Rubber
Years: 1629BCE - 2115
Natural rubber, also called India Rubber or caoutchouc, is an elastomer (an elastic hydrocarbon polymer) that was originally derived from latex, a milky colloid produced by some plants.
The plants would be ‘tapped’, that is, an incision made into the bark of the tree and the sticky, milk colored latex sap collected and refined into a usable rubber.
The purified form of natural rubber is the chemical polyisoprene, which can also be produced synthetically.
Natural rubber is used extensively in many applications and products, as is synthetic rubber.
It is normally very stretchy and flexible and extremely waterproof.
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Early Olmec culture, centered around the San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán site, a simple farming village located on the Rio Chiquito near the coast in southeast Veracruz, had emerged by 1600-1500 BCE.
The earliest evidence for Olmec culture is found at nearby El Manati, a sacrificial bog with artifacts dating to 1600 BCE or earlier.
Sedentary agriculturalists had lived in the area for centuries before San Lorenzo developed into a regional center.
The first Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmec lay many of the foundations for the civilizations that follow.
Among other "firsts,” there is evidence that the Olmec practiced ritual bloodletting and played the Mesoamerican ballgame, hallmarks of nearly every subsequent Mesoamerican society.
The Olmec, whose name means "rubber people" in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, are strong candidates for originating the Mesoamerican ballgame so prevalent among later cultures of the region and used for recreational and religious purposes.
A dozen rubber balls dating to 1600 BCE or earlier have been found in El Manatí, an Olmec sacrificial bog ten kilometers (six point two miles) east of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan.
These balls predate the earliest ballcourt yet discovered at Paso de la Amada, circa 1400 BCE, although there is no certainty that they were used in the ballgame.
Human sacrifice, particularly in context of the Mesoamerican ballgame, is the major theme of Classic Veracruz art.
This art is rendered with extensive and convoluted banded scrolls that can be seen both on monumental architecture and on portable art, including ceramics and even carved bones.
At least one researcher has suggested that the heads and other features formed by the scrolls are a Classic Veracruz form of pictographic writing.
This scrollwork may have grown out of similar styles found in Chiapa de Corzo and Kaminaljuyu.
In addition to the scrollwork, the architecture is known for its ornate ornamentation, such as that seen on the Pyramid of Niches at El Tajin.
This ornamentation produces dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.
While Classic Veracruz culture shows influences from Teotihuacan and the Maya, neither of these cultures are its direct antecedents.
Instead, the seeds of this culture seems to have come at least in part from the Epi-Olmec culture centers, such as Cerro de las Mesas and La Mojarra.
El Tajín is a prosperous city that eventually controls much of what is now modern Veracruz state.
The city-state is highly centralized, with the city itself having more than fifty ethnicities living here.
Most of the population lives in the hills surrounding the main city, and the city obtains most of its foodstuffs from the Tecolutla, Nautla and Cazones areas.
These fields not only produce staples such as corn and beans but luxury items such as cacao.
One of the panels at the Pyramid of the Niches shows a ceremony being held at a cacao tree.
The religion is based on the movements of the planets, the stars and the Sun and Moon, with the Mesoamerican ballgame and pulque having extremely important parts.
This has led to the building of many pyramids with temples and seventeen ballcourts, more than any other Mesoamerican site.
The city begins to have extensive influence starting around this time, which can be best seen at the neighboring site of Yohualichan, whose buildings show the kinds of niches that define El Tajin.
Evidence of the city’s influence can be seen along the Veracruz Gulf coast to the Maya region and into the high plateau of central Mexico.
At the end of the Classic period, El Tajín survives the widespread social collapse, migrations and destructions that force the abandonment of many population centers at the end of this period.
El Tajín reaches its peak after the fall of Teotihuacan, and conserves many cultural traits inherited from that civilization.
The inhabitants of El Tajín place a marked emphasis on the sacred Mesoamerican ball game, played in ritually significant, elaborately decorated masonry courts.
Maize, unknown outside the New World, is extensively cultivated in all its present forms by the indigenous peoples of North and South America.
Nuclear American peoples, now almost entirely reliant on cultivation, have domesticated hundreds of species of plants for use not only as foods, but also as raw materials (such as pima cotton), as poisons, and as hallucinogens and stimulants.
Domesticated plants and agricultural techniques have gradually spread to other parts of the Americas, although most other New World cultivators, such as those in the tropical forest of South America and in the Southeast and Southwest of North America, continue to supplement cultivation with ancient food-collecting techniques.
At the time of contact between Old World and New, the area of the future United States has a population averaging only about one person per thirteen to twenty-six square kilometers (roughly one person per five to ten square miles).
These indigenous tribes, numbering between one hundred thousand and five million, built their prosperous societies on the foundations of cassava farming, fishing, and inter-island trade.
Gold jewelry, pottery, and various goods were among the treasures they exchanged.
Five caciques, male or female, presided over the well-ordered society on Quisqueya, each serving as a chief, priest, healer, and local legislator.
This land, situated along the north and northeast coast interior, witnessed the lives and endeavors of its native inhabitants.
Christopher Columbus, a forty-year-old Genoese navigator also known as Cristóbal Colón, set his sights on Quisqueya.
Anchoring near present-day Cap-Haïtien on the north coast, he christened the land La Isla Española, or Hispaniola in English.
Tragically, the introduction of European diseases, brutal reprisals, and harsh working conditions led to the devastation of the indigenous population.
By the end of 1513, their numbers will have plummeted to a mere thirty thousand.
It was a time of brave voyagers, uncertain discoveries, and encounters that would forever shape the course of history.
An agreement between the Spanish crown and Columbus sets the terms for the planned three-ship expedition.
The Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria are outfitted in the minor port of Palos.
Juan de la Cosa is the owner and master of the Santa Maria, Columbus's flagship.
Two brothers—Martin Alonzo Pinzon, who receives command of the Pinta, and his younger brother Vicente Yanez Pinzon, who captains the Niña—aid Columbus in recruiting a crew.
The elder Pinzon is probably part owner of both the Pinta and the Niña.
They leave Palos on August 3, 1492, re-rig the Niña in the Canaries, and sail to the west on favorable winds.
Columbus had underestimated the distance; he thought it was about three thousand miles (forty-eight hundred kilometers).
After landing in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, the three ships take on a number of locals, then make their way to Cuba, the largest island in the Antilles archipelago, with some fifty thousand inhabitants.
Reaching the island in two weeks, Columbus lands delegations to seek the court of the emperor of China and gold.
Columbus apparently believes that he has reached the East Indies.
Consequently, he calls the inhabitants of the island Indians, a misnomer still generally used today in labeling the indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South America.
After six weeks in Cuba, Columbus’s expedition sails east to Hispaniola, the most populous of the Antilles, where, at Christmas, the Santa Maria is wrecked near Cap-Haïtien.
Columbus gets his men ashore.
The native Arawaks appear friendly and the Europeans exchange their trade goods for gold.
The Magua, with Guarionex as cacique, is in the farther northeast.
The Xaragua, with Bohechio as cacique, occupies the western plains of present Haiti.
The Higuey, with Cotubanama or Cayacoa as cacique, occupies the easternmost peninsula, Rico.
Columbus finds the Tainos occupied with fighting against the warlike Caribs, who have invaded the eastern part of Hispaniola.
As he will report to his royal sponsors, Columbus takes possession of a large town and names it the City of Navidad.
Pinzon meanwhile abandons Columbus in the Antilles for six weeks, probably to explore Hispaniola for gold and spices.
On Pinzon’s return, Columbus censures him for disobeying orders.
Leaving a garrison of thirty-nine (or twenty-one) men behind in an unfinished fort built from the timbers of his wrecked flagship, Columbus sails for home on the Niña to reveal the New World to the inhabitants of the Old.
As he will write some months later, he takes "by force some of the natives, that from them we might gain some information of what there was in these parts; and so it was that we immediately understood each other, either by words or signs."
He reports cotton growing in the Bahamas.
He also finds the Arawak Indians of the Caribbean smoking tobacco in loosely rolled cigars (a practice documented in the Mayan culture more than two thousand years ago).
Encountering Caribs in eastern Hispaniola, observes the inhabitants using the dried, elastic sap of a wild climbing vine to make soft, resilient playballs; they call this material “cachuchu, ““the wood that weeps.” (The French will later corrupt the name of the material to “caoutchoc”.)
An agreement between the Spanish crown and Columbus sets the terms for the planned three-ship expedition.
The Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria are outfitted in the minor port of Palos.
Juan de la Cosa is the owner and master of the Santa Maria, Columbus's flagship.
Two brothers—Martin Alonzo Pinzon, who receives command of the Pinta, and his younger brother Vicente Yanez Pinzon, who captains the Niña—aid Columbus in recruiting a crew.
The elder Pinzon is probably part owner of both the Pinta and the Niña.
They leave Palos on August 3, 1492, re-rig the Niña in the Canaries, and sail to the west on favorable winds.
Columbus had underestimated the distance; he thought it was about three thousand miles (forty-eight hundred kilometers).
After landing in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, the three ships take on a number of locals, then make their way to Cuba, the largest island in the Antilles archipelago, with some fifty thousand inhabitants.
Reaching the island in two weeks, Columbus lands delegations to seek the court of the emperor of China and gold.
Columbus apparently believes that he has reached the East Indies.
Consequently, he calls the inhabitants of the island Indians, a misnomer still generally used today in labeling the indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South America.
After six weeks in Cuba, Columbus’s expedition sails east to Hispaniola, the most populous of the Antilles, where, at Christmas, the Santa Maria is wrecked near Cap-Haïtien.
Columbus gets his men ashore.
The native Arawaks appear friendly and the Europeans exchange their trade goods for gold.
The Magua, with Guarionex as cacique, is in the farther northeast.
The Xaragua, with Bohechio as cacique, occupies the western plains of present Haiti.
The Higuey, with Cotubanama or Cayacoa as cacique, occupies the easternmost peninsula, Rico.
Columbus finds the Tainos occupied with fighting against the warlike Caribs, who have invaded the eastern part of Hispaniola.
As he will report to his royal sponsors, Columbus takes possession of a large town and names it the City of Navidad.
Pinzon meanwhile abandons Columbus in the Antilles for six weeks, probably to explore Hispaniola for gold and spices.
On Pinzon’s return, Columbus censures him for disobeying orders.
Leaving a garrison of thirty-nine (or twenty-one) men behind in an unfinished fort built from the timbers of his wrecked flagship, Columbus sails for home on the Niña to reveal the New World to the inhabitants of the Old.
As he will write some months later, he takes "by force some of the natives, that from them we might gain some information of what there was in these parts; and so it was that we immediately understood each other, either by words or signs."
He reports cotton growing in the Bahamas.
He also finds the Arawak Indians of the Caribbean smoking tobacco in loosely rolled cigars (a practice documented in the Mayan culture more than two thousand years ago).
Encountering Caribs in eastern Hispaniola, observes the inhabitants using the dried, elastic sap of a wild climbing vine to make soft, resilient playballs; they call this material “cachuchu, ““the wood that weeps.” (The French will later corrupt the name of the material to “caoutchoc”.)
European scientists have by the late seventeenth century begun to investigate the properties of the soft, resilient, natural plant product known to the French as caoutchouc, from the Awawak cachuchu, “the wood that weeps”.
The French Geodesic Mission lands on the Caribbean coast in Colombia, sails to Panama where they travel overland to the Pacific, and continue by sail to Ecuador, at this time called the Territory of Quito by Spain.
In Ecuador, they split into two groups, traveling overland through rain forests, arriving in Quito in June 1736.
Bouguer, La Condamine, Godin and their colleagues measure arcs of the Earth’s curvature on the Equator from the plains near Quito to ...
...the southern city of Cuenca.
These measurements enable the first accurate determination of the size of the Earth, eventually leading to the establishment of the international metric system of measurement.
La Condamine, with François Fresneau Gataudière, makes the first scientific observations of rubber.
"{Readers} take infinitely more pleasure in knowing the variety of incidents that are contained in them, without ever thinking of imitating them, believing the imitation not only difficult, but impossible: as if heaven, the sun, the elements, and men should have changed the order of their motions and power, from what they were anciently"
― Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (1517)