[quiescant_dodo]

> Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards.

The Maya and Aztec had writing in the form of hieroglypics. The Inca had persistent communication via Quipu's rope knots.

(I learned this from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ which is a phenomenal book. I haven't done other research, though, so maybe the book isn't a good source.)

[jcranmer]

Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas.

The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common than logographic components, but I'm not certain). Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging.

The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system, largely capable of only recording proper nouns (predominantly place names); most of the writing would instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period) appears to have never used any form of writing, despite having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in full florescence of their writing systems.

Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether they can convey enough information to be considered writing is unknown.

Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English or any European language, but he did have access to European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee letterforms look like Latin ones but have completely different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers.

[grzm]

Thanks for the reference. Sounds like an interesting book! I see Charles Mann has a couple of books. Have you read 1493 also?

- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491

- 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9862761-1493

[jcranmer]

It's on my to-read list, but I haven't made time for it yet.

[Grieving]

I assume the person you're responding to is talking more about the aboriginal peoples of the United States.

GG&S is an interesting book, but extremely conjectural and ideological, and not well-sourced. Some of the evidence is distorted. Off the top of my head, he reproduces a table of grain yields, and when tracking down his sources for this, it turns out that he's omitted results that contradict his theory. The reasoning is sometimes shaky or circular: 'Why do we know X wasn't domesticable? Because it wasn't domesticated.' Etc. etc. I don't find his theory holds up particularly well.