[lumost]

Something that has never sit right with me. Why do we not have clear evidence of past major civilizations in the main habitation zones of modern North America?

Shouldn’t we see ancient cities in New England, the PNW, Bay Area, and southeastern US? What made South America, and the southwestern zone of North America special in this regard?

[jcranmer]

North American agriculture appears to have been cursed with poor cereals for cultivation--basically none of those crops survive today as major cereal crops, unlike all the other agricultural hotspots. Corn doesn't arrive until ~1000, and the arrival of corn radically alters the makeup of North America.

Cahokia is the largest city of North America (peaking at probably 10-20k people), starting about 1050, peaking perhaps 1200, and being completely abandoned by about 1350 for unknown reasons. And after Cahokia, there's... no other major city. Mississippian sites in general decline in size, and there seems to be a general aversion to urban centers. It's hard to make out what is going on, because then comes catastrophic European contact that destroys all of the cultures with only fragmentary evidence of contemporary lifestyle.

One theory that I've heard is that we're seeing what is essentially the endgame of proto-civilization: the North American cultures are trying out alternatives to urban, territorial polities. Perhaps something akin to Greece during the Greek Dark Ages. If European contact had come two or three centuries later, we might have seen the emergence of territorial states in North America.

The exception to this in North America is of course the Southwest, which was in cultural contact with South America and Mesoamerica. Corn arrives to the Southwest far earlier than the rest of North America--maybe 2000 BC at the earliest, although it doesn't clearly hold until about 500 BC.

[anthonypasq]

this seems so bizarre considering how incredible fertile the midwest is considered. you'd imagine the mississippi river system had enough geographical advantages to support the number of people you would see in China or India

[AlotOfReading]

Cities has a particular connotation of dense, urban areas and it's not necessarily the only way high population density can exist on a landscape. California is a good example here, with some of the highest precolumbian population densities in what's now the US. Most of those people lived in Central Valley in large villages often exceeding 2,000-5000 people. However, there was very little high level political organization compared to say, Central Mexico and their primary food sources fall outside typical definitions of agriculture (though they were definitely intensive and involved lots of complicated plant management).

Within the Bay area, populations were centered around exploiting marine resources. Hundreds of large shell middens dozens of feet high littered the precolonial coast, most of which are now destroyed. Even pleasanton, far inland, harvested marine resources because it was a swamp filled with fish.

The PNW still has extant remains of massive precolonial villages, like Ozette [0].

The Southeast/Midwest was another case where we have massive villages, in some cases supporting 10s of thousands of people.

Etc. We don't see these today because we quite literally built on top of them. I used to live near a suburban neighborhood built atop an old Hohokam village where thousands of cremations had been recovered. None of the residents I met knew that the "hill" in the middle was the bulldozed remains of the Pueblo.

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

[rawgabbit]

AFAIK The native peoples of the Americas did not have iron technology. The Incan and Aztec empires were able to feed their peoples despite being limited to stone and wood and obsidian.

I believe the forests of North America could not be farmed without iron axes and saws.

[AlotOfReading]

They did, and the people of the PNW specifically worked drift iron. The wiki page on precolumbian metallurgy is worth reading through, because the true extent of metalworking was fairly widespread [0].

In most cases, stone was preferred to metals because it was abundant, sharper, and cheaper, much as we use iron extensively today despite Aluminum and Titanium alloys being better in many respects. The areas that did work metal heavily (e.g. west Mexico, the triple alliance, Ecuador) typically used it for ceremonial objects and small domestic tools like needles.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Am...