I'm continuing to try to get a handle on the knowledge base, crafts, and technologies we can assume for our Stone Age primitive tribes.
You've referenced canoes a few times and said canoes/rafts are the next priority for my craftspeople (after basic housing). From this, I presume that boatbuilding (at least at the basic level of "artificially constructed floating thing that can be used to transport people and goods across water") is assumed to be a generally-available and widely-known tech/skill. Would the canoes in question be of the dugout (hollowed-out log) or frame-and-covering (bark or hide) variety?
What about containers? You've specifically said pottery wouldn't be suitable as a tribe-specific *advanced* tech, so that's pretty obviously out. Wooden bowls made from hollowed and shaped wood blocks should be reasonably simple for anyone with woodcutting/carving/shaping tools/skills good enough to make dugout canoes and contemplate the clearcutting required for slash-and-burn agriculture. How about waterskins (requires decent tanning, stitchery, and treatment of seams with waterproof coatings)? Buckets (presumably made from a solid block similarly to a dugout canoe or the bowls discussed above, rather than the "barrel stave" construction that we tend to think of when envisioning a wooden bucket)? Woven baskets (whether made of rattan/bamboo wicker, palm fronds, reeds/canes, or thin flexible twigs similar to willow)? "Natural" containers such as gourds or sections of bamboo would, I presume, be common and unremarkable.
Tendon or rawhide cord used to tie things securely is kind of a given, I presume--"stone spearhead lashed to wooden shaft" is part of the basic *Paleo*lithic toolkit, after all. Ditto the use of vines or palm fronds as rope/string/cord of short lengths and moderate strengths. How about longer/thicker/stronger lengths of cordage/rope (or longer/*thinner* lengths of *string* of limited-but-reliable strength) crafted from plant fibers? (I assume that at minimum the Tree People know how to make fairly sturdy cordage as part of trapmaking, but how about the rest of the tribes?) When you mentioned rafts as a high priority for my craftsmen, that seems to imply high-strength lashings on a fairly large scale, which in turn implies (to me, anyway) *something* that serves reasonably well as "rope".
If making cordage/rope/string/whatever is a commonly-known skill, how about making nets (useful for fishing, hunting birds or other small game (esp. live-trapping), keeping birds and other similarly-sized pests away from especially-desired food plants, or as a lightweight container for transporting lots of smallish solid objects)? (You've already mentioned that net fishing isn't suitable for the Eastern Marshes, but the Lake isn't all *that* far away, and that looks like a prime environment for net fishing--quite apart from all the other varied uses for nets.)
On the topic of fishing, has pole-line-hook fishing been invented? Or is spear-fishing the presumed default method?
Food preservation: I'd expect drying and/or smoking of food (meat, fish, fruit) is a common and uremarkable skill, or there wouldn't be much point to hunting really large game. I'm guessing that meat preservation by salting is as yet unknown, quite apart from the whole issue of a sufficiently-large salt supply in an inland environment (no sea-salt) with generally-soggy ground (any native salt deposits would have long since dissolved away).
Has meat smoking progressed to the stage of making sausage/pemmican? (In its most primitive form, that would basically be chopping/grinding/smashing fatty-rather-than-oily meat to bits, mixing it with the fat to form something sticky and pasty, and then smoking it without drying/hardening it too much.) Softer preserved foods are very useful if one wishes to feed small children, old people, the sick and infirm, or anyone else who might have trouble chewing on nigh-rock-hard dried-meat jerky.
What sorts of plant foods are recognized as "food"? Ripe fruit is obvious, of course, in any area that *has* fruit-bearing trees. An awful lot of the useful Amazonian-wetland starch sources (other than plantain) are tubers/roots, which hide underground--can I assume cassava root and sweet potatos and suchlike grow wild in the environment and are known/recognized as food sources (plus, for a disturbing number of Amazonian plant-based starches, that the proper techniques are known for selecting/preparing it as wholesome food rather than cyanide-laced slow poison)? What about grasses/cereals/grains (none come to mind as native to Amazonian lowlands, but I figure I may as well ask)--have they figured out that picking a handful of grain seeds yields just as valid a food source as a plantain fruit (even if it's harder to collect the seeds and they require more effort to turn into something a little kid or toothless elder can eat)? Or fresh bamboo shoots, heart of palm, or similar "perhaps nonobvious soft parts/stages of plants that one might ordinarily think of as "wood" rather than "food"? (Yes, we're in lush territory and adequate food per se isn't a problem. It's those "visual thinking" and "world/culture-building" parts of my overactive brain again. I want to get a feel for what the cuisine is like, and hence the culture that's evolved around it, and the toolset that's necessary to support it, etc.)
Cooking. Meat on a spit over an open fire, and various plant-based foods wrapped in wet leaves and buried in hot coals, both seem to go back to the dawn of time as cooking methods. How about "pan frying" on a hot rock in/beside the campfire? (I've been assuming that's how the edible algae is prepared: press it into a damp paste, spread it on a hot rock, and fry/toast it like a fried egg or flatbread. Hence my references to "soylent crackers" in the in-character threads.) Do they use "enclosed cooking" methods of any sort (smoking more complex than "meat on a spit over a small fire with green/damp wood", Polynesian-style covered pit ovens, above-ground clay or drystone ovens), or is it all open-campfire barbeque-style cookery?
I'd been assuming that boiling of any sort (soups, stews, crawdad-boils, etc.) would be impossible in a pre-pottery era due to a lack of large, deep, fireproof containers to act as stewpots/cauldrons. However, I *just this weekend* got pointed to a reference to Neolithic "stone pots"--something I'd never heard of before. It was, sadly, a passing reference in an article about a completely different Neolithic artifact, so I haven't been able to get any specifics on them. But I am heartened to discover that Neolithic peoples may in fact have had the technology to host a big Cajun feast! YAY! (Well, except for the musical instruments required to do up Zydeco music *right*....)
I'd also assume that seasonings and spices (at least in the form of peppers and chiles) are readily available in an Amazonian-jungle context, and fairly well understood. Hot, humid climates *always* seem to develop heavily-spiced cuisines. (Heh. I *will* invent the ubiquitous swamp-dweller tradition of the unbearably-spicy-community-shrimp-fest, I will I will!)
How about the complex of knowledge and skills that go into basic flatbreads? (Flour-water paste fried on a hot rock implies flour, which implies grinding hard dry starch sources to make flour, which in turn implies knowing either that grain seeds can be used as food or that tubers can be preserved by drying *if* you can overcome their rocklike, tooth-endangering consistency....) Leavened bread, I'm pretty sure, will be Right Out--yes?
You've mentioned my people's use of clay as a building material. I assume this means that clay is also known (at least to my craftsmen, and presumably to the other tribes as well) as a multi-purpose spiffy material for handicrafts--malleable and easily-shaped when wet, yet hardens into a strong solid form when dry (provided it *stays* dry, which might be a bit of a challenge given the environment *g*)--and that therefore what we're missing in regards proper pottery are some combination of 1) the knowledge that it gets even stronger *and waterproof* when exposed to hot fires and/or 2) figuring out how to apply the knowledge in step one without having most of the product break/explode during firing. Correct?
I assume that making a fire from scratch is no big deal for these folk, with the hardest part being finding *dry* kindling in an Amazonian swamp/rainforest (I've seen *moderns* do the "rub two sticks together" thing in under a minute with some practice in the correct techniques--no bow-drills or flint-struck sparks required).
You've said "no bows and arrows". What about atlatls, or slings, for another path to decent ranged weaponry? ("Amazonia" makes me also think immediately of "blowguns", but blowgun darts are nigh-useless without poisons, which are the purview of the Xionites and hence presumably not part of my peoples' technological toolkit.)
How good is the tribe's basic woodworking? I assume cutting/shaping/carving of simple, single-piece wooden implements is no big deal for my craftsmen. Your comment about rafts implies that they can do large multi-piece implements with structural-strength joinery via lashings or similar (I'm envisioning something built like a wooden palisade wall section, but floating rather than sunk vertically into the ground), but I assume that complex implements requiring multiple heavily-shaped pieces with carved joinery (for instance, a box made of 5 flat slabs--a bottom and four sides--pegged together with dowels) is probably beyond them.
Fermentation. Given that many berries ferment on the vine and thus provide what amounts to naturally-occuring wine, it would seem to me that our primitive tribespeople would have spent no small amount of brainpower on figuring out how to do that deliberately/artificially so they could booze it up at times of the year other than right at the end of summer and beginning of fall. And since more than a few fruits will frequently start to ferment before they spoil, that shouldn't have been too difficult (note the past tense *grin*) for them to figure out. Which then would seem to lead directly to fermentation as a method of food preservation (for definitions of "food" that include "fruit juice", at least--kim chee or similar might be more advanced, especially for a people lacking pottery). But I could be wrong--intoxicating drink might be one of those "advanced techs" that we'll be picking up over the course of the game. (In which case we might have to fall back on ayahuasca.... *g*)
I assume that stone tool-making is pretty well advanced--large edged/pointed items from chipped cores, small edged/pointed items from flakes struck off larger cores, ground/polished basaltic items, etc.; in particular, axes good enough to do the large-scale felling of trees required for the "slash" part of slash-and-burn agriculture, adzes/knives/awls/etc. good enough for carving raw wood into useful implements (the aforementioned canoes, whether dugouts or covered frames, would require some pretty respectable woodworking skills/tools even if much of the roughing-out is done by controlled burning), grinding implements for doing "finish work" on wooden items ("sanding" stones for finishing spear shafts so they're straight, smooth, and of constant diameter, for example; smooth spear shafts and axe handles are pretty much a requirement if the user doesn't want to injure his own hands). I presume also that they're reasonably adept at making and using tools cut/shaped/carved from hard animal parts like shells, horn, and bone.
How about leather and tanning? Cutting/piecing/stitching leather into complex shaped items like garments, waterskins, canoe covers (though I repeat myself here with the waterskin and canoe references)?
This setting being based on Amazonia, I envision the stereotypical "jungle drums" for long-distance communication--if not now, than eventually when the disparate tribes become more close-knit. So what can our primitive savages do drum-wise? Hollow-log drums? Stretched-hide drums? Do we know how to scale either of those up to a size whose sound will carry across inter-village distances? Have we stumbled on the *concept* of coded drum rhythms as a method of fast long-distance communication?
Do they have any kind of domestic animals? I'm guessing not, though there might be some semi-domesticated wolf/dogs. (The salamanders successfully tame/train/domesticate some of the local large *reptiles*...might be a good thing for the god of reptiles to keep in mind for his people....)
Okay, enough with the endless questions. Plenty here for you to think about and answer. At least for now--I'm sure I'll be badgering you about this stuff for a while until I've got a decent mental image of what these people can (and can't!) do, what vital tech improvements have to be introduced ASAP, etc. (Consider it a sign that I'm intensely interested in the game. That's a good thing, right? *g*)
Subject: Dark Jungle - Home Rules 
Tue Apr 01, 2008 8:46 pm
LOL April Fools... You can roll your own dice for me. I won't be hunting you down. I know where you play on alternate Friday nights. Hunting you is unnecessary. You will come to me! Mwa-ha-ha-ha!
