t is enough to say that they had laws grounded in customs, and that these customary systems of laws served such peoples as the Cherokee very well. Indian achievements in science and technology were considerable, and even now receive respectful study by historians of architecture, astronomy, and agriculture. The Mayan calendar was at least as accurate as calendars devised by Europeans, and Mayan astronomical observations are sophisticated and accurate enough to be used by astronomers and historians of astronomy to test the work and confirm the observations of European astronomers. And yet, by the time the Europeans first came to the Americas, no indigenous American society or culture had yet developed the use of wheeled vehicles. (The Indians' failure to discover the wheel is not a measure of scientific, technological, or cultural "backwardness." All it proves is that different societies pursue e science and technology in different ways, and that technological insights such as the wheel are not inevitable.) Indian economies were shaped by their geography, climate, and ecology. As noted above, some Indian peoples were primarily hunters and grazers, while others were primarily agricultural, and still others possessed complex, sophisticated, and successful mixed economies that rivaled European economic systems.One last point: Again, all these areas remain controversial in the extreme, implicating as they do such disputes as whether Indian peoples are "primitive" and whether the concept of "primitive" is useful or even appropriate in analyzing a different people's culture and way of life. Further, as we see in essay II, a complicating factor in the study of the Americas before the arrival of European explorers and settlers is the idea -- widely circulated and discussed during the 500the anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the "New World" -- that the Europeans dispossessed the rightful inhabitants of these continents, and that all later Amer...
