I’m honored to present a guest post from Andres Michel Amezcua (Quezaltcoalt), Bilingual Interpreter at American Translators Association, an expert on Mesoamerica and its various indigenous nations and cultures.
Why didn’t the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica have wheeled transport? They had a vibrant commercial economy, with lots of long-distance trade, periodic marketplaces, and professional merchants. They had two types of money. But they didn’t use wheeled carts.
The surprising thing is that the Mesoamericans DID invent the wheel. They made wheeled toys – mostly small clay animals with holes in the legs for an axle and wheels. These were most abundant in sites of the Toltec period (AD 900-1100), including Tula in central Mexico.
When the Spanish arrived from Europe in the sixteenth century they were astounded at the remarkable skills exhibited by the architects, builders and craftsmen of the ‘New World’. The calendar developed by the ancient Maya was more accurate than the calendar in use throughout Europe and the medical system in place among the residents of Mesoamerica was superior to that of the Spanish.
Yet, for all the advanced thinking, there was no utilitarian wheel; no carts, no wagons, no potter’s wheel. Still the concept of the wheel was known throughout Mesoamerica.
Archeologists have recovered numerous wheeled toys, very much like those still made today for children. These toys were what we would call “pull toys” and they were generally made of fired clay in the form of an animal (real or imagined) standing on a platform supported by four ceramic wheels. A loop for the pull string was usually made around the neck or head of the creature.
And yet, while the idea of the wheel was in place there were no wheeled vehicles.
Oddly enough, the Maya built roads, or more correctly, causeways. These roads, called sacbeob meaning white roads were constructed of limestone and paved with natural lime cement called sascab. Often as wide as ten to twelve feet and raised between a foot or so to as much as seven or eight feet above the ground, the sacbeob connected various areas of settlement. The sacbeob at one Maya site (Coba) in the Yucatan of Mexico connects several major architectural groups, the longest running in an almost perfect straight line for over sixty miles! Archaeologists have found what may have been stone rollers used to compact the road bed during construction.
But no wheels.
While it is certainly true that the Maya did not possess the potter’s wheel, they did make use of a device called the k’abal. This was a wooden disk that rested on a smooth board between the potter’s feet. Spun by feet, the k’abal was not unlike the potter’s wheel that had been in use in the Old World for over five thousand years.
Still, there was no conventional wheel.
Perhaps the closest the Maya came to a utilitarian wheel was the spindle whorl.
In ancient times the Maya wove cotton garments in much the same way as they do today. Cotton was spun into thread, using as a spindle a narrow pointed stick about a foot long, weighted near the lower end with a ceramic disk called a spindle whorl. Acting as a fly-wheel, it gave balance to the stick which was twirled with one hand while the cotton was fed by the other to the top of the stick. The twisting motion produced the thread which was then sent to the loon for weaving. Cotton material is still being produced in this way by Maya groups in several parts of today Mexico and Guatemala. Some scholars believe the first wheeled toys were made with spindle whorls and spindle sticks as wheels and axles.
Why, then, were the Maya and other native populations without carts or wagons? Certainly they had the concept, so why did they transported everything on someone’s back?
The answer probably lies in the fact that there were no animals around suitable to pull a wagon or cart, no beast of burden. Horses and burros were unknown in Mesoamerica. Without draft animals a cart is not particularly useful. Then too. the area in which the Maya lived, for example, did not lend itself to road construction and that fact lives on until this very day. Rural areas are more easily accessed by foot or along narrow trails than by car or truck. Streams and rivers were the highways of the Maya, with extensive trade and commerce carried out by fleets of canoes.
Hope this partially answers the mystery of no wheel.
Sources: Diehl, Richard A. and Margaret Mandeville 1987 Tula and Wheeled Animal Effigies in Mesoamerica. Antiquity 61: 239-246. Linn?, Sigvald 1951 A Wheeled Toy from Guerrero, Mexico. Ethnos 16. Stocker, Terry, Barbara Jackson, and Harold Riffell 1986 Wheeled Figurines from Tula, Hidalgo, Mexico. Mexicon 8 (4): 69-72.
For the original post and more information, you are invited to visit Andres Michel Amezcua’s Facebook page Andres Michel Amezcua (Quezaltcoalt)
I was thinking that the wheel would not have had much utility without a beast-of-burden more robust than a human being. They did remarkably well without it, though.
Absolutely! The main reason it was not used widely, I’d assume 🙂
Thanks for a great and informative article! Came here after reading about the latest Lidar discoveries in the Guatemalan jungle.
James – London, UK
Thank you for your interest and your comment, James.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask here or email me.
Sincerily,
Zoe Saadia 🙂
It would seem logical to me that folks who had knowledge of the wheel, as the Mayans’ use in toys would indicate, would use that simple tool when and wherever it seemed appropriate, and this would include transportation. I’m afraid I find fault with the dogma that they did NOT have the wheel for use in transportation. While we can find evidence that a civilization HAD something, how does one find evidence that a civilization did NOT HAVE something? Lack of suitable beasts of burden would support the notion of, at the most, their limited use of the wheel, but it does not support the absolute zero use of the wheel. Hand carts are being used, or have been used, around the world for millennia where there are good roads, bad roads, or no roads at all. The archeological tenet that the Mayans absolutely did NOT have the wheel for transportation purposes seems unsupportable. Perhaps they did not, but it would seem more likely that they had at least limited use of the wheel for transportation, but we have, as yet, no archeological evidence of it.
It is a very interesting point you make, Mike, and I can’t help but agree with your point. Maybe we, indeed, just lack the evidence of the limited use, as, like you pointed out, the concept of wheel in itself most definitely existed throughout Mesoamerica at least.
I wish we had more evidence than that!
My thoughts:
Clearly they had access to the wheel, but what good would it do them for transportation?
Imagine the concept being introduced…the conversation goes something like this:
“Hey, I have an idea…let’s put wheels on a cart and use it to carry things so we can make our job easier!”, says Maya Uno.
“Like the kids toys? How does that help?”, asks Maya Dos.
“Well, we could push the cart, or pull it…and we wouldn’t need to carry it around on our backs.”, points out Uno.
“I suppose…”, says Dos hesitantly, “What about the jungle? How do we get a cart through the trails. It’s hard enough to cut our way through with a machete on foot. It grows back pretty fast.”
“True, we would need to make wider roads and maintain them. But, think of how much more we could carry in a single trip!”, Uno exclaims.
Dos considers a moment, then says “I think we could just make a few extra trips and it would be less effort. What about the fact that we live in a mountain range? Wouldn’t wheels be problematic for pushing things uphill or trying to manage downhill roads? I mean, sure we could move a lot more stuff at once, but we couldn’t control it with just two of us, and the added weight of the cart just makes hills worse.”
Uno falls silent, unable to counter this line of reasoning. After a long pause, “We could get more people to help, or use animals…”
Dos hands Uno a sack and says, “Let’s go. With more people or llamas, we wouldn’t need wheels. We could just carry more in less trips anyway. Why do you have to make things so complicated?”
Uno, “…”
They had the wheel. They just didn’t have any viable use for it on vehicles.
Hi William,
I would say it is the best and possibly the most correct summary of the topic 🙂
(and the most entertaining as well :D)
Thank you for your comment,
Cheers,
Zoe Saadia
In my opinion the the theory of lacking beasts is incomplete. Yeah, pushing a 200+ Kg cart uphill is kind of unpractical, but still for small loads it would be feasible. Rikishas for instance: a small flat plattaform mouted on two axed wheels to transport people; not to heavy and easy to conceive.
Another person commented in a forum that not the “invention” of the wheel per se, but its usability came around 4 millenia BC, when metal tools started being produced. Such tools allowed to improve physical aspect like frection and precision. People were not able to make a good fitting of the wheels to the axes for lacking of technology and such tools to refine these proccess and aspects.
This explanation seems to perfectly complement the first one about the lacking of beast power.
It’s an interesting point, Josh. Thank you!
Pre-contact MExico had a lively industry concerning metallurgy, but yes, they did not seem to work with iron and other hard metals, specializing in copper, bronze (less wide-spread), gold and such. So yes, maybe the lack of iron made the difference in the case of wheeled vehicles.
Thank you for your comment! 🙂
So… I attended an informal lecture, more than 20 years ago, somewhere in California, and I’m not sure about the credentials of the speaker, however the presentation was specifically about this. It was fascinating. The presenter showed several slides of toys and examples proving that the concept and usefulness of the wheel was not unknown THROUGHOUT the Americas (North, Central and South), just as this article has.
His argument for the lack of use of the wheel in daily life in the Americas, was NOT because of the lack of animals, because in North America the native people used dogs to pull their tepee poles, and llamas in South America prior to the conquest.
His argument or theory, was that the the shape of the wheel- a CIRCLE, was so sacred to them, throughout all the Americas, i.e.- the shape of the SUN,- source of life, (Aztec calendar, medicine-wheels of North America, etc), so sacred they would rather “hoof it” than put themselves above or desecrate the sacred Circle ; perhaps in the same way many Christians do not allow their Bible to touch the ground, or how Americans don’t want their flag to touch the ground.
Anyway, I found this argument rather interesting & it made a lot of sense to me, but I have never heard it elsewhere or since then.
Thank you for your comment, JR. It’s an interesting theory that I also never heard before. Not certain if the shape of a circle could have been sacred to all nations and people around this hemisphere, but it is certainly another possible direction to research as well.
Thank you for sharing! 🙂