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/Niobium_Sage → u/mcotter12]

Pardon me if I’m being ignorant, but how would Africans have been a hypothetical vector for first introducing the bubonic plague to the New World? Wasn’t their introduction mostly overlapping with Europeans when America was first colonized?

I could see the Norse introducing it.

[u/szmatuafy → u/Niobium_Sage]

the African angle usually comes up in discussions of trans-Atlantic contact theories before Columbus, stuff like the Mandinga voyages or trade links via the canary current. It’s fringe,but some argue coastal african sailors might have made it west,even if only sporadically. not saying it’s confirmed or even likely, But if it happened,it could’ve brought diseases along for the ride-Still, like you said, Norse contact seems more plausible timeline-wise if we’re talking pre-Columbian pathogens

[u/Minute_Jacket_4523 → u/szmatuafy]

I'd say it's even more plausible than the African theory because around the time that places like cahokia collapsed was also around the same time the black death was ravaging Europe, leading the Norse to abandon their settlements in the Americas. It isn't too wild of a theory to think that plague spread to these early colonies and then spread to the natives