What did the native Americans use to write with?

Answer 1

Writing in the strict sense was limited to only a very few Mexican and Central American groups - writing is defined as a language recorded by permanent marks made on a surface, so the glyphs used by the Aztecs and Maya qualify as writing, petroglyphs found across North America do not.

Maya texts were often carved in stone using stone hammers and chisels; writing on codexes was done with brushes of animal hairs set in bird quills, using red and black inks. Some texts were also painted on pottery, such as a famous cup bearing the glyphs for "cocoa".

Zapotec, Mixtec and Aztec texts are similarly in stone or on codex manuscripts made of deerskin sheets or a kind of paper made from pounded agave fibres, glued together in a long roll. Aztec scribes were called tlacuilo, meaning "he writes by painting".

It is still being debated among scholars whether the Moche, Nazca and Inca peoples of Peru had a writing system: in general it is thought that they did not.

Among the Plains tribes, a system of symbols was used as memory aids in the so-called "winter counts"; these are no more than lists of pictures to assist in recalling a specific event from each successive year but are not classed as writing. An example would be a horse next to an ear of corn, representing a particular incident when a large number of Pawnee horses were captured by the Lakota (the corn representing the Pawnee) - this is certainly not recording language.

Winter counts were usually painted on buffalo hides using natural mineral pigments and charcoal mixed with animal fat, applied with a small stick crushed at the end to make a kind of brush.

Many tribes produced signs on birch bark (a type of document called wikhegan) which, although not writing in the strict sense, could be interpreted by anyone understanding the system. The Passamaquoddy chief Sapiel Selmo produced a drawing scratched on birch bark with a knife, recording a hunting expedition and the types of animals killed - these include moose, bear, sables and caribou. The document is essentially a map showing rivers and lakes, pictures of the hunters and the animals, with marks indicating numbers against each type.

Most of the petroglyphs carved in rock across North America are probably religious symbols indicating water spirits or similar forces of nature.

Answer 2

Typically clay or wax tablets, scratched in with a stylus; the Romans used wax and the Mesopotamians clay. The Egyptians pioneered the use of papyrus, a reed that grows along the Nile, which was the first modern-day paper.