Hey, /his/, I don't come here often, so excuse me if this

>>2847484
Didn't the Cherokee built semi-permanent settlements all over their territory?

I'm no expert on the subject but their villages seemed in my opinion too complex to be merely temporal refuge. Makes sense you'd built them out of wood if you live in the middle of the forest tho.

>>2847484
they had to much land and so few people that staying in one spot rather then following herds was stupid. Cities are centers for trade and it's hard to set one up when the next large group of purple live so fucking far away

>>2847504
I think they did have settlements that I think are referred to as mounds, but just like you said, "Semi-permanent" I'm meaning permanent in more of a sense like Cuzco, which was continuously inhabited for hundreds of years before Spaniards even found it.
However, I sure ain't an expert either. I could be completely wrong, and they lived there for hundreds of years too.

>>2847513
That could explain it for the prarie Indians who relied so heavily on Bison, but what about the Cherokee? They relied more heavily on plants and fruits than animals. That's not to say they didn't hunt, they certainly did, but they didn't follow herds.

>Sorry to keep referencing Cherokees, but they are the ones native to where I live, and they are also just a generally well-known group

>>2847484
How would they tramsport all of that building material without horses for one? Would seem like a big, strenuous, stupid fucking thing to do when just surviving in those places were a challenge already

File: Screenshot_20170129-164441~2.png (1MB, 1080x739px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 1080x739px

>>2847578
The mayas had no horses

>>2847578
That is a reasonable point, however, the Inca, Maya, Aztec, etc. didn't have any domesticated animals better than llamas to assist in that, but left lasting structures. In fact I don't think they even used wheel and axle machinery. (I could be wrong about the wheel thing, but the first part I am sure of.)

>>2847596
Mayans knew about the wheel but for whatever autismal reason they refused to use it.

"Harsh land" is a shitty excuse to be honest, the peruvian highland is inhospitable af yet Incans built entire stone cities in sylvan mountaintops with farming terraces and all

>>2847618
Honestly out of all of the american landscapes the North American tribes had some of the easiest to live in. Probably why they were so contempt with their primitive life styles.

>>2847484
The Spaniards than tried to conquer North America in search of the seven cities of gold found lots of settled indians in little towns/cities. The biggest city they found was about 10.000 people strong and wrecked it when the indians got uppity. So they had cities and even stone cities (missisipians) but were a lot smaller than the messo/andean ones.

>>2847596
Fair enough. I still believe the inference that the mayans were simply more intelligent or hardier to be unfounded. Horses are certainly too narrow a factor to generalize things. suppose the difference was agrarian then

>>2847484

I think their cultUte Never had need for something like fortresses / castles or churches since they never had any central "governmental body" with leaders who wanted to build lasting legacies to be remembered.

Also the oldest consumer behavior

"If it's not broken; don't fix it"

>>2847484
For such a huge question, this actually has a pretty simple answer. It's not the ONLY answer - there are a lot of reasons the groups in the US and Canada weren't as developed as the Meso- and South American groups - but a big one is that they had a several-century lag on getting the whole civilization thing going because they received high-density staple crops like maize, squashes etc much later.

Most of those crops are native to Mexico and Central America and unsurprisingly were first domesticated there. Maize and squashes are native to Mexico, starchy tubers like potatoes are native to the Andes. Further, there's less of a geographical barrier between Central and South America than between Mexico and the US - I'm not saying the geography in Central America is easy to traverse, but it was easier for crops and so on to spread south than north, which is why the South American groups had maize etc centuries before the groups in the US.

It's also not true that only the Meso and South American groups made lasting permanent settlements; plenty of groups in the US lived in permanent agricultural settlements, and some of them had very large cities (like the Mississippians, as anon mentioned above). It's no surprise that if you look at the size of their cities, the spread of "civilization" (i.e. population density and permanent settlements) more or less follows the diffusion of maize into the US, with some exceptions (i.e. the areas with shitty land that wasn't suitable for farming, the groups that learned to farm other crops like sunflowers). If you're wondering why, by and large, their cities were less spectacular than the ones in Meso and South America, it's because the Maya, Inca etc had a pretty significant head start.

Give the tribes in the US a couple more centuries of development and they probably would have had very large cities with striking monumental architecture like the Maya etc did.

Sorry for writing so much!

Anasazi - good concept of lasting (not permanent) settlement society/civilization.

It is not proven, but IMO they made the same mistake like Nazca people or Ester-Island lost tribe - exploitation of near environment. While historians point at climate changes (especially vital for irrigation) - country that was stripped of the large flora (trees) and changed into plain fields, is much prone to any climate change, drought... both Nazca (Peru?... south America anyway), and Anasazi showed knowledge of astronomy, nature, irrigation, so we may consider them advanced. Still they had to abandon their town(s) and disperse into smaller tribes (or be lost/assimilated).

Why only Anasazi were city builders and why there were not more such cities?
Difficult to tell nowadays, but most tribes in the norther USA and Canada were hunters and as such, they were much more efficient if they were able to move with their prey. Also, there was for their population enough food, without focusing on much more efficient crops/mais , basically farming.
So in my opinion, the concept of stone-city-based civilization, is:
Step 1: need of farms
Step 2: protection of farms (and people working on them)
Step 3: need of social hierarchy
Step 4: building centers of power + protection (cities + pyramids/castles...)

So I believe that in the northern USA and Canada, there was no overpopulation and hence the lack of the need to specialize (in farming in this case)

Interesting side note: native Americans refer to Anasazi as "the ancient enemy" or such..interesting IMO.