Euclid, who lived in the 6th Century, which was an era dominated by the Goths, who lived in what we now know as Poland... OTOH: If you never go off on tangents, you keep going around in circles.