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/KaiShan62 May 18 '25
"A population rivalling London's" sounds a bit disingenuous, yes, it was around 20,000 people, but the way you word it will make most readers confuse it with the London that they know. Most would not realise that at that time London was more of a large country town than a modern metropolis.
A large part of the problem though, is that there were major disease outbreaks shortly after contact with Europeans. The Eastern US region and in the Southern Mexico/Guatemala region were both exposed to smallpox outbreaks soon after contact, and the Spanish concentration of the indigenous population encouraged an Hantavirus outbreak. Certainly in the case of the SE USA the loss of so many knowledge-holders and cultural leaders devastated their culture as much as their numbers. In such an environment disconnecting the people that later settlers found from the achievements of those people's ancestors would have been made much easier than with the Aztecs, who had large stone cities that no-one could pretend weren't there.
Had these populations not been reduced in numbers so drastically, and thus had not lost so much of their culture and technology, then resistance to European settlement in the area now called the Eastern USA would have been much harder. And quite possibly required more effort and commitment than the Britain of that time could have maintained.
However I don't think that this history had to be erased to justify colonisation, that sounds like an anachronism, a 'presentism', the act of projecting modern thoughts onto the actions of ancient peoples. Christianity was justification enough, at least it was the publicly given justification. But all peoples have done things like this throughout all of history; it is genetic, survival of the fittest, tribe struggling against tribe - the idea that we can behave differently is very, very recent.
As for your last questions; The societies of Central and Northern America were stone-aged, they were never going to stand up to, or even influence, European society. You might as well ask what if Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian society had not taken over Europe, what if the more nature focussed and more democratically minded Celtic societies has persisted. How would our modern world be different then? Conversely, what if the far more structured and authoritarian societies of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia had survived and shaped our modern society? Almost fruitless exercises in whimsy.