Mexico and Central America have plenty of ancient, monumental structures (e.g., Chichen Itza). But the continental US and Canada do not. Why?
In: Engineering
A few do exist. Cahokia (just outside of St Louis) is a World Heritage Site and the largest extant ancient ruins in North America. Aztlan (in Wisconsin) was built by the same culture and is a very similar site, just on a smaller scale. Great Serpent Mound, in Ohio, is a massive burial site on a horizontal scale that rivals Giza, though the fact that it’s less vertical and not in a desert obscures a lot of its grandure (trees do that). Speaking of desert, various cliff dwellings in the southwest (most notably Mesa Verde in Colorado) are astonishing in their scope and complexity.
Part of the problem is just geology. The major civilizations of ancient North America were heavily clustered in the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. These are great places for a stable agricultural society, but much less great for hard stone building materials like what you need to build Chichen Itza. Most of the places with good access to stone building materials were also comparatively bad for agriculture. The Nile Delta is a relatively unique phenomenon with respect to geology, geography, local biota, and proximity to early homo sapiens evolution. The combination of an arid climate (which helps preserve everything, since rain and humidity are awful for stuff), easily accessible bedrock veins, and abundant access to incredibly fertile soil and reliable water is not something that happens in many places around the world. The Colorado River delta in present-day North-Western Mexico is the closest thing that I can think of anywhere else in the world, and it’s not as good as the Nile in any of these respects (and also was first inhabited about a million years after the Nile was).
The Columbia River gorge strikes me as one counter-example to this, though I’m not aware of any large hierarchical societies (a la the Mississippians, Aztec, Maya, or Inca) in that area despite its dense population and fertility.
So yeah… Tldr, the areas where civilizations flourished in North America didn’t have extensive stone building materials, so they built earthworks instead. These were spectacular, but they also erode much faster and are in locations where trees happily overgrow everything. You should visit Cahokia though, it’s really very impressive. A lot like what Chichen Itza would look like if they had to build it out of dirt rather than stone (I’ve spent time at both sites).
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