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arrlaari.livejournal.com (arrlaari.livejournal.com) wrote in scans_daily,

What's odd about Perez' amazon tech is... they have steel. The bracers they wear are definitely not bronze, nor could anything less sophisticated than steel have been used in the construction of the pistons on Doom's Door there.

This has to have been their own innovation, because in 1000 BC they didn't have steel in the Aegean - quality mass-manufacture on the level that the amazons evidence didn't show up for another 500 years. Even more so, given their construction of the Door, they have access to a *lot* of iron, a really, really sophisticated and impressive forge, and a sound understanding of mechanical principles.

So they can't have just frozen where they were when they were dumped on the island. Just that door suggests a tremendous step up from the ancient greeks they left. So, why did they keep going that far, and then why on Earth would they stop there, of all places, given what a revolutionary thing steel manufacture is, technology-wise?

It's possible, if not probable, that the door itself was made and installed by the gods before the Amazons were chosen to guard it - Cottus's claim that Diana's passage weakened the "cursed seal" and the silly thing with Pan's death imply that something beyond physical power holds Doom's Doorway shut.

As for the general argument for technological advance, I could understand justifying the old-tyme Greek aesthetic (as that's the meta reason for low-tech Amazons) as proceeding from a lack of, or unwillingness to consume, energy - no coal mines or oil wells, or mass wood burning. A great deal of our technological advancement is predicated on a willingness to burn, or otherwise consume, large quantities of a finite set of limited resources and also to lay waste to large tracts of environment, neither of which are very Amazonian. This is especially true of of motor vehicles and most true of airplanes - least energy efficient mode of transport that's ever been economically viable.

On the other hand, that's more of an argument for a fundamentally different kind of advancement, rather than no advancement at all. Off the top of my head, being Greek they would of course be very advanced mathematicians, astronomers, and theoretical physicists; and there's good cause (Doom's Doorway) to have a concious effort to investigate metallurgy (to the extent that their energy capacity allows), siege engineering and organic chemistry.

It's ultimately a speculative fiction premise.