A PARADOX IN COLONIALISM AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

Abstract

Scholars who study technological change have shown that indigenous people in the Americas had ideas of practicality that were different from those of European colonizers. Still, indigenous people have come to adopt many technologies that we associate with European expansion, such as metals for cutting, machines for grinding, draft animals, the wheel, etc. This is the paradox of narratives of technological change: practicality is culturally defined, yet many people have ended up adopting the same technologies. I attempt to explain this paradox by focusing on economic variables. Specifically, I focus on access to the means of production among indigenous people in central Mexico, and how having access to raw materials, tools, and the products of labor shaped the continuation of the use of chipped-stone tools well into the colonial period. I also focus on how changes in labor and the environment can explain the abandonment of hand-held tools for grinding maize in the late 20th century in Xaltocan, Mexico. These case-studies point to the potential and limitations of the use of economic variables to explain technological change.