Farmerman, I agree with just about everything in your most recent post, above. Just one thing, however. I see the wheel as a red herring in this situation. The Mesoamericans understood the use of the wheel as a motive aid. Tiny wheels that turn were used on children's toys. (For a discussion of this, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.) The one overwhelming reason why they never made, say, carriages or war chariots with wheels is that they had no use for the wheel in this capacity. They had no draft animals for pulling such conveyances. On the mountain roads which they used, pack animals (the llama in the Andes, dogs in Mexico) or human slaves with back-packs were far more efficient means of transportation. They undoubtedly used the principle of the wheel in moving the large slabs of stone in building their pyramids; i.e., they must have been rolled on logs or some similar method. We tend to focus on the wheel only because it is so standard a device in Eurasian societies that we assume its use must be more or less universal. You need a horse, a mule, a water buffalo for the wheel to be useful. In the type of irrigated farming they did, even the wheel-barrow, pushed by humans, would not have been too terribly useful.
(Edited once for typos)
Farmerman,
....I don't know how to do the link thing. I was thinking if I gave you the titles of the books, and told you to go to Amazon.com, you would be able to get there your self...My bad.... As for the rest of it, I understand where you are coming, believe me I do. I won't bother you about it anymore, in the name of peace.
