[jandrese]

North American natives were not good about writing stuff down, and by the time Europeans showed up it was almost a millennium later so the records would have been scanty even if the Europeans hadn't gone on insane rampages spreading death, disease, and destruction everywhere they went.

[murat131]

Writing was invented in Mesopotamia around 3200BC, while in the Americas the necessity of writing things down triggered the same invention around 600BC. Main reason was because Eurasia was in the east-west plane where climate is similar and communication/commerce was not difficult to employ which helped Europe, ME, Asia, and far east to increase interaction. Americas on the other hand lays on the north-south plane, Isthmus of Panama is narrow to pass through, variances in climate and terrain greatly limited communication and commerce between north and south. When European showed up on the shores of Caribbeans and the mainland of Americas it was already too late.

[jcranmer]

Clearly, you've read Guns, Germs, Steel, whose accuracy when it comes to anthropology is on the same level as the (Christian) Bible's accuracy with respect to cosmology.

> Americas on the other hand lays on the north-south plane, Isthmus of Panama is narrow to pass through, variances in climate and terrain greatly limited communication and commerce between north and south.

It should be noted that there is rather little evidence of technologies spreading along the main East-West axis of Eurasia (particularly Neolithic technologies), while there is far more evidence of such technology spreading along the North-South axis of the Americas. For example, pottery may well have spread from its invention in the Amazon Rainforest across the Caribbean to Mesoamerica and the Southeast US; corn did spread from its initial domestication Mesoamerica to both the US (where it largely supplanted preexisting domesticants) and down into the Andes (where it supplemented the existing potato crops); and metallurgy spread from its Andean origins along the Pacific coast to Western Mexico and the Southwest US.

[boomboomsubban]

Though worldwide it's difficult to keep records intact for a thousand years, the Mayans had writing systems for nearly two thousand years. The Spanish priests burned any writing they found during the Mayan conquest,

[danharaj]

Oral traditions record, among other things, historical events.

[refurb]

This is my understanding from chatting with a number of First Nation in Canada.

Most of the tribe's stories were passed down verbally, rather than written down.

[jandrese]

Keeping an oral record detailed and accurate over a 900 year span is difficult for human beings sadly.

[anonAndOn]

Doesn't "not good" in this context mean NEVER. Are there any native tribes/peoples that had a writing system before European contact? AFAICT, it's one of the main causes so many native languages are dying/extinct.

[yorwba]

Writing developed in America long before Europeans showed up and continued to be used until Europeans showed up, but the Europeans destroyed most books they could find and forced the natives to learn the colonizers' languages. That's the main cause why so many native languages are dying/extinct.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems

[anonAndOn]

It looks like writing developed in present-day Mexico and never made it north of the desert border (Mojave/ Sonoran/ Chihuahua). So NONE of the estimated 296 languages spoken by natives in US and Canada had a written language that we have evidence of. [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...

[perl4ever]

The article says near the top:

"An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script."

It also says:

"The Florentine Codex, compiled 1545-1590 by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún includes a history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire from the Mexica viewpoint"

[thaumasiotes]

Having a writing system and using it to record history are surprisingly independent. For example, in ancient India they wrote all kinds of stuff down, but virtually none of it is history. Most of what we know about the history of India comes from the records of other peoples who came into contact with the Indians.

[AlotOfReading]

There's at least one script that's absolutely, a 100% definitive written language, Maya. There are about half a dozen more that qualify for certain reasonable definitions of writing. Beyond that, there are hundreds of systems of proto-writing that rely primarily on the cultural context of the speaker to interpret. These were still used to record events and stories, though.