I recently got the chance to watch on YouTube a video by the user OllieBye which chronicled the history of civilization, every year. I noticed you had primitive tribes of Europe at first like the Bell beaker people, Gothic and Latin tribes which in turn became the Roman republic and then the Roman empire, which fell and turned into the ostrogothic people. We ended up having kingdoms like France, England, Norse and the holy Roman empire, meanwhile During this time, the map of North America was basically blank, you had the Pueblo people and the Mississippi people but that wasn't until later. Europe and Asia were creating empires that rose and fell and religions like Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism. You had notable figures like Genesis Khan, Julius Caesar, William the conquerer, Jesus, muhammad and the buddha. Meanwhile I don't see really much of anything from the Native Americans.
In South America, it seems they were maybe a little more advanced but not by much. We had the Maya, Aztec and the Inca empire but by the 15th century when the europeans arrived, the native Americans had spears and arrows while the europeans had gunpowder, horses and Armor and the inca, Aztec and Mayan empires were crushed.
Why was this the case? Why were the native Americans behind europe and asia? The Natives were stuck in the Bronze age but the Europeans were much more superior by the time they landed in the Americas.
The issue here is that you are looking at technology pertaining to a single sphere and applying it universally to entire cultures, when in reality different cultures pursued different avenues of technological development that are often mutually exclusive.
Andean, namely Inka cultures had an incredibly advanced social system. This culture essentially terraformed hill and mountainsides for agricultural use. Their textiles were incredibly detailed and adept at disseminating ideological messages, while their understanding and use of metalwork was geared toward the production of specific alloys to achieve very specific looks and shines (for the Inka, this pertained to the dissemination of ideology through spectacle - the shine impresses people during ritual ceremony).
It’s not that they were behind, it’s that they were different. You could say that while Europeans pursued a technological sphere focused around the increasing lethality and efficiency for weapons and to perform work, Andean cultures pursued an Avenue focused on mastery over the incredibly unique ecological environment they occupied. I am no ecologist, but the Andes possess a stunning variation in environment, from incredibly dry coastal deserts to fertile mountain valleys, all within such a small area. These people did not have a consistent or mainstream method of production across their empire, but had highly localized production that would be widely disseminated throughout the empire. A Eurocentric lens might see Andean culture as primitive, but this is reductive - the Inka for instance had one of the most advanced colonial systems regarding settlement of near-inhospitable environments, maintained by one of the most complex and rigorous corvée systems in the world.
Where European technological advancement was geared toward allowing a single individual to perform as much work as possible, Andean tech was social based and tried to include as many people in a single task as possible, informing political and cultural cohesion. Andean peoples were concerned with mastering their environment, whereas European peoples may have been more concerned with competing with their neighbors for resources/land/populations.
I’m afraid I’ve been a bit hasty in composing this, so feel free to shoot me any questions. Mind you, I am merely a student of art history. Here is my source:
Heather Lechtman, “Technologies of Power: the Andean Case” in Configurations of Power. Henderson and Netherly, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993.