how come Native North Americans didn’t have vast empires of wealth and cities like Montezuma had down in Mexico?

Question

how come Native North Americans didn’t have vast empires of wealth and cities like Montezuma had down in Mexico?

In: 2227

Answer 1

There was definitely one at the height of the Mississippian Culture, with the suspected or likely capital at Cahokia. The book “Dawn of Everything” goes into a deep dive on it, but they suspect this empire was so brutal that it influenced Native political philosophy and, consequently, Enlightenment thinking, even hundreds of years later. Before the Mississippian culture, there seems to have at least been a sort of North American cultural sphere that was remarkably peaceful and relatively uniform; whether it was a conscious empire or just a large cultural group is unknown, but they built some impressive stuff.

Even afterwards, the Hodenasaunee or Iroquois Confederation was massive, bigger than the Triple Alliance by land area. The Comanche also conquered a massive amount of land and held it for a long time.

There are likely many amazing epics, wars, and stories of the highest caliber that we will never know thanks to one of the single greatest human tragedies in world history post contact.

I imagine we will learn a lot more about pre-contact North America as archeology continues to find more stuff. Archeology has already shown that significant populations were in the Americas before the last major Bering Strait migration, and possibly even non sapiens hominids before that.