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Originally Posted by ausjulius
i think also one has to look at the method of warfare neither the american settlers nor the indians were engaged in any heavy combat or in any large organized encounters.. the indians never fourght in organised groups in that area of the americas.. compared to for exsample the indians on the pacific coast and coastal alaskan natives they used very basic tactics and attacked in a individual manner.. not using group tactisc or any real manouvers invoiving preorganized plans..
generaly you will find in these cultures they combatants lack body armor and sheilds or have very small sheilds or use the infrequently.
as they are attacking as an single person. they have no orders.. attacking with what weapons they personaly own and in what manner they wish,
i thin armour realy coms when
1, you have a people with a structured ordered society with a class or worriors who can be directed by a chief and armed by his direction and controled by his tactics like people of the pacific in micronesia and polynesia western alaska .. or you have to have a seditary people producing agriculture,, that may not have a sturctured society with a hereditary chief but still use things like shield and body armor.. like in papua new guinea, they are able to store in their homes these extra and infrequiently used equipment.. and they fight in a group and not as an individuial with "fighting plans" and "drilling" before the battle.
i think you could say the plains indians culture was buy the time of european contact no longer at this state. no doubt in the past they had a far more complexed social structure and i do seem to recall some finds in the mid west of some form of body armor from earlier times when they were less mobile.
but by the time horses became common i think the lost many of these habits as they didnt suit their lifestyle and style of combat.
it can be seen in central and south america , the settled peoples having body armor and the nomadic ones mostly not having this..
i thin it is obvious why the "cowboys" of the day didnt have body armor.. it was becasue maybe in their whole life they would never shoot one person or be in one gun battle . and elk and bison dont have guns.
the most people were never in raging gun battles every week or fighting off bands of indians..
if one wants to see the real wild "west" then northen brazil or southern mexico would be exsamples of rely wild frontiers..
and in both these places body armor was actualy used up till the 1890s.. as were swords and spears..
one an other note....
one always has to remember how many millions of starving mouths expired in the life of those young ladies so they could have those jewels in their corsets , as they hardly worked for them  |
Hi Ausjulius,
I was thinking through a long list of examples, and my end conclusion is that there's not a great correlation between who's carrying armor and defensive weapons and the social structures you're talking about here. I keep thinking about those shields the Australian Aborigines carried, to cite one example.
A couple of complicating factors play in thinking about this:
1. Social structure. The Indians of 1491 appear to have been more organized than the ones of, say, 1800, or 1850. Epidemics took most of them out. Without getting into the politics of this, we all need to specify what time period we're talking about for any location, to talk about what the level of social complexity was at a place and time.
2. Social complexity may not add up to military might. An example: I'm reading a book about Estanislao (
link), a California Indian who entered the Mission system in 1821, rebelled with 400 followers in 1827, beat the Spanish in several battles, and reconciled in 1829, only to die in 1838 from either smallpox or malaria. Among other things, he built several working forts based on what he learned from the Spanish. Another thing is that he was quite possibly the origin of the Zorro myth. As a devout Christian, he would trap the Spanish, carve an S in their chest, and let them go with no loss of life, at least in the early battles. The last battles got pretty bloody on both sides.
The basic point is that if you're doing a cursory reading of the ethnographic literature, the California Indians weren't politically sophisticated and didn't build forts, use complex weapons or wear armor. However, it took one of them only six years to figure out how to beat the Spaniards at their own game. People can change very rapidly, especially when exposed to new ideas.
I think it boils down to a couple of questions.
1. Can someone make useful armor? This is a technical question, a logistical question, and (in some societies) a financial question.
2. Is it worth making and using that armor? This depends on things like mobility, survivability in the armor when not in combat (from wounds, heat stroke, drowning, etc), and the general trade off between how good the armor is vs. the problems with using it in a particular situation.
Generalizing beyond these two questions is problematic, IMHO.
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