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I'll throw out several thoughts, then let other people take over.
The Hohokam built multi-storied houses and large adobe walls. They are most famously known for engineering and building an extensive irrigation and canal network.
The Mound Builders built extensively, and had walled cities and pyramids. Here is a very large and famous site: https://cahokiamounds.org/
A lot of Indians in the US were nomadic horse people, so they aren't going to build anything.
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The Hohokam & Mount Builders didn't build in stone, they built in wood, adobe, piled-up earth - which all decayed back to nature without constant attention/maintenance. The cliff dwellers in the SW US had better luck; & adobe & wood can last, but it has to be in high desert. Otherwise, the stuff just melts away over time.
Many of the Plains Indians in the US were horse people, true enough - once the Spanish had obligingly reintroduced horses to the New World, & lost a few to the Native Peoples. So that had to be after 1521 CE (the fall of the Aztec Empire). I don't know that the Native Peoples had a notion of history like Western Civilization. @ the time, fighting off the European diseases & explorers & colonists, the notion probably didn't occur to them - they were otherwise occupied.
Weather probably had a lot to do with it. Remember the Ice Age. Instability in climate in the northern part of the US caused many cultures to used a hunter-gatherer life stile.
It's widely assumed that the natives of the West coast had such an easy time of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that there was never any drive to form the larger civilizations needed for agriculture and so forth.
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Cahokia, a large settlement of Mississippian culture, near what is now St, Louis, MO was once a settlement of about 20,000 occupants. Oddly it's something that few seem to know about.
This is what I intended to say. They've still coming to terms with how large and influential Cahokia might have been, and there are estimates that the area (regional) population may have been around 1 million.
Of course, wiping out 95% of the population in the blink of an eye colored the European interpretation of what they found.
Same reason people move to Alaska and live off the land
They don’t want to get with the program
The small tribes living in the wilderness were also off the grid
Not everybody sees big city life as development and progress
This only makes sense in light of a world that has big cities that can be rejected. The idea that some sort of primitivists pre-rejected the notion of larger civilization is... bizarre.
Or at least grossly lacking in historical perspective.
Taos Pueblos are thought to be continuously for over 1000 years. They are just north of the town of Taos NM. Look at Chaco in NM as well where buildings with 700 rooms were built but only ruins remain. Also check out Canyon De Chelles near the NM and Arizona border. A more remote example of cave dwellings like Monte Verde in Colorado.
What man knows at any given point in time, looks ill informed when looking back at that same time from a century later. We suffer that same tendency, that is to think we know more than we do.
In my 70 years Ive seen coffee declared bad for me, to good for me to drink all of it I want, sans milk and sugar to now its thought coffee in moderation of two or less cups a day are good for us but over that is bad. This is a small example where mans knowledge of something simple changes over a short time. Be open to being proved wrong over time, no matter how certain some may claim to be of their position..
Taos Pueblos are thought to be continuously for over 1000 years. They are just north of the town of Taos NM. Look at Chaco in NM as well where buildings with 700 rooms were built but only ruins remain. Also check out Canyon De Chelles near the NM and Arizona border. A more remote example of cave dwellings like Monte Verde in Colorado.
And, other than very polished oral tradition and scattered archaeological evidence, we know very little about the Anasazi.
The note above that there were no horses here until the 1500s is one point that gets overlooked by even those who understand pre-Columbian North America: the tribes, peoples, nations and cultures changed, and changed, and changed. The "horse tribes of the Plains" didn't exist until about the time of the American colonies. Many other tribes relocated, shifted territories, went from anchored to migratory and back again. The forced relocations beginning in the late 1700s completely changed the nature, region and character of many tribes.
It was not some monolithic world with a few simple divisions of culture. Unfortunately, as there are essentially no written records, what was no doubt a vibrant and tumultuous world is largely lost to us.
Because Ancient Aliens helped the Aztec and Mayans as they were "geographically concentrated" as opposed to natives in North America which were scattered all over the place.
Actually those were Time Traveling Tourists (T^3), but who's dealing with facts anyway?
You’d need farming and ranching developed to certain level to afford growing populations and bureaucracies ... then develop written language for arts and science. These things could happen by accident, Native Americans just never did, but natural conditions were all there. No, they don’t need 5G communication network, linked devices to develop civilizations back then.
You’d need farming and ranching developed to certain level to afford growing populations and bureaucracies ... then develop written language for arts and science. These things could happen by accident, Native Americans just never did...
They had the first four. They probably would have had written records in another century, possibly infused from other cultures that didn't wipe them out as a first step. The only significant NAN written language is Cherokee, which was developed by a native who was influenced by European writing around 1810.
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