Why did large-scale agriculture not take off in North America

but more important, why didn´t the red man tame the buffalo?

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There is at least one example of heavily agrarian, urban settlement in pre-contact North America at Cahokia, which had at least 15,000 people at its peak, probably many more.

Since Cahokia is largely viewed as continuous with earlier mound-building cultures, and the descendants of the Cahokians populated vast regions of America at the time of contact (Mississippian culture), it seems that the story of Cahokia represents a critical moment in the history of North American Indians.

The reasons for its fall are complex but generally attributed to a period of severe flooding, an earthquake and deforestation.

One can imagine another universe where Cahokia was never abandoned and the entire history of North American indigenous peoples looks very different.

But my own opinion is that the Natives had a cultural, technological and ecological system of living which frankly worked for them; this is why the people who left Cahokia went back to the woods. They essentially flourished, and in a way pattern that was basically unique to America.

It involved low population distributions, villages dotting the country, seasonal migrations, the use of forest burning to increase game stocks, and a low intensity agriculture that provided squash, beans and corn. Their understanding of the world provided them with a full context of meaning for these activities.

>>1440548

There seems to be a widespread assumption among westerners that civilization is meant to follow a specific template characterized by technological progress, population growth, urbanization, writing-based culture, animal husbandry etc.

We tend to think of hunter-gatherer / nomadic life as being harsh, greatly unpleasant and meager. This is simply not the case.

I think, instead, that once a people has made the transition into an urban, settled form of life, that this kind of evolution becomes possible and sometimes carries out. History as we think of it is born and human life gets carried away through its tectonic motions.

What's "large scale?" Several cultures had agriculture more sophisticated than Europeans at the time, and we're generally better fed.

>>1440612
How do I snap out of it? My family and friends are part of it. I feel stuck

>>1440706
Go build a shack in the woods.

>>1440706
Go to Alaska, work as a fisherman or at a cannery, live in your car and save all your earnings, read books about carpentry/homesteading in your downtime.

You could afford your own plot somewhere in the wilderness in less than 5 years.

>>1440579

Thanks for the info, native American history guy. I think you answered my last thread too about the Mississippian culture.

>>1440633
Nice b8

>>1440548

they arent really suited for domestication

It did. Everywhere outside of the plains and deserts were full of full time agriculturalist natives with extensive farmlands.

Disease and invasion quite literally wiped them out entirely. Our view of native Americans in NA is of the plains Indians, but in reality they were a small and insignificant amount of the real natives who were farmers and where in many places were starting to develop civilisations.

>>1441042

But it's true..

>>1440548
same reason the white man didn't tame the buffalo in europe as well.

>>1440706

Non nomadic life, like nomadic life, has its plusses and minuses. There are ways to have a good life in both.