Let's Talk About Gaul

[Boris Gudenuf]

Based on the context, when Ed Beach mentioned 40 civilizations, to me it sounded like he was talking abstractly about Civ5.

Never heard Ed's original comment directly, just a 'quote' from someone else. I remain optimistic: there are too many 'standard' Civ entries still unrepresented in Civ VI: Carthage, Byzantium, Ottomans, Eastern North American Native, Inca, etc. While they Might pick them all up in pairs in DLCs, I think I'm safe assuming at least one more Expansion Pack.

 

[The Kingmaker]

Never heard Ed's original comment directly, just a 'quote' from someone else. I remain optimistic: there are too many 'standard' Civ entries still unrepresented in Civ VI: Carthage, Byzantium, Ottomans, Eastern North American Native, Inca, etc. While they Might pick them all up in pairs in DLCs, I think I'm safe assuming at least one more Expansion Pack.

I'm confident we'll get a second XP. There's been an XP2 for every Civ game going all the way back to Civ2! What I'm hopeful for is something beyond that. More DLC? XP3? Bring it on.

 

[Morningcalm]

The second expansion is unquestionably already in the works (or at least being considered) by Firaxis. The real question is whether there's additional DLC which they will offer that gets Steam ratings quite as stinky as the ones we have for Civ VI vanilla DLC.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The second expansion is unquestionably already in the works (or at least being considered) by Firaxis. The real question is whether there's additional DLC which they will offer that gets Steam ratings quite as stinky as the ones we have for Civ VI vanilla DLC.

Well, I can think of two DLCs that would be almost No Brainers:

Rumble in the Jungle:
A DLC featuring the Maya and Siam, with buffs to other jungle-themed Civs like the Khmer, Aztecs, and Indonesia, reflecting the exciting new Lidar finds in Cambodia and Guatemala that are rapidly revising everything we thought we knew about population densities and development in those areas.

Navel of the World
A DLC with the Ottomans and Byzantium, which could be tied into two new Scenarios:
End of the Middle Ages: with Spain, France, and Germany on one side, Ottomans, Arabia, and Persia on the other, and Byzantium in the middle - a Crusades Scenario, really, but that word is anathema in a large part of the world nowadays.
Silk Roads and Silk Purses: A Cross Asia scenario with China, Mongolia, India, Scythia, Ottomans, Georgia, and Byzantium all conniving to control the richest trade routes in the world.

 

[Morningcalm]

I don't think a jungle-focused DLC pack would quite be likely, but certainly a pack with either Siam or the Maya would be welcome (perhaps with a scenario). An End of the Middle Ages DLC pack with say, four civs, would be quite exciting, but generally their DLC has been more piecemeal (it would be cool to see proportionally more affordable larger DLCs though--might be more popular than the $5 per civ pack DLC thus far).

 

[AnonymousSpeed]

Rumble in the Jungle:
A DLC featuring the Maya and Siam, with buffs to other jungle-themed Civs like the Khmer, Aztecs, and Indonesia, reflecting the exciting new Lidar finds in Cambodia and Guatemala that are rapidly revising everything we thought we knew about population densities and development in those areas.

I can't believe you forgot Brazil, the civilization who's ability is the Amazon rainforest.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I can't believe you forgot Brazil, the civilization who's ability is the Amazon rainforest.

Didn't forget them, but all that Brazil has ever done with the rainforest is chop it down: we now have reason to believe that more ancient Civilizations like the Khmer and Maya managed to thrive in it instead of despite it, and it's that unique ability to manage a given landscape and terrain that I'd like to see displayed in the game. Something similar with Civ-specific Landscape/Terrain Uniques could be done with Desert terrain or Mountain/Hill terrain and several Civilizations as well, but the Jungle is in the scientific news lately...

 

[The Kingmaker]

Very happy to report that GAUL IS IN!

 

[Zaste]

Didn't forget them, but all that Brazil has ever done with the rainforest is chop it down: we now have reason to believe that more ancient Civilizations like the Khmer and Maya managed to thrive in it instead of despite it, and it's that unique ability to manage a given landscape and terrain that I'd like to see displayed in the game. Something similar with Civ-specific Landscape/Terrain Uniques could be done with Desert terrain or Mountain/Hill terrain and several Civilizations as well, but the Jungle is in the scientific news lately...

The Maya destroyed all the rainforest, which caused a drought that lasted decades ending their civilization. This is what archaeologists believe to be the cause of the fall of the Maya. They used the wood to cook the stones to buid the temples until there was no forest close.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The Maya destroyed all the rainforest, which caused a drought that lasted decades ending their civilization. This is what archaeologists believe to be the cause of the fall of the Maya. They used the wood to cook the stones to buid the temples until there was no forest close.

For some reason my Mac isn't allowing me to access your attached file. Can you give me another link or access to it? My understanding (from articles/journals several years old, admittedly) was that the Mayan destruction of the rainforest was in response to a 200 year drought that caused them to expand agricultural lands to try to make up for meagre crops per acre due to lack of consistent rainfall. All made worse by the fact that the Mayans got virtually all their water from rainfall directly or indirectly, so when the rains stopped they were driven to extreme measures to try to survive.

The entire question of the 'demise of the Mayan civilization' has gone through several transformations, but the drought theory or variations on it has been around since the 1930s, along with depletion of topsoil, depletion of forest cover, epidemic diseases, or foreign conquest, with my understanding that the last two have the least evidence at the moment, but with intense debate on-going as to which of the others and in what combinations they contributed to the stresses on the Mayan cities and polities.

 

[Zaste]

For some reason my Mac isn't allowing me to access your attached file. Can you give me another link or access to it? My understanding (from articles/journals several years old, admittedly) was that the Mayan destruction of the rainforest was in response to a 200 year drought that caused them to expand agricultural lands to try to make up for meagre crops per acre due to lack of consistent rainfall. All made worse by the fact that the Mayans got virtually all their water from rainfall directly or indirectly, so when the rains stopped they were driven to extreme measures to try to survive.

The entire question of the 'demise of the Mayan civilization' has gone through several transformations, but the drought theory or variations on it has been around since the 1930s, along with depletion of topsoil, depletion of forest cover, epidemic diseases, or foreign conquest, with my understanding that the last two have the least evidence at the moment, but with intense debate on-going as to which of the others and in what combinations they contributed to the stresses on the Mayan cities and polities.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/06oct_maya
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...to-deforestation-and-climate-change-30863026/

The link to the articles and studies are in those sites. The inconsistent rainfall is the main cause. Why would you expand your agricultural land if you don't have water? You can change your way of life to consume more fish or live
nomadic life like a tribe of Native Americans did after a long drought. I forgot the tribes's name. Usually people would move to another place to live which i belive they did after some time.The forests brings moisture to the continent which helps to make rain. If they cut so the rain will be less frequent.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/06oct_maya
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...to-deforestation-and-climate-change-30863026/

The link to the articles and studies are in those sites. The inconsistent rainfall is the main cause. Why would you expand your agricultural land if you don't have water? You can change your way of life to consume more fish or live
nomadic life like a tribe of Native Americans did after a long drought. I forgot the tribes's name. Usually people would move to another place to live which i belive they did after some time.The forests brings moisture to the continent which helps to make rain. If they cut so the rain will be less frequent.

Thank you very much for the links. They confirm, though, that while this is a very likely explanation for the Mayan Situation, as originally hypothesized by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book, it is still consideredc theory. I happen to agree with you that it is an extremely plausible theory, especially since virtually the entire Mayan water supply was sourced from rainwater, so anything that reduced the seasonal rains was potentially fatal to their urban concentrations.

And, by the way, per your comment, an unknown but significant percentage of the Mayan population did turn to a 'nomadic' life, in the sense that they migrated out of the original 'Mayan Heartland' as it succumbed to the drought. Unfortunately, when the basic problem is lack of water, fish are not an alternative food source!

What is also fascinating about this is that here the normal "Mesoamerican Center of American Civilization" is turned on its head: like the Mayans, the northeastern North American natives (Algonkian and Iroquoian both) also relied on maize as their basic crop, but they added beans and squash in a mutually-sustaining and soil-renewing "Holy Trinity of American Agriculture" as one agronomist called it. And they practiced more controlled burning to clear the underbrush out of the forests while leaving the tree canopy largely intact: all in all, a much more sophisticated and sustainable system of agriculture than the 'civilized' Mayans had in Mesoamerica!

 

[Zaarin]

What is also fascinating about this is that here the normal "Mesoamerican Center of American Civilization" is turned on its head: like the Mayans, the northeastern North American natives (Algonkian and Iroquoian both) also relied on maize as their basic crop, but they added beans and squash in a mutually-sustaining and soil-renewing "Holy Trinity of American Agriculture" as one agronomist called it. And they practiced more controlled burning to clear the underbrush out of the forests while leaving the tree canopy largely intact: all in all, a much more sophisticated and sustainable system of agriculture than the 'civilized' Mayans had in Mesoamerica!

A lot of people seriously undervalue how urbanized the Iroquois in particular were.

 

[BuchiTaton]

What is also fascinating about this is that here the normal "Mesoamerican Center of American Civilization" is turned on its head: like the Mayans, the northeastern North American natives (Algonkian and Iroquoian both) also relied on maize as their basic crop, but they added beans and squash in a mutually-sustaining and soil-renewing "Holy Trinity of American Agriculture" as one agronomist called it. And they practiced more controlled burning to clear the underbrush out of the forests while leaving the tree canopy largely intact: all in all, a much more sophisticated and sustainable system of agriculture than the 'civilized' Mayans had in Mesoamerica!

Wait this system is Mesomaerican in origin, in fact the mesoamerican Milpa is the older more rich and diverse on species version.
The are a big problem in supossed that the population density plus the environmental load of the more stratified classical mayan society is equivalent, also is to suppose that the soil or the climate of the tropical rainforest is the same of the template forest.

Mayans were building cities with modern California´s average population density and monumental palaces and temples on a less resilent enviroment centuries before this system reached northeastern USA. These people faced different social requeriments on different environments.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Wait this system is Mesomaerican in origin, in fact the mesoamerican Milpa is the older more rich and diverse on species version.
The are a big problem in supossed that the population density plus the environmental load of the more stratified classical mayan society is equivalent, also is to suppose that the soil or the climate of the tropical rainforest is the same of the template forest.

Mayans were building cities with modern California´s average population density and monumental palaces and temples on a less resilent enviroment centuries before this system reached northeastern USA. These people faced different social requeriments on different environments.

We've rather stopped Talking About Gaul here, but I would point out that the population density in northeastern North America was nowhere near as 'light' as everybody once thought and most people still think. European fishermen, who were working the Grand Banks off Newfoundland over a decade before the Pilgrims arrived in New England, reported that the New England coast from Cape Cod north was "an uninterrupted series of settlements" - a more dense population than that coast shows now, at least outside of the Boston urban core. And modern examination has shown that the Native American Three Sisters agricultural system of maize, beans and squash produced up to 6 times the calories/acre of the European wheat mono-crop system, and so could support a very dense population - more so, in fact, than the system imported from Europe by the Colonists.

Now to bring it back around to Gaul, while everyone talks about the Gauls metallurgical prowess, the most fascinating aspect of their culture, to me, is that in just a few centuries before Caesar's conquest, they had adopted agriculture as their primary food source, and also developed urban concentrations that exceeded anything else north of Rome or Athens, and connected their urban centers with well-surveyed roads with precisely measured distances (and 'road signs' marking those distances, which the Romans quickly adopted post-conquest)
And in adopting agriculture they also had technologies relating to horse tack and saddlery, cart and wagon and wheel-making all superior to Rome's, and invented and adopted the first heavy iron plows to make agriculture possible in heavy northern European soils (Yes, and gthey had them about 900 years before they were supposedly 'invented' in the Middle Ages!).

Very much like the Northeastern Iriquoian/Agonkians and the Mesoamerican agricultural technologies, the Gauls had adopted the Mesopotamian/Mediterranean Basin agricultural technologies and metal-working technologies and improved on them in many ways. The tragedy in both cases was that further individualistic development was cut short by foreign conquest so we will never know how far and in what directions they might have gone.

 

[BuchiTaton]

Agree about that every year we know better about a way more populated pre-european Americas, with most areas under significative human management to produce abundant food. But also seem to be the case that the population density, social requeriments and environment differences between these american cultural regions could explain better the collapse of the classical mayans considering they developed this systems centuries before. We can say that the success of their agriculture was their own demise when they grew to big and complex to resist a long period of climatic anormality. Even after all these they grew again to be one of the most populous groups of native american peoples both at european contact and right now.

We must need to ask how was that the people of the more resilent enviroment and bigger on area Eastern USA failed to sustain their demographic dominance even before the later industrial revolution and massive inmigration to USA. The early collapse by disease of Mississippian and Eastern cultures after the early spanish expeditions dont put them far from the epidemics that devastated Mesoamerica. Maybe spanish were not as bad to manage the native population or in fact the mesoamerican agriculture, society and institutions were stronger to rebuilt themselves, while ENA native cultures were more fragile and the english more invasive?

Even more we must remember the civilizations from the Central Andes Coast, people like the Moche and Nazca that were turning green the coastal desert to sustain monument building warring city states. Also the peoples of the Amazon and their "terra preta" that now confirms early spanish and portuguese chronicles about dense populations on an environment that now is seem as unsustainable for long term agriculture. These two civilizations are a real thing about be adapted to built civilization on difficult biomes, sadly they are unlikely to be added to civ series.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

. . . We must need to ask how was that the people of the more resilent enviroment and bigger on area Eastern USA failed to sustain their demographic dominance even before the later industrial revolution and massive inmigration to USA. The early collapse by disease of Mississippian and Eastern cultures after the early spanish expeditions dont put them far from the epidemics that devastated Mesoamerica. Maybe spanish were not as bad to manage the native population or in fact the mesoamerican agriculture, society and institutions were stronger to rebuilt themselves, while ENA native cultures were more fragile and the english more invasive?

Even more we must remember the civilizations from the Central Andes Coast, people like the Moche and Nazca that were turning green the coastal desert to sustain monument building warring city states. Also the peoples of the Amazon and their "terra preta" that now confirms early spanish and portuguese chronicles about dense populations on an environment that now is seem as unsustainable for long term agriculture. These two civilizations are a real thing about be adapted to built civilization on difficult biomes, sadly they are unlikely to be added to civ series.

The answer to the Native American collapse in the face of European pressure has, I think, been answered: the pressure was not from European humans, but from epidemic diseases like small pox and measles that had up to 90% fatality rates among the Native American populations. Even the worst of the 'Old World' pandemics never got above a 50% mortality rate (the infamous 'Black Death' of the 14th century may have gotten up to 50% in places), so this Event was truely catastrophic for the societies involved.
To say that the native cultures without the immense pressure from the diseases was more 'fragile' than the European is simply speculation, because we don't have any other 'test case' of equal severity and magnitude to see how other human cultures would stand up to such pressure. Perhaps the nearest thing to such a test case would be the climactic crisis of the 16th - 17th centuries chronicled in Geoffrey Parker's massive book Global Crisis. In that case, the pressure exerted by repeated catastrophic crop failures was felt across Europe and Asia (and probably Africa, but it is less well-recorded there). It resulted in a far smaller percentage loss of life overall, but did produce regicides from China to England and repeated upheavals in government and society virtually everywhere. IF the actual disruption had been coupled with a 90% loss of population, one could question whether any culture in Asia, Europe, or the Middle East could have survived intact.

But all that is more the subject of an Alternate History novel than actual history. . .

 

[Zaarin]

The answer to the Native American collapse in the face of European pressure has, I think, been answered: the pressure was not from European humans, but from epidemic diseases like small pox and measles that had up to 90% fatality rates among the Native American populations.

And, per Alfred Crosby, not just European diseases but European weeds (a good 60+% of the plant life in the temperate New World is Eurasian in origin) and European animals, both livestock and pests. The combination of disease + weeds + livestock allowed Europeans to virtually replace the Native population in the temperate zone (what Crosby calls the "zone of demographic replacement"), but not in the tropics or in areas where the Native population density was high enough to rebound from disease--namely the Andes and the Valley of Mexico.

100% agree that calling a culture fragile because it can't cope with 90% population loss on top of invasion, mass migration, recurring epidemics, perpetual warfare (both among tribes and between Native Americans and Euroamericans), loss of hunting grounds, and decline in animal populations is rather harsh. I think we should rather stand in awe at the niches the Iroquois, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Cree, Five Civilized Tribes, and others were successfully able to carve for themselves in such an environment.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

And, per Alfred Crosby, not just European diseases but European weeds (a good 60+% of the plant life in the temperate New World is Eurasian in origin) and European animals, both livestock and pests. The combination of disease + weeds + livestock allowed Europeans to virtually replace the Native population in the temperate zone (what Crosby calls the "zone of demographic replacement"), but not in the tropics or in areas where the Native population density was high enough to rebound from disease--namely the Andes and the Valley of Mexico.

100% agree that calling a culture fragile because it can't cope with 90% population loss on top of invasion, mass migration, recurring epidemics, perpetual warfare (both among tribes and between Native Americans and Euroamericans), loss of hunting grounds, and decline in animal populations is rather harsh. I think we should rather stand in awe at the niches the Iroquois, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Cree, Five Civilized Tribes, and others were successfully able to carve for themselves in such an environment.

The Massive Irony of the European botanical invasion of the Americas is that something similar happened in reverse: the advent of maize, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and other American food plants drastically changed diet and cuisine all over the Eurasian world.
Mann, in his book 1493, mentions a Phillippine children's song that lists all the 'familiar' plants that surround the 'happy home' in the Phillippines - the irony being that almost none of the plants are native to the Phillippines, they are imports from the Americas!

 

[Zaarin]

The Massive Irony of the European botanical invasion of the Americas is that something similar happened in reverse: the advent of maize, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and other American food plants drastically changed diet and cuisine all over the Eurasian world.

That's generally how the Columbian Exchange worked: the Europeans got a demographic expansion, the Americas got a demographic collapse; the Europeans got a slew of luxury and staple crops like chocolate and maize, the Americas got weeds like dandelions and broom; the Europeans got syphilis (maybe), the Americas got a litany of deadly diseases.

Mann, in his book 1493, mentions a Phillippine children's song that lists all the 'familiar' plants that surround the 'happy home' in the Phillippines - the irony being that almost none of the plants are native to the Phillippines, they are imports from the Americas!

I recall reading an account in one of my courses about 18th century West Africans refusing to believe that their ancestors hadn't always eating manioc.