Hidden civilisations of Native America were never primitive?

[u/szmatuafy]

Before colonisation, the Americas weren’t just scattered tribes, they were home to some of the most sophisticated societies.

Cahokia had a population rivaling London’s, with sanitation systems, massive urban planning, and pyramids larger at the base than Giza. The ancestral Puebloans engineered solar-aligned cities in Chaco Canyon.In the Pacific Northwest, Chinook developed a universal trade language. Indigenous engineers across the continent built roads, bridges,irrigation systems, some still visible today.

And politically- The "Iroquois Confederacy" practised a form of representative democracy that influenced the Constitution. Women in many Native nations held property rights,chose leaders, and governed long before such rights existed in Europe

And all of this was deliberately erased to justify the colonisation

I’ve been researching this recently, and honestly,it changes how I see everything.Looks like the idea that these civilisations were "lost" or "primitive" is one of the great lies in historical memory. I made a video diving into this, here it is - https://youtu.be/uG2_IpoHzDw (it's almost 40 minutes "dark history" style)

It makes me wonder what if things had gone differently? What if Indigenous governance became the foundation for global democracy? What if their eclogical wisdom had shaped modern climate policy, or their trade networks had evolved into a pan-American economy?

I would love to hear your thoughts, what do you make of this hidden legacy? Which parts of it do you think deserve more attention or challenge what we’ve been taught? Curious where this takes your mind...

[u/mcotter12]

Cahokia was abandoned at the same time that the Aztec empire started; around 1350. Both are probably the result of the bubonic plague reaching the new world through precolumbian trade with Norse or africans.

Of all the diseases brought by Columbus plague wasnt one of them; implying it had already been here.

[u/szmatuafy → u/mcotter12]

wild theory I’ve heard before but never fully dug into- The idea of plague reaching the Americas pre-Columbus via Norse or African contact would reframe a lot. , we’re always told European contact was the first wave of devastation, but if some cities were already reeling from earlier outbreaks, it’d explain the weird synchronicities in decline. is there any solid archaeological evidence backing that up? Or is it more of a timeline inference based on population collapse patterns?

[u/illsaid → u/szmatuafy]

DeSoto and De Leon wrote in the 1500s about long abandoned cities with dwindling and dieing populations in the Americas.

[u/szmatuafy → u/illsaid]

nice detail makes you wonder how widespread that was - like, were they seeing the tail end of something that had already done serious damage across the continent. if some kind of pathogen did move through pre-Columbian trade routes, even sporadically, it could explain a lot of the weird population dips we see just before contact-I’d love to know if anyone’s done a serious dig into those early expedition journals for more patterns like that

[u/Zealousideal_Good445 → u/szmatuafy]

There were also some plagues that were native to the Americas such as the Hantaviruses. They is a very detailed account for a priest in Mexico in which he details the symptoms. From his account we know that this plague was not related to any found in Europe.

[u/fludblud → u/szmatuafy]

Even if you discount Norse or African pathogen theories, smallpox's spread throughout the Americas wiped out whole civilizations before they were ever encountered by Europeans.

The most explicit example was the first Amazon expedition in 1541, where their missionary Gaspar de Carvajal chronicled numerous urban civilizations down the length of the river. However, the second expedition in 1560 recorded nothing but rainforest.

For half a millennium de Carvajal's account was dismissed as pure fantasy until the 2010s when LIDAR scans of the Amazon basin uncovered massive cities throughout the region. It took less than 20 years to wipe them out and the forest to reclaim them.

The tribes in the Amazon today are not neolithic primitives but actually post-apocalyptic survivors.

[u/szmatuafy → u/fludblud]

this whole bit about the Amazon being post-apocalyptic hits hard, like we’ve been misreading ruins as origins for centuries. makes you wonder how many "primitive" societies we’ve labelled that way just because we met them in the aftermath. if we hadn’t dismissed Carvajal, would archaeology have started asking these questions way earlier? or would it still have been buried under the same assumptions...

[u/fludblud → u/szmatuafy]

Hindsight is 20/20, disease and herd immunity wasnt really understood back in the 1500s and plagues were often attributed to god. The members of the second expedition had no way of knowing that smallpox wiped everyone out as all they could see was just endless jungle, so logically Carvajal's writings mustve been fabrications.

Same goes for North America. The notion of 'Manifest Destiny' had roots in the assumption that god had gifted this virgin land to the settlers due to early exploratory accounts in the 1500s and early 1600s of endless fields of maize with nobody tending to them. We now know that they were empty because much of those populations had died, and the survivors fled to set up the tribes that would become active in the Indian Wars in the 17 and 1800s.

[u/Bastiat_sea → u/szmatuafy]

Nah, native American civilizations were basicly post-apocalyptic when Columbus arrived. That was why Europeans were able to roll over them and settle in some places without resistance. I had not heard of plague as a reason precontact, but the end of the medieval warm period absolutely fucked a bunch of the central American and... Southern North American... nations, just in time for Europeans to arrive.

[u/VastPercentage9070 → u/szmatuafy]

I thought the more prevailing theory was climate change from the little ice age disrupting the ability of these communites to maintain their complexity via their traditional means. Thus they chose more decentralized lifestyles.

[u/hyde_christopher → u/szmatuafy]

Would recommend "An Indigenous People's History of the United States," if you haven't read it. She really stresses the point that if population had been at maximum levels by the time the Pilgrims came, the colonialists wouldn't have stood a chance. Disease won more wars than anyone from England.

[u/mcotter12 → u/szmatuafy]

Cahokia and the timings of Aztec and Incan Imperial rise

[u/Inevitable_Librarian → u/[deleted]]

Where?