how come Native North Americans didn’t have vast empires of wealth and cities like Montezuma had down in Mexico?
In: 2227
They weren’t needed. People build the civilization they need. No vast marauding army plunged through North America conquering all before it, so the trappings of strength inherent in large fenced cities was unnecessary. The drive for wealth usually exists as a means to either conquer, or resist conquest. While wars happened among North American natives, and empires definitely existed (example: the Iriqoius) they were generally about dominance rather than territory per se.
Furthermore, metalworking technology, while it seems to have existed in some form in certain places in the New World, was a novel notion in most of North America, which really limits the technological ability to have large scale civilization. In a very real sense the Bronze Age seems to have mostly not happened in North America.
The lack of written language probably also contributed to this. When there is no written language, it’s much harder to retain progress. In the Old World (or at least most of it, looking at you subsaharan Africa!) writing is ancient. It was also present in mesoamerica and Inca lands, although the Conquistadors pissed off whole generations of historians by burning most of the libraries. It really wasn’t present north of the Rio Grande, which means that any genuine progress that was made tended to last for a generation, then fade.
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