Bronze Age New World
Imagine that sometime before
500 AD the Arawak Indians of the Caribbean develop a better
navigational package. It's not as good as the Polynesians, but
it's enough for serious long-distance sailing. The *Arawaks don't
reach Europe, but they do sail up and down the Atlantic coast of the
New World from Delaware to Brazil, raiding, trading, and
cross-fertilizing ideas.
The result is a somewhat faster advance
of technology in the New World. Bronzeworking is developed in
Mesoamerica around 900 AD and spreads slowly but steadily outwards;
more advanced navigation techniques jump the Isthmus of Panama soon
thereafter, with sails and outriggers reaching the California Chumash
around 1400 and the Indians of the Northwest in the 17th century.
Columbus
and the other Europeans arrive on schedule, but they find a New World
that is rather different from the one of our timeline. The
Caribbean is postapocalyptic rather than Arcadian -- still recovering
from the collapse of the *Arawak civilization, the major islands dotted
with the ruins of stone cities. Mesoamerica is occupied by a
Bronze Age empire that only vaguely resembles our Aztecs. There
are large cities in the Mississippi valley and around Chesapeake Bay;
there are some rather Homeric barbarians in the upper Midwest.
The
Indians of the American Southwest are similar to OTL but more populous
and more advanced. There is an agricultural civilization in the
lower Amazon and another, smaller one in Florida.
Greater
urbanization gives the Indians a couple of diseases to swap with the
invading Europeans: a pneumonic variant of Rocky Mountain Spotted
Fever, and the tloggotl virus, a relative of Machupo fever and more
distantly of Ebola. After about 1520, the virus plus different
patterns of conquest and trade will cause European history to slowly
but steadily diverge from the history that we know.
The Beginnings of the Timeline : This is where it all began. Click below for the start of this timeline.
First Contacts:
The Tlon-Spanish War
: This arc covers the Spanish encounter with the Tlon, a much more
advanced Meso-America civilization than in Our Timeline. It is
probably the best AH Mike Ralls has ever written, as well as being an
interesting story by itself.
One Shots: These are self-contained episodes from this world.
Brave New
The Incas: A trip down to
The Anasazi : A little known tribe of the
Meta : The creation of the Webpage and all about Alternate History.