Post by Huehuecoyotl on Jan 3, 2016 12:28:41 GMT
Renewed Petsiroò - Agriculture and Technology
By the fall of the South-Wind Empire in the late 7th Century BCE, the day-to-day crafts of farming, metalwork, and animal husbandry had been altered fundamentally since the days of Tseroro. While the big population drop-off in the period in between slowed the rate of new innovations throughout Petsiroò during the 11th and 10th Centuries BCE, the unification of the region under the Empire starting in 878 BCE spurred on technological progress, especially after the fall of Atsadzil.
These dates themselves are something we know as a result of one cultural innovation, the first Petsiroan calendar. The concept of a firm chronicling of the years seems to have come north from the old Otopa lands just after the collapse, and with a few modifications, came into widespread use as the bureaucracies of the new cities were faced with the task of chronicling harvests of the peasants in the countryside. The five-season model, based upon the basic climatic seasons of southern Petsiroò, begins the year with the vernal equinox and the beginning of the wildflower blooms, and splits summer in two, parting the year into five roughly 70-day-long periods, with a few ritual days not belonging to any particular season to round out the rest. This calendar, with modifications, would spread through much of the continent, even in places which lacked Petsiroò's seasonal peculiarities.
The chronological regimentation of the harvests throughout the country corresponded both with a great refinement of mathematics, and correspondingly a minor agricultural revolution. Both the concept of a calendar and of the number 0 arrived in Petsiroò, apparently via the trade routes from Nuuyoo, the former in the 11th Century and the latter late in the 8th. The ability of Black Hand monks to work with the newly-refined number system, being the only literate class amongst the population, would see a vast expansion of the earthworks and irrigation networks supporting Petsiroò's agriculture and spark a long tradition of religious leaders being expected to function as civil servants as well. This role would carry downward through the centuries and give rise to some of the most accomplished architects, inventors, and thinkers the continent would ever know.
Here and now, however, the boon of their efforts in the dry Petsiroan lands would be to vastly improve the harvest output of the region of the following centuries, encouraging the farmers to experiment a bit more with their crops. Hesperidian peppers (genus Capsicum) featured prominently in the new shoots sprouting along the plateau and valley gardens around the Petsiroan cities. Both larger, sweeter fruits, useful as food, and the smaller, spicier variety which became popular as a source of spice, quickly grew in popularity among the farmers of the region, spreading from south to north.
At the same time, one of the local breeds of juniper (J. osteosperma) was first being welcomed into controlled groves and orchards alongside the crop fields. The sweet, berry-like cones of the tree had long been prized in Petsiroò, and as wild stands of juniper were depleted by expanding farmland and cities, it became necessary to begin extensive replanting to keep it from vanishing from the inhabited regions altogether. Such was the anxious demand for a solution to the receding juniper forests that the Emperor himself was forced to address it with a decree in 699 BCE, offering out written contracts to landholding families to entitle them with choice tracts of land to serve as juniper groves protected by the state. Some of these contracts would remain in force until as late as the 8th Century CE. The new controlled groves would provide a minor supplementary food source as the berries were selectively bred to be plumper and more plentiful, and the trees (already a bit runty so far as junipers go) to generally grow shorter. The needle-like leaves as well as the berries would also be used in tea and alcohol, and the wood from whatever trees were occasionally cut down could be used in utility and construction, or mulched and mixed with uurung dung as a useful fertilizer.
As they worked on all this, the farmers had new tools in their hands, something owed to the metalworkers of the cities who had perfected at last the independent discovery of a useful alloy first created in Egypt more than 2,000 years earlier—bronze. Without access to tin, the ancient Petsiroans had to instead discover that a dust created as a byproduct of copper smelting, today known to be arsenic, was capable of strengthening that metal into something which would revolutionize Columbia's tools and weaponry. This process would not come into wide use until around 800 BCE, so the famous ballads of the Battle of Atsadzil and their references to bronze spears and swords are surely anachronistic. At the time, obsidian was still the most popular implement in sharp weapons.
Nonetheless, by 700 BCE, Lhiitsézh and Atsadzil had become important centers of bronze production, supplying the Empire with bronze hatchets and cutting tools for its peasants, and a formidable array of weaponry for the Imperial armies which would drive the last, ill-fated South-Wind campaign of the late 7th Century BCE. As well, the expanding use of this metal saw the invention of the first plows in the uplands, where the farmers learned to harness a pointed wedge of metal to an uurung's back in order to till the soil much more efficiently than the hand-powered hoes then common in the area.
This period of discovery and innovation is sometimes called the Petsiroan Bronze Age, and is considered to have lasted about 900 to 622 BCE.
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[1] - Picture by Doug Pensinger, found by the author here.
