I'm thinking at this moment about the movie Castaway. At first, he "lives and dies by the clock." Movie opens with him lecturing new Russian FedEx employees. Everything's rush, rush, rush. Now, now, now. Lost on the island, though, he charts the position of the sun's rays shining into a cave by the month. At the end of the flick, he's standing a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, USA, and takes a good, long while to ponder his choices. (Object lessons aside, I'm thankful that there are people at FedEx who are anal about keeping things at a brisk pace.)
Next subject.
The lack of accurate time-keeping was probably both a cause and effect of cultural properties. In the west (and none of these ideas are my own, but espoused by Landes in his "Wealth and Poverty of Nations"), having clocks actually improved efficiency. People worked dawn to dusk. In the summer they worked long hours, in the winter much less. With clocks, people could actually work (and produce) consistently throughout the year. In China, as a counter-example, the emporer moved people about. The emporer (through his agents) told laborers where to move (sometimes entire villages), when to be at work, when to go home. China didn't develop beyond very simple time-keeping mechanisms. In Europe, by contrast, the village clock was a prized possession.
I don't know who first said "Necessity is the mother of invention," but I think there must be a lot of truth to it. People, individually or collectively, develop what skills, what technology, and what ideas they require to survive, to thrive, to make their lives easier. The Chinese didn't develop an accurate clock because they didn't need one. In other cultures and other places, it could be that geography played a role. When it's 95% and hotter 3-5 hours in the middle of the day and there's no air-conditioning, it's probably not a good work strategy to labor frenetically (like the pre-castway, FedEx guy) - probably even a seriously bad survival stategy.
It may be true that maplessness affected the way that Native Americans viewed land ownership, but did they need it? For hunter-gatherers why would anyone need land as an individual? (Bet hackles were raised when tribe X decided they wanted to hunt on tribe Y's side of the river though!) I'm not sure whether sedentary NAs farmed collectively or individually, but I wouldn't reckon they would actually need to start marking territory unless the commodity was scarce. At that time, for individual tribes, I can imagine they had plenty of room. OTOH, the colonists were coming from a culture where they already had a sense of land ownership - not an easy sense to be rid of once acquired.
Clearly maps are handy for marking territory and for finding one's way reliably. I'm not sure about polynesians navigating the oceans reliably without maps. Did they record the failed attempts? Writing things down, whether maps or words, is a very useful thing for a culture to have - regardless of whether they own things.
k
