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While I was reading books about The Journey of Discovery one book mentioned William Clark's older brother and harkened back to the time when being an Indian Killer was a thing to be proud of. There was an event where Europeans came upon a village of Indians who for all practical purposes were living in dwellings "like White people."As I remember they routed and burned them out anyway.
Pit houses, long houses, wikiups (both of more or less permanent design), stone structures, adobe structures... there's a long list. Check out the Mound Builders...Cahokia was a gigantic permanent city in the Midwest, for example. The difference is whether the natives lived a permanent/semi-permanent or nomadic lifestyle.
Go to Mesa Verde or Chaco canyon... the stoneworks built by the Anasazi there are superb. Go further south to Mesoamerica and the natives built structures on par with anything build in the ancient Middle East. Go further south and the quality of the native stoneworks surpassed even Ancient Greece and Egypt. (see Puma Punku... the stone cutting is so exact that many people are convinced only aliens could have done it )
Pit houses, long houses, wikiups (both of more or less permanent design), stone structures, adobe structures... there's a long list. Check out the Mound Builders...Cahokia was a gigantic permanent city in the Midwest, for example. The difference is whether the natives lived a permanent/semi-permanent or nomadic lifestyle.
Go to Mesa Verde or Chaco canyon... the stoneworks built by the Anasazi there are superb. Go further south to Mesoamerica and the natives built structures on par with anything build in the ancient Middle East. Go further south and the quality of the native stoneworks surpassed even Ancient Greece and Egypt. (see Puma Punku... the stone cutting is so exact that many people are convinced only aliens could have done it )
While the Mesoamericans and Incas had great stonework what impresses me the most as a architect and contractor myself is the locations where they built. Building in the dense jungles or on the side of a cliff in the Andes mountains requires lots of human resources and rather complex logistics.
They built this on the side of a mountain with no heavy equipment and no metal tools. No easy feat by any stretch of the imagination.
Mesa Verde was fantastic! Book the full day tour and they will take you through everything. We stayed in the park and had a great weekend. The highlight is taking the tour and climbing through the city itself. Just don't look down as you climb the latter at the end.
The northeastern tribes lived in longhouses, and Native peoples from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington builds longhouses of redwood or cedar planks. The Chinook Tribe of the Columbia River recently built a new plank house, open to the public. Large plank houses going back to the 1800's are still standing, along with the totem poles that mark the clan relationships of the head of each household, in coastal parts of Alaska and the Queen Charlotte Islands, aka Haida Gwaii. Plank Houses - American Indian Tradition & Continuity
Native people in the Southwest had monumental architecture, being located at the northern end of the MesoAmerican cultural zone that included the Aztecs and Maya to the south, with whom they traded. The Anasazi people built large apartment-like complexes five stories high, with round ceremonial chambers inside. Other cultures in the area had MesoAmerican style stone ball courts.The large Anasazi complexes were oriented to the south, to take advantage of passive solar heat. Chaco Canyon National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where many ruined complexes can be seen.
Native Americans were obviously not all the simple savages they were portrayed as being but let's not get carried away here. It's not like our astronauts had to pull an Iroquois dream catcher out of the lunar regolith before planting the American flag.
If you read Caesar's De Bello Gallico or Livy's Ab Conditio, you will see a remarkable similarity between European culture of that period and the culture (including architecture) that Europeans found when they arrived in N.Am.
Well. What’s the definition of a structure? I grew up in Ohio where there was an ancient mound building culture that thrived for generations. Many of these mounds survived into the present time.
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Why did native americans not build structures
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