hckrnws

I saw this on Nova once, it is amazing to see it made.

https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/asset/eng06_vid_incabridge/ is the best link I could find for it.

I'll add this too:

https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_Inca:_Masters_of_th...

Jago Cooper is superb and I love all his stuff. The Easter Island documentary is one of the best I've ever seen.

Amazing. Thank you

> Remarkably, the Inca managed to forge this vast society without the wheel, the arch, money, iron or steel tools, draft animals capable of ploughing fields or even a written language.

No horses until they were reintroduced by the Spanish. Minimal mobility. California had 500 distinct tribal groups before the Spanish arrived. The increased mobility allowed disease to wipe out about 90% of the indigenous peoples in North America before 1600.

Some of this information is a bit outdated.

Horses were reintroduced by Spaniards, but precolumbian mobility was not what we'd call minimal today and adoption of horses in the plains was deeply tied to political changes from Spanish colonialism in the southwest. As one example, people would make annual pilgrimages hundreds of miles across the desert from modern Phoenix to the gulfs of California and Mexico. People in the Northeast would travel hundreds of miles on their waterways for social visits. There was a vast trade network spanning the continent from the arctic down to South America, and the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Epidemic disease also didn't spread in advance of European contact. The demographic shattering diseases that led to those (fairly questionable) population loss figures happened after sustained European contact. Some regional disease slightly preceded contact, but we think they were fairly minor events demographically. Textbooks and popular media haven't caught up with the new work in this area though, like: https://doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.79.3.487

> Epidemic disease also didn't spread in advance of European contact. The demographic shattering diseases that led to those (fairly questionable) population loss figures happened after sustained European contact.

Yup, the biggest killer - smallpox - was probably introduced by Pánfilo de Narváez‘s expedition to arrest Cortez’ while he was already well into his campaign to conquer the Aztecs, decades after Columbus. Europe and North Africa were experiencing their own sporadic outbreaks at the time and it’s likely that a slave named Francisco Eguia brought it over Several of the indigenous people in the Caribbean were already wiped out because of the awful conditions of their enslavement by this point.

DIdn't Columbus essentially wipe out natives on the Carribean Islands though through a kind of forced labour (mining) genocide (with the "help" of disease)?

And Cortez wasn't exactly a passive visitor either?

Sure the diseases might've helped speed things up, but both of them seemed to be on a pretty intense and efficient pillaging, killing and raping spree. Where Cortez even went to great lengths to not only wipe out the natives but actually also destroy any trace of their largest city.

The crazy thing about Columbus (well, one of many) is that Spain explicitly forbade him to take slaves in the Caribbean, they wanted the natives Christianized and the land colonized. Columbus just did it anyway, and shipped over boatloads of slaves they didn't even want.

From my reading I understand that the Aztecs and Inca people never met, how did this trade network span the continent?

There were lots of other groups of people in between. Even if only neighbouring people traded with each other, the trade network could still span the continents, with some items moving much farther than the individual people.

Find it curious how people in the US tend to give a questionably huge role of disease to the population loss of the first americans

Because when they learn the origin of each of the 13 colonies in grade school that's the way Massachusetts and New England (which get a lot more time than some of the other because they were one of the first and US democracy traces its roots do the Pilgrims) get taught because it's the easy way.

There is a kernel of truth to it. The Pilgrims did kinda luck into settling an area that was somewhat depopulated from recent disease (but they also picked just about the most shitty area in the region so it wasn't exactly densely populated to begin with). But that line of causation gets over-played because nobody wants to stand in front of a bunch of teenagers and split hairs between various flavors of christian extremists and the circumstances by which they came to "own" the land they settled.

Well, what's the better explanation? If it was internecine warfare, the victors would be around. If it was colonial attackers, we'd have more records.

We have good documentation for it happening in the other direction, where some areas had diseases which struck Europeans so badly that they didn't want to immigrate and raise a family there.

The modern explanation is that disease played a major role, but it's disease that's closely related to the social and political disruptions from European contact.

Some examples: Spaniards enslave the Taino of Hispaniola, who are ravaged by diseases with lethality and infectiousness boosted by the malnutrition and stress of their enslavement. Spaniards take over Tenochtitlan, then destroy the sewer systems of the valley of Mexico. A series of E. Coli and salmonella epidemics known as Cocoliztli subsequently ravage the Mexican highlands. Spaniards get involved with a bitter civil war in Peru, and diseases decimate the displaced and destabilized populations. Spaniards institute corvee labor and create a famine in the southwest, which is followed by decades of recurrent epidemic diseases that heavily affect the people most directly under Spanish influence. Nomadic groups largely outside Spanish control, but still physically in the same regions like the Apache and the Comanche then became ascendant political forces in the resulting demographic collapse.

And the result of these losses was permanent because the populations ended up displaced or absorbed into colonialism.

In 1500 there were 60 million north american natives. In the early 1600s when the English settled, there were six million, most due to disease. It wasn't a single event of course. The smallpox epidemic of 1862 killed far more native peoples in California than settlers. Smallpox killed 66% of all native people in British Columbia (20,000) in that event.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1862_Pacific_Northwest_smallpo...

I wonder what enabled the Inca to imagine all of these things, from bridges to quipos to an enormous empire - and then to develop the culture, the skills, the technologies, and forge the political support for the investment, all on large scales.

It's not just one person's idea at one time. It takes generations and a whole society. How do you even spread those ideas across such a wide area without literacy?

> I wonder what enabled the Inca to imagine all of these things...

Probably the same way as the Chinese, Romans, Persians, Hittites, Assyrians, Olmec, Mexica, and all the other large scale political polities of the world.

> How do you even spread those ideas across such a wide area without literacy?

Most of the world has been illiterate for most of history. Even after the invention of writing, most practical knowledge was orally transmitted. Writing was for warehouse records so you could prove that the peasants really did owe you that ox.

Then how was it done? Do you disagree with the article about these issues? And why be dismissive?

I'm not certain I understand where the problem is? Trades are learned by apprenticeship. Knowledge is learned by oral transmission. As the previous commenter said, this has been normal for most of history, and frankly is still the case many places around the world. Literacy is _new_. Even when literacy was emerging, it was likely that a mason or a carpenter was not of a literate class and they learned the same way generations before them did: apprenticeship and oral knowledge transmission.

We're talking about adminstering and leading large-scale empires, which is enough of a difficulty, and doing it in the special circumstances of the Incas. And as part of that, developing and advancing these technologies and all the precursors to it - culture, education, skills, technology itself, and political support for it, all on that large scale.

If you think that's easy or normal, consider that it is hardly ever done. Few accomplish what the Incas did, much less with their challenges (see the OP regarding those). For an example, look at China in the mid-to-late 19th century, a place with far more advantages, as they tried to adopt technology.

Edit: From the OP:

"... they managed to create the largest empire ever seen in the Americas – a sprawling two-million-sq-km civilisation that extended across parts of modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina – encompassing as many as 12 million people and 100 languages. It was roughly 10 times the size of the Aztec Empire and had twice its population. Remarkably, the Inca managed to forge this vast society without the wheel, the arch, money, iron or steel tools, draft animals capable of ploughing fields or even a written language."

They used Quipu to catalog most administrative information (taxes, census, military, etc) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

Quipu's are actually pretty cool - it's basically a proto-flamegraph and could even potentially be used alphabetically, but we wouldn't really know as there just aren't that many left after the brutal Spanish invasion of the Inca empire and the subsequent inquisition.

Yes I'm aware of them - and they add to my wonder: Why were the Inca so innovative?

As I understand them, quipu did not transmit words, so how do you communicate, for example, rope bridge construction and maintenance information over great distances and time.

> quipu did not transmit words, so how do you communicate, for example, rope bridge construction and maintenance information over great distances and time.

Your question has been answered before in this thread. You communicate rope bridge construction and maintenance via apprenticeship. There is a master rope bridge builder who teaches personaly by demonstration and telling an apprentice rope bridge builder, then supervises their work for a bit before the apprentice is declared a master themselves. You do not need written communication for this.

In fact even to this day this is how much of the skills are communicated. I learned lost wax casting from a dude in a workshop who shown me what should be the proper consistency of the malachite-gypsum-water mixture before you slop it on your wax pieces. I didn’t learn it from a book, even though i know how to read and read a lot. Similarly i learned from a master (a different one) during personal supervision on how silver glows when it is just perfect temp to flow into a cast. Also learned from a master how to see that the metal I’m working is becoming brittle from work hardening, and what can I do to avoid or even use that effect to my benefit. None of this is rope bridge building, just illustrations that knowledge, even very important knowledge, is transmitted to this day without writing.

Why is it so hard to imagine that the Incas did the same?

What a bizarre conversation - I could understand one person not quite fathoming the question, but all these people insisting is really odd.

This thread doesn't explain the Incas at all for reasons I explained (but which should be obvious). What I'm asking are well-established, prominent subjects of research.

And then people playing down literacy ... is this that anti-modernism trend - the Middle Ages were fine, secret prehistorical societies had advanced technology, who needs literacy, etc.? It's just hard to fathom.

I'm not sure I'm (I'll speak only for myself in this thread) am 'playing down literacy'. It's great, we should have more of it. No questions asked.

Maybe there's a tone interpretation issue in the thread... 'How did the Incas do this' -- is that asking for the detailed specifics of their management culture and systems (mostly unknowable -- likely the subject of a many past and future academic careers), or is it a statement of incredulity. I think myself and most of the other commenters have interpreted the latter, whether that was your intention or not.

What I'm pointing out is that, if you've seen much of the developing world, or lived anywhere except the fully formed bubble of a 'modern developed society,' you will have had the opportunity to observe that 'life... (and by extension, civilization)... find a way.'

The Egyptian pharoahs ruled for over 3000 years. That number is unfathomable in the context of modern society. Yes they had a written language, but the vast majority of that empire very likely did not know how to read it.

The millions that lived through that era integrated, obeyed and functioned into that power structure for more than 1.5x the time since we all agreed on a numbering structure for 'years since some arbitrary point in the past.'

Christianity, and Hinduism, and Islam, and frankly every major religion spread, and brought most of humanity into their fold without most of its adherents being able to read. There wasn't a formal written bible until hundreds of years after the religion itself was formed. It passed through dozens of generations before being formalized.

All this is to say: I don't know how the Incas did it, in terms of the granular specifics of their culture and systems, but that they did it, somehow, and using methods quite normal for most of history, is far from implausible.

> 'How did the Incas do this' -- is that asking for the detailed specifics of their management culture and systems (mostly unknowable -- likely the subject of a many past and future academic careers), or is it a statement of incredulity. I think myself and most of the other commenters have interpreted the latter, whether that was your intention or not.

I understand now. No, not incredulity at all, but serious questions. It's an exceptional, very rare achievement. I was hoping for some research out there already that someone was aware of.

> I was hoping for some research out there already that someone was aware of

I think this thread got very heated, but fundamentally

1. Oral transmission via an apprentice system - a common method used throughout much of history, as mass illiteracy was the norm for most societies at the local level until the 18th-19th century

2. Quipus as a form of proto-writing - we know the Inca were able to codify and communicate categorical and numerical data using quipus. Hypothetically, they might have even been able to use quipu knots to represent an alphabet.

We simply wouldn't know because the Spanish burnt most Quipus during the inquisition and the aftermath of the conquest of the Neo-Inca State in the late 16th century and the failure of Tupac Amaru II's rebellion against the Spanish at the end of the 18th century.

The Spanish conquest of the Andes was heavily genocidal compared to their other conquests (that's saying something). It almost compared to the ferocity with which the Moriscos (Iberian Muslims) and Sephardim (Iberian Jews) were genocided in the 16th century.

To this day the Quechua homeland in Bolivia and Peru remain the least developed regions of South America, with HDIs comparable to those found in poorer states of India and China, compared to much of South America's (excluding Venezuela due to their collapse) HDI converging around 0.800-0.850.

Thanks. Are you summarizing the thread or is that based on evidence and research? I don't see the explanatory power of those theories.

> Oral transmission via an apprentice system

Oral transmission has probably existed everywhere (apprenticeship is a matter of definition, but I get the idea), but very few have achieved anything like the Incas.

> Quipus as a form of proto-writing

Quipus are just numbers, as far as I know. They are great, but don't explain how the enormous amount of other necessary information is transmitted and updated across such a vast geography.

With due respect, what we need is actual research based on actual evidence, not Internet comments (I'm not offering any theories myself!).

> With due respect, what we need is actual research based on actual evidence

I recommend “Tinkuqchaka: A Suspension Bridge over the Upper Pampas River, Ayacucho, Peru” from Lidio M. Valdez, and Cirilo Vivanco. Published in the Journal of Anthropological Research, 2021.

It has its limitations of course. It describes present day rope bridge building practices and there is no guarantee that those practices are the same as in days of old. But given that the bridges themselves rot away and the ancients are not around to interview this is likely the best description you will ever get.

Thank you. I am not wondering how to build rope bridges; lots of cultures figure out some interesting local technologies.

It's the Inca's scale that is what sets them apart - doing these things, at a very high level and with great success, over enormous distances and populations.

A few civilizations achieve these things, the great majority don't; what is the difference?

It is a common question asked by scholars for generations about all sorts of places - for example, see the popular book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

> I am not wondering how to build rope bridges

You were just a few comments ago. You were specifically asking how bridge construction and maintenance is communicated over great distances and time. Let me quote your very own words to you: “how do you communicate, for example, rope bridge construction and maintenance information over great distances and time”

This is the only thing i have answered because your wider “how do the inca do?” question is not specific enough to be answerable.

And the answer to that specific question is that no maintenance information needs to be transmitted and the construction information is spread as folk tradition. Bridges are usefull enough that local villages want them to be built, and they are perfectly manageable as a local effort. And then the next village sees that a bridge was built, they also want one and find someone who knows how to build one and they do. You repeat that a bunch of times and you have a bunch of rope bridges all around. There is no mystery there.

This idea was so alien and unbelievable to you that you accused me of promulgating some sort of conspiracy of playing down the importance of literacy. Not cool.

> very few have achieved anything like the Incas.

Can you be more specific?

I understand they were a vibrant, far reaching empire, but I'm not sure I understand how they were so exponentially further advanced than many other past civilizations, that have each has their share of remarkable 'how the hell did they do that's.'

Taken in sum, I find them all remarkable in their own ways -- but it also proves the earlier point, that human ingenuity has found ways to express itself innumerably across the eras.

Two ways they are extraordinary:

First, the great majority of 'civilizations' [1] do not achieve anything like what the Incas did. Perhaps your perspective is distorted by survivorship bias - you know about the biggest successes, not the 99.999% that you've never heard of, like someone who thinks FAANG are typical of computer businesses. There are (or were until recently) societies in the Amazon, for example, no larger than a village and living in neolithic conditions. That is how far they made it. So there is the common question - why do some 'succeed' on such a large scale and some don't? Jared Diamond's famous book, for example, looks at this issue.

Second, the Inca did it with unique limitations: "Remarkably, the Inca managed to forge this vast society without the wheel, the arch, money, iron or steel tools, draft animals capable of ploughing fields or even a written language." That's from the OP.

It's mysterious to me that the OP spells out this question, but nobody in the discussion seems to understand it.

[1] I'm not sure that's the right word, but I'm not going to define it to precisely

Perhaps you have something profound to communicate here, but you're not doing a great job of getting it across.

As an example, in response to "very few have achieved anything like the Incas," I asked for something specific to establish a frame of reference, and you replied with something that can be summarized more or less as "very few have achieved something like the Incas."

As to your second point, this is remarkable. Nobody has disagreed. But it's not extraordinary. Not every culture has to be agrarian. Not every culture has to be written. Draft animals, arches, wheels. These are one way to solve specific projects problems. They aren't the only solution. The Incas, through remarkable ingenuity and effort, solved those problems differently. Again, remarkable but but extraordinary.

It feels to me like you've asked and been answered, and for myself at least, it sounds like you've sort of dug in and want to be found on this hill of Incan exceptionalism. I personally find their exceptionalism exceptional, as exceptional as the many other exceptions that have been discussed in the thread so far.

> Perhaps your perspective is distorted by survivorship bias

Have you considered that perhaps it is your viewpoint who is suffering from survivorship bias? For a civilisation to be considered “great” many many things has to go just right. A wide variety of things can and do go wrong to curtail human societies. Prolonged bad weather can ruin the harvest, and the resulting unrest break up the “civilisation”. Random sparks of religuous fervour can catch and destabilise the region. The ruling class can be wrecked by succession wars. Outside threats can conquer all of them. Their civilisation can fail due to economic or demographic changes.

Is it possible that when you are asking how they succeed on such a large scale while others did not you are just observing that they were lucky in many aspects until one day they were no longer lucky? And then wondering what their secret of success was is indeed just survivorship bias.

Obviously it is still an interesting question to study how did they operate, how did they live and so on and so on. But searching for their “secret sauce” might be a fools errand. Because they very possibly didn’t had one.

> I could understand one person not quite fathoming the question, but all these people insisting is really odd.

If everyone is misunderstanding your question then maybe the problem is with how the question is formed.

> This thread doesn't explain the Incas at all

Yeah. Nobody is going to explain a whole civilisation with everything involved in a few short sentences. You were asking specificaly how the bridge building knowledge was spread without literacy. That is what was explained to you. Repeatedly.

> And then people playing down literacy

Nobody is “playing down literacy”. It is just clear from your question that you do not understand how something can happen without it. So I have pointed out examples where skills are transmitted without reading/writing. It is called tacit knowledge and it has a huge role in all kind of skills and technology.

> the Middle Ages were fine, secret prehistorical societies had advanced technology, who needs literacy, etc.?

What are you talking about? Why are you making things up?

> It's just hard to fathom.

I can say the same about your weird whatever that list is.

The kamayocs spread the knowledge orally from master to protege

> Then how was it done?

madhadron's comment answers your question. Which part are you not understanding?

> Do you disagree with the article about these issues?

What issues? What is there to disagree? The article clearly describe how it was done. There is no disagreement between the article and madhadron's comment.

> And why be dismissive?

They are not dismissive.

The king says they want a pyramid. The middle managers get you all in for a stand up and tell you they need those blocks ready by the end of the quarter. You make the blocks. The transport team move the blocks to the site. The block laying team complain your blocks aren’t good enough and you have an argument about block standards. 20,000 people are put to death. The pyramid is completed.

It's odd that so many on HN don't see that it doesn't happen. 99.99% of societies don't manage anything like that, and the Inca did it in unique ways with relatively very limited technology.

They had quipu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu) as fairly extensive civil records. The Spanish colonizers destroyed most of them out of a belief they were religious objects.

I am Peruvian, it was just a lot of hard work. The culture was already there. Quechua was there before the Inca. Their was organization before Inca, as there were tribes which were organized. The Inca just took them over and re-organized. The Inca were also geniuses. They just figured it out.

Thanks for your perspective.

> it was just a lot of hard work

If that was true, then many would have done it instead of only one.

> Their was organization before Inca, as there were tribes which were organized. The Inca just took them over and re-organized.

Organizing a small scale is commonplace; everyone does it. It's the large scale that only the Inca managed.

> The Inca were also geniuses.

Must have been! But in what way? And it can't just be one person; you need a whole culture (especially with limited communication, the Inca depedended on locals everywhere understanding the concepts, methods, etc.) - what was special about that culture? Where did it come from?

Well first they were visionaries and then they worked hard.

One step at a time, they took over tribes and they had vision and they developed a system for their territories

The Inca was a tribe so it wasn't one person.

I guess, but that leaves almost every question unanswered. What was their vision? Why did they have the vision and not others? Lots of people have visions; how were they able to apply theirs and so successfully? What was their system? etc.

The quipo scholars were literate, it was just terribly inefficient system compared to physical representations of language we are familiar with. It still beats having no records at all though, Shows just how powerful preserving and passing knowledge is.

It can be surprising to learn what civilisations accomplished before inventing a writing system for their language. I was amazed when I found out that Japanese didn't have a writing system until the 4th century AD despite 600+ years of agricultural empires and Shintoism. And even then, their writing system was just adapting Chinese characters nobles had to learn so they could deal with mainland Asians. They used the symbols that either meant the same thing as their words or sounded similar.

(I'm probably getting some of that wrong or not clarifying enough, and am eager to learn from those who'd correct me.)

That is a complex question that is not well understood. There actually was a kind of writing system in the form of knotted strings. These were considered sacred objects and invaders destroyed as many of these as they could, the result being an almost total break with the previous sacred order.

The knotted strings are the quipus that some comments are talking about. They were for accounting, not words.

Why not?

Humans did a lot of impressive things before writing all over the planet. Oral tradition is powerful, even for today's technological standards.

Calling the end of the Inca civilization a collapse fails to convey a fair bit of history.

I expected a term that suggests destruction by invasion.