10 ms·
It's interesting that while South-American pre-colombian construction projects are familiar to many (such as Aztec cities and Nazca Lines, etc), it is perhaps n
by fsloth 4y ago
It's interesting that while South-American pre-colombian construction projects are familiar to many (such as Aztec cities and Nazca Lines, etc), it is perhaps not as well known that North-American pre-columbian populations had massive civil engineering projects as well e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point
I wonder why the latter are not as well known.
- prepend 4y agoI assume it’s because the SA construction projects are more visible today than NA projects. Nazca lines are still visible along with Inca and Maya stone buildings. NA mounds and these canals are not as visible so people just can’t see them and walk around them as well.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoThe north American equivalent of the Nazca lines (the Blythe intaglios [1]) are just as visible, simply not as numerous and importantly, they don't have a decades-long presence in the public mind as an enduring archaeological mystery. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios
- MichaelCollins 4y agoIt's probably because the biggest at Blythe Intaglios is about 50 meters across, while some of the Nazcal Line figures are more than a kilometer across. The former seems like something a handful of people could plausibly do on a whim as a hobby, while the latter seems like something that would require careful planning, maybe some surveying techniques, and a lot more energy expenditure and manhours.
- ok_dad 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Nickell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Nickell This researcher and a small team re-created a method to make Nazca lines in the 70's with the same tech that the Nazca civilization had. People make very complex crop circles all by themselves, too. It's simply a matter of a bit of math and careful planning and practice.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoNobody is saying it is impossible, just that it requires more interesting explanation. Certainly you would agree?
- ok_dad 4y agoNot really, no. It wasn’t anything crazy like aliens or whatever, just humans doing engineering.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoEngineering is crazy and amazing enough
- ok_dad 4y agoThat’s for sure, I’m still pretty sure I couldn’t figure out a foolproof way to draw giant figures.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> It's simply a matter of a bit of math and careful planning and practice. That lines up with what I suppose above. A few people, careful planning and a bit of basic math/surveying to make the Nazca figures. But the Blythe Intaglios figures are much smaller, at 50 meters across I think I could probably make a figure like those by kicking around gravel for a day or two. No planning or math needed, I'd just eyeball it.
- ok_dad 4y agoDrawing is hard enough for me that I can't imagine just kicking some dirt around for a few days to draw even a 10m stick figure, but I do get your point that it would definitely be easier than trying to draw a 50m, and in turn even harder for a 500m figure.
- spinlock 4y agoSouth America was also much more populous than North America. I suspect we weren’t as successful at eliminating stouthearted americas culture.
- bpodgursky 4y agoIt's kind of unclear. It's also possible that because of the slower exploration and settlement of North America, we simply never saw the large societies before they collapsed from disease (especially true of the Mississippian cultures) — Europeans only came through in force a hundred years later.
- spinlock 4y agoIt’s so unclear. There’s so much we don’t know about America it’s pretty insane.
- shipman05 4y agoIf you want to build to last, build with stone.
- bokohut 4y agoA simple and concise statement backed by undeniable proof found in monuments around the world of which some modern man still cannot explain as we continue to discover such artifacts as our technology aided exploration expands. My additional comments to this comes from personal experience in this arena in the last decade of my own local discoveries that are directly linked to Native and Paleo occupation on the land of which I live and the surrounding area. Over ten years ago now I found my first artifact laying on the surface behind my house and in that time I have done hundreds of hours of research and well over a thousand hours of walking in which I have discovered many artifacts to date. Several accredited individuals and organizations have visited my location to see my finds as I attempt to get the surrounding areas studied for preservation from what the experts have informed me on my collection. As with anything however someone must take up the preservation battle and while I continue to discover items weekly my professional background is not in artifacts nor land preservation. I'll close with another statement for one to ponder just as shipman05 did: Nearly everything humans have created that is no longer needed either gets buried by another human or by nature in time.
- tomcam 4y agoWait, you're not going to tell us what artifacts you found or what country you're in? You're killing me here!
- bokohut 4y agoTo satisfy my conscience I humbly make this post to save tomcam’s life. Stay with me! ;) My findings include artifacts that are carved from stone and shell along with relics fired from clay with items that date back 10,000+ years per sources. Off topic and therefore not previously stated I only mentioned pre modern man artifacts given the discussion however I have located so much more. I live in the Eastern coastal mid Atlantic region of the United States of America which has a very long and documented history of human occupation, aka people losing things. For those reading this that have wanted to find such an artifact I can assure that such things are everywhere however one just needs to invest the time to look and comprehend one's surroundings. Just as the article concludes "There’s more out there to be found, but they have to be looked for".
- formerkrogemp 4y agoI spoke with an archaeologist and interpreter recently at an archaeological park with mounds from the Mississippian people period. They said that the archaeological park might have easily been dozed over if events had turned out differently. I suspect that North American pre-columbian construction is often obscured by a century of modern development and centuries of farming now. Much of what might have been is now crushed under our tractors or buried under our malls, highways, and houses. I wonder what people living here before us were like and what lessons they might teach us.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoNative Americans aren't gone, they're just quite a bit less populous post-colonization. You can still find nations like the Natchez and the Choctaw whose ancestors built mounds and ask them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez_people
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoIndeed speaking in the past tense about indigenous Americans is a long standing artifact of colonial ideology which has the effect of diminishing the present day reality of natives on this land. I was fairly recently shocked upon a trip to the Museum of Natural History in NY where plaque upon plaque in the section about pacific NW peoples spoke about the Haida and related people in the past tense and proudly displayed what were in all likelihood stolen artifacts. My son was sent home with homework a couple years ago that spoke about the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe etc) all in past tense grammar. Meanwhile we have close family friends who are Ojibwe. In Canada at least there has been a bit of a reversal in this trend, with more recognition of the present day nations. And in fact there's actually demographic growth among many first nations here, while the broader European settler derived society is in a demographic decline (solved only by immigration).
- gen220 4y agoSituations like these, with the right teacher, are great eye-opening moments for children. I still remember a unit in US history, in which we were asked to write an essay expounding on the evolving nature of woman's role in American society from the antebellum period through reconstruction (1820s-1890s). I think just about everybody in the class interpreted the question as being one about "white" women, and wrote their essays accordingly. The next lecture opened with this meta-fact, and rather than shame us about it, she used it as a wedge to open a discussion on how the overwhelming majority of writing on American history is authored from a male, generally Western European lens. Most of our essays told of monotonically expanding rights and freedom (Seneca Falls was in 1848, the various feminist movements were gaining steam at the state level around property rights and suffrage). But this time period saw Indigenous women undergo the Trail of Tears and the institutionalization of reservations and forced relocation. It also saw enslaved women experience Emancipation only to be followed with the failure of reconstruction and the installment of Jim Crow. --- This was over 10 years ago, and I still remember the lesson in so much detail! And find it useful when reading history today. Every time we uncover a blind spot and cure some ignorance, we're making progress.
- altacc 4y agoI've read a bit around this topic and a rather plausible explanation is that in North America, the European settler mentality was that the north was all empty land. Acknowledging the presence of native American towns, cities, farmlands, etc... would have brought up the inconvenient subject of ownership of the land. It was much more convenient to declare the native Americans as barbarians with little culture & society and the land unused and open to be claimed by European settlers. Inaccurate societal tropes about native Americans still persist today and education about their history is still lacking. South America was more populated but also the European tactic was of conquest of the natives, not total eradication & displacement (although they did an effective job at those as well).
- kodah 4y ago> It was much more convenient to declare the native Americans as barbarians with little culture & society and the land unused and open to be claimed by European settlers. I went to a US public school in the South and also went to a private school. We spent most semesters of history learning about Native American civilizations, construction, and at one point had to build small-scale physical replicas of their cities. That's to say, I don't really buy your explanation for the broader US. Maybe specific pockets. What I do think is more likely is that people believe that warring kingdoms were still normal back then and view Native American tribes as just that - kingdoms that were conquered. That much I can live with, but the constant lying and taking back promises we made to the Native Americans is absolute trash and should be rectified.
- zasdffaa 4y agoCities, yeah? Big ones? I know of mesoamerican cities like Tenochtitlan but I am unaware of any north american Indian cities (to be fair, I'm not from the USA), so some pointers would be very welcome indeed.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoHere are two: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cahokia-mounds-state-historic-site-world-heritage-site.htm https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cahokia-mounds-state-histor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaco_Culture_National_Historical_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaco_Culture_National_Histo...
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoMuch of it was deliberately destroyed and obscured. Large parts of Cahokia were destroyed by highway and suburban development, and it wasn't that city planners and officials didn't know it was there. They often suppressed discoveries and tried to cut archaeologists out of the loop, because the artifacts and etc were in the way of development goals. Many North American cities were built on top of or near where native settlements were. It was in the best interests of colonials and moderns to suppress or diminish findings. That and North Americans were engaged in a long running cultural genocide based on a mission of Christianizing a 'primitive' people, which would have been undermined by recognizing this area as previously occupied by a settled agricultural societies. https://www.amazon.ca/Cahokia-Ancient-Americas-Great-Mississippi/dp/0143117475/ https://www.amazon.ca/Cahokia-Ancient-Americas-Great-Mississ... is a great book on this topic written by an archaeologist who spent much of his life working around Cahokia. And he gets into this issue at length.
- stephenhuey 4y agoSeveral years ago I visited the Cahokia museum and went on top of a large mound with a St. Louis native who had only barely heard of it even though it's just across the Mississippi River from the main part of the city. I'm hoping they're able to dig up a lot of interesting finds before I visit again someday.
- tomcam 4y agoThere was no long-running cultural genocide. There was tons of unintentional spreading of disease, which of course had a similar effect.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoI believe you're confusing "genocide" and "cultural genocide." You can argue there was no long running genocide, but it's very hard to deny things like residential schools or forced child abduction aren't cultural genocide.
- tomcam 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ch4s3 4y agoI think straightforwardly the Nazca lines are totally unique and pyramids of Mexico are undeniable in their impressiveness. Poverty Point and the mounds are mistakable as weird hills, and were mostly uninhabited by the time settlers arrived.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoMany iconic Mexican pyramids were also weird hills before they were excavated and restored in the 20th century and similarly unused. Here's one example [1]. Even major cities like Tikal were essentially unknown until systematic mapping of the areas around the more obvious pyramids revealed their true extents. [1]: https://i.redd.it/jj7y8vn3lir51.png https://i.redd.it/jj7y8vn3lir51.png
- ch4s3 4y agoYea that’s true but Europeans wrote detailed accounts of the structures at their apogee, documenting their use and the culture of their builders. We’ll, at least in some places.
- jltsiren 4y agoI think the reasons are fairly obvious. People remember great centralized empires. They remember societies with extensive written records. Cultures that impressed their conquerors. Areas with contiguity of centralized civilization. Monuments that are noteworthy on the global scale. When those things are missing, past societies fade into obscurity. Even in Europe, ancient cultures are mostly remembered from their interactions with Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern societies. European history effectively begins with the spread of Greco-Roman influence, which in many cases was well into the middle ages. Whatever there was before is now mostly forgotten.