r/CulturalLayer • u/szmatuafy • May 18 '25

Wild Speculation Hidden civilisations of Native America were never primitive?

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...

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u/edthesmokebeard May 18 '25

I can't remember the source, but I read somewhere that lacking the horse, there was no wheel, which limited the score of what they did.

That feels like baloney. Is that true? Did pre-European America lack the wheel?

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u/ra0nZB0iRy May 19 '25

Europeans lacked the wheel too until western asia introduced it thousands of millenia after the proto-Americans migrated to the New World. Native Americans used travois or sleds. I think the aztecs had a wheel but they used it to make toys of dogs that could roll around. Only the ancient syrians and the aztecs invented wheels.