You are talking about a culture with more knowledge of wood than you and I. You are talking about a culture who uses fire more than you and I.
I love Native American Culture as much as anyone but their knowledge largely relied on the "just enough to get by and not an ounce more". There was no need to do more.
And I say that with no disrespect to them.
Compare what other cultures have done with wood, stone and fire and you'll understand.
I'm just getting caught up on this conversation, but I definitely think some aspects of native culture have been getting overly dismissed here. I'm all about science, and the extent of modern knowledge is amazing. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that a sizeable percentage of natives knew more about wood than you or I (that's not to say they knew more than all the knowledge contained in modern libraries and scientific journals).
'Largely just enough to get by' is a terrible description of their knowledge. A life of hunting and gathering is hard, but modern people have many misguided ideas about it. Native societies had actually had a good deal more leisure time than the white agricultural societies that lived alongside them. This was the seed of a lot of racism. White people saw them as lazy, but the native life simply wasn't as hard as the farming life. Also, they were better fed through the winter, with white settlements often having to rely on the native's help and knowledge to avoid starving.
I'm not saying they knew more than we do now, probably not, but science is still learning from their knowledge of the environments they lived in and we can only guess at how much knowledge has been lost. The extent of their knowledge on plants was amazing, but every now and again you come across an example that defies reason. Like when combining 2 plants in to a drink in a specific way has a strong effect, but individually either plant has no effect at all. Without foreknowledge, looking around at all the thousands of species of plants, it boggles the mind to imagine how they discovered that. Were they trying the millions of different combinations of plants, and remembering the millions of different results of each test without a writing system, recording the injuries and deaths from the bad combinations, until they found something good? When a native was asked how they could possibly know astronomically unlikely things like that, the native looked confused and replied, "Do the plants not sing to you?" I don't believe in mystical powers or anything, and I have no idea what that answer means. But I think it's clear that they had a connection with the land that a modern person can scarcely imagine.
What they could do with stone? Look at the Incan walls of Cuzco for some of the most amazing stone work possibly ever, anywhere. I can't even begin to understand how they did it. Tellingly, some of the most impressed people today are modern stone masons. Contemporary accounts of the Aztecs are replete with the marvels of their craft. The conquistadors said their gold work would challenge the best gold smiths of Spain, and when the Spanish got Aztec carpenters to help to build Spanish war ships, the conquistadors remarked that they were probably the highest quality Spanish ships ever made. The first conquistadors write about feeling like they were in an alien fantasy land from some fanciful novel, dotted with temples that they say were equal in splendor to European cathedrals. This was before the Spanish set about destroying the culture, which they succeeded at to a horrifying degree.
But the various cultures of the Americas were as different from each other as they were from the Europeans, and obviously the nomads of the North American plains lived in a very different way from the civilizations of Central and South America. But North America had impressive civilizations too, ones we know very little about today. Civilizations that had come and gone before the Europeans had a chance to see.
But even just the North American cultures the Europeans did see. Particularly the earlier accounts, before European disease and war took their toll. The crafts are not the works of a people who are living on the edge of survival. These things took serious time and skill, as I'm sure you will agree, and elaborately decorated objects work about as well as non-decorated ones. Not an ounce more than what is necessary? Quite the contrary.
Anyway, bit of a side debate, but I'd feel bad not contributing to it.
