Questions about Native Americans

EMTSATX

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I have a few questions about Native Americans, there are a lot of very knowledgeable people on this board and thought they could be answered. While I am asking questions that could be considered to be European's are better than Natives, I do not mean it that way at all. I admire a lot about certain nations. My best friend is a member of the Cheyenne nation.

Why did Natives not develop certain things like:

Written language I.e. when the European's arrived or later on.
Cities like in Europe or China?

A monotheistic religion.

Cartography.

Better weapons not excluding gun powder better fighting formations.

Some form of industry on a society level (not talking about animal utilization)

System of Government that's well defined.

Sea going trade and exploration.

I could go on, I have a lot of questions but I will stop now. Perhaps I will ask more if there. If there is any interest in this post. One more thing, and it is a big question. Where would Indian's be today if there was no contact with Europeans today (pick your reason) like a huge plague in the world that wipes out Asia and Europe.

I'm asking about North American plains (mostly). I know nothing about central or South America. I don't know enough about them. I don't want to discus the Aztecs or Mayans or any of the South American tribes. I realize the Pueblo built cliff buildings, which they abandoned with no real reason. I know the Cherokee developed a alphabet much later in the game and the Lakota people.
 

CalBear

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Well, they did.

The Aztec, Maya, and Inca had cities, large ones.

Several Mezzo-American cultures developed written or other sorts of recorded language (at least five distinct ones).

The Mississippian Culture had cities with up to 20,000 residents (Cahokia). Tical, in the Mayan Empire had a population of up to 90,000. Tenochtitian, the capital of the Aztec Empire had a population of 200,000+ (London at the same time had a population of 60,000).

One of the biggest difficulties we have with determining what North American culture was like is that by the time any serious effort was made to colonize the Eastern Seaboard, most of the NA population was dead from Old World diseases. What The English and French encountered were the remnants of a mass death that makes the Black Death look like a bad seasonal flu. 90%+ of NA's population died, often before the first European put a foot onto the shore in a region. The Islands where the first contact occurred were in regular trade with the NA mainland, When traders arrived from Cuba or any of the other Caribbean islands, they brought the diseases the Europeans had left with them, poisoning the entire continent.

It is like coming into the world of Max Max and asking why there were no cities or surviving industry. What we saw was the survivors of the End of Days.
 
Better weapons not excluding gun powder

Define better.

I mean, you can't blame folks for not having Metal weapons if Metal is hard to get/scarce/nonexistent. at that point it's basically a symbol of wealth, and there's no real reason to try and make those into weapons because there's so little.
 
I have a few questions about Native Americans, there are a lot of very knowledgeable people on this board and thought they could be answered. While I am asking questions that could be considered to be European's are better than Natives, I do not mean it that way at all. I admire a lot about certain nations. My best friend is a member of the Cheyenne nation.

Why did Natives not develop certain things like:

Written language I.e. when the European's arrived or later on.
Cities like in Europe or China?

A monotheistic religion.

Cartography.

Better weapons not excluding gun powder better fighting formations.

Some form of industry on a society level (not talking about animal utilization)

System of Government that's well defined.

Sea going trade and exploration.

I could go on, I have a lot of questions but I will stop now. Perhaps I will ask more if there. If there is any interest in this post. One more thing, and it is a big question. Where would Indian's be today if there was no contact with Europeans today (pick your reason) like a huge plague in the world that wipes out Asia and Europe.

I'm asking about North American plains (mostly). I know nothing about central or South America. I don't know enough about them. I don't want to discus the Aztecs or Mayans or any of the South American tribes. I realize the Pueblo built cliff buildings, which they abandoned with no real reason. I know the Cherokee developed a alphabet much later in the game and the Lakota people.

Cities - They had them. Tons of them. Even in the modern US there were cities, including on the Plains where Mississippian culture influenced traditions there--although on the Plains, "town" is a better word. The warmer years on the Plains helped those cultures expand even into Canada in parts. The main thing hindering settlement was the fact that (as on the East Coast), they'd tend to exhaust the soil in a few decades and thus move the village. They also needed to supplement their diet with protein, so oftentimes they'd leave in long hunting expeditions (or just trade for it with the more nomadic peoples there who became the ones to basically conquer them once said nomads got horses).

Written language - They had this though. Mesoamerica had written language both proto-writing and actual writing. But writing is a very rare invention, as evidenced by the fact that all of the world besides China and Japan use scripts derived from the Proto-Semitic alphabet.

Monotheism - Another rare invention, even rarer than writing. I don't know how many times it independently showed up aside from Akhenaton, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism, which some believe Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrianism in that regard.

Cartography - Not sure about this one. But they obviously did have a conception of their territory, though I think it was pretty flexible as to where the "borders" were since that wasn't really a concept in any of those cultures.

Better weapons - Lack of iron and bronze utilisation in any large scale plus the fact that what they had tended to work seems to be a good reason. It doesn't help that it some parts of the Americas (like the Mississippi area), organised civilisation was very new meaning it might've taken a while to get things started. There was an American Indian culture which used copper in the Great Lakes area.

Industry - What do you mean? The organised civilisations were extremely industrious peoples. All those mounds, those Andean roads, those incredible temples, etc. Am I misunderstanding you?

Government - They ruled based on tradition, which is basically what occurred in most every place prior to the 18th century, especially in pre-literate societies. Seems a bit overrated for a pre-modern civilisation. Then you have societies like the Comanche, Sioux, and yes, the Cheyenne that were basically an anarchist society that because of their lack of organisation became some of the most resilient societies in

Seagoing trade and exploration - Frequently occurred, even amongst the less organised societies. The Aleutian Islands were colonised relatively recently. The Haida raided down to Mexico, and fought the Chumash of California, who also engaged in seagoing trade. The Taino and others in the Caribbean were great explorers. Topa Inca Yupanqui allegedly sent out a great expedition into the Pacific. And trade routes stretched across the Americas long before the Europeans.

The Pueblo abandoned their more famous cliff dwellings because of several of many droughts in the Medieval Warm Period. Of course, they still had dwellings which they live in to this day and are incidentally the oldest towns in the United States by far. The Cherokee alphabet was of course inspired by encounters with the Latin alphabet and couldn't have been invented in that form prior to European contact.

Where would the American Indians be without European contact? That's pretty hard to say--I think it's impossible that neither Europe or Asia contacts them, so ASB death plague kills everyone there. I think we can tell their societies were getting more complex and organised as times went on, and the Mississippi region was on its way to becoming a third major center akin to Mesoamerica and the Andes.

It is like coming into the world of Max Max and asking why there were no cities or surviving industry. What we saw was the survivors of the End of Days.

Or witnessing and contributing to it as de Soto basically did.
 
What Calbear and these others said. They were able to go a lot farther than people think.

Not having domesticated animals was a huge setback to Native American progress. They had dogs, alpacas, and llamas and that was about it. Not having a horse or mule/donkey like animal (alpacas/llamas are very inferior substitutes) basically ensured that they weren't going to develop to the same level as Eurasians.

The other challenges they faced were geographic and geological. Europeans had two huge advantages that no one else in the world really did that took them very far. The first was that they were in a unique geographical position that allowed them close contact with tons of other cultures—and the ability to take in their innovations and leapfrog with them. When European ships were sailing to the New World they were using Chinese compasses, Egyptian trigonometry, Indian algebra, and innovations and knowledge from all around Europe to do so. Native Americans didn't have nearly as broad a range of cultures to draw knowledge from. They were also inhibited in traveling, trading, and exchanging knowledge with the ones they were in close proximity to. Europe has a ton of useful long rivers without navigation obstacles that made communication and trade routes easy to set up and it is surrounded by navigable and very useful seas and oceans. Getting around it on land is also relatively easy compared to North America; the place is mainly a flat, arable plain. There are some mountain ranges like the alps but they can be worked through and there are sea routes. North America is not such an easy place to get around in. The land is broken up by tons of mountain ranges, jungles, and deserts which makes land navigation tough, there are a lot fewer useful navigable rivers, and good harbors are less frequent. There are sea routes and they were used to an extent but the distances are mostly longer and transporting stuff inland from the coast is harder.

The geological reason only Europe really developed industry indigenously is that they were enormously privileged to have coal and iron located right next to rivers and ports. This was a godsend because without power there is no way to move amounts of coal large enough to be useful in industry around unless you happen to have a useful river or coastline right next to it. This is a problem in China for example even today; their coal deposits are not near anything like that so shipping them is difficult.

So that's some of the reasons.
 
What Calbear and these others said. They were able to go a lot farther than people think.

Not having domesticated animals was a huge setback to Native American progress. They had dogs, alpacas, and llamas and that was about it. Not having a horse or mule/donkey like animal (alpacas/llamas are very inferior substitutes) basically ensured that they weren't going to develop to the same level as Eurasians.

The other challenges they faced were geographic and geological. Europeans had two huge advantages that no one else in the world really did that took them very far. The first was that they were in a unique geographical position that allowed them close contact with tons of other cultures—and the ability to take in their innovations and leapfrog with them. When European ships were sailing to the New World they were using Chinese compasses, Egyptian trigonometry, Indian algebra, and innovations and knowledge from all around Europe to do so. Native Americans didn't have nearly as broad a range of cultures to draw knowledge from. They were also inhibited in traveling, trading, and exchanging knowledge with the ones they were in close proximity to. Europe has a ton of useful long rivers without navigation obstacles that made communication and trade routes easy to set up and it is surrounded by navigable and very useful seas and oceans. Getting around it on land is also relatively easy compared to North America; the place is mainly a flat, arable plain. There are some mountain ranges like the alps but they can be worked through and there are sea routes. North America is not such an easy place to get around in. The land is broken up by tons of mountain ranges, jungles, and deserts which makes land navigation tough, there are a lot fewer useful navigable rivers, and good harbors are less frequent. There are sea routes and they were used to an extent but the distances are mostly longer and transporting stuff inland from the coast is harder.

The geological reason only Europe really developed industry indigenously is that they were enormously privileged to have coal and iron located right next to rivers and ports. This was a godsend because without power there is no way to move amounts of coal large enough to be useful in industry around unless you happen to have a useful river or coastline right next to it. This is a problem in China for example even today; their coal deposits are not near anything like that so shipping them is difficult.

So that's some of the reasons.

Well, the Americas have those four huge mostly navigable river systems that drain into the Atlantic, which connect most of the eastern parts of the two continents - add coastal navigation and you have potentially a completely connected system.
A pity that most American agriculture developed elsewhere, in the Pacific side highlands - yes, both the Amazon and the Mississipi basins had settled societies and developed local crop packages (the Mississipian one later mostly overtaken by the richer one of Mesoamerican origin) but they remained relatively backward areas when compared to the highlands of the Andes and Mesoamerica, where the more diverse and productive crop packages had been developed earlier.
The Amazon also lacks a lot of critical materials - they basically had to do with wood (lots of it), clay, and some stone (probably not high quality).
The Andeans had pretty good bronze working by the way, although most of their tool inventory still relied on stone stuff. The Mesoamerican metal working was slowly moving toward Early Bronze Age at the time of the Conquest apparently, although again, they employed mostly stone.
Which incidentally makes Mesoamerican achievements even more impressive: they barely had the faintest notion of bronze, but they had cities larger than most European ones, with far better sanitation, acqueducts, public architecture (for rather gruesome purposes) etc. than anything existing in Europe at the same time. They also had what you could legitimately call philosophy. Their calendric system was as precise as its European counterpart if not more. They had preceded Eurasia in developing a positional numbering system with zero. They produced written and illustrated books (would it be too anachronistic to call the latter "comics"?).
In the Andes, you also have a strange situation. The Incan Empire was a complex polity, the result of political awareness as sophisticated as anything you could expect on the other side of the Ocean (although the premises were different). Yeah, it was a palatial theocracy, but a very refined one. And they did not even have true writing (although there has to be more to their quipu system of strings for record-keeping than we currently understand) to run it all.
Perhaps the most striking results achieved by Native Americans, however, are the works of countless generations of peasants whose voice will never come down to us. The people who somehow turned tiny teosinte into one insanely productive crop - maize, and developed so many varieties of. The ones who inventes nixtamalization. The ones who selected potatoes and sweet potatoes into other insanely productive and nutritious domesticates, the ones who created terra preta. The ones who sowed and plowed and got sustenance and surplus from the Amazon Basin, the Peten jungle, the arid valleys of New Mexico, the cold and dry slopes of the Central Andean Cordillera - with stone and wood implements and little animal domesticates if any.
 
Written language I.e. when the European's arrived or later on.

As Metalinvader665 points out above, wholly independent writing was a rare event in human history; in fact, it's only been proven to have been generated twice, and one of these was in Mesoamerica. The Olmecs, Zapotecs, Mayans, and Aztecs all made use of sophisticated varieties of scripts in the pre-Columbian period, including an independent numeral system that encoded zero. The quipu system of the Andes was also likely a form of proto-writing.

A monotheistic religion.

While the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas are known for having polytheistic religions similar to the ancient Indo-European and Semitic ones, there were/are tribes with a concept of an omnipresent force or spirit that unites all other spiritual forces and lesser beings; in modern times this is often referred to as "Creator". The Lakhota Wakan Tanka or general Algonquian Manitou are examples of this concept.

System of Government that's well defined.

As others have pointed out, there were many complex and sophisticated Indigenous governments in the pre-Columbian Americas, not least being the empires of the Incas and Aztecs, and the city-kingdoms of the Maya and other Mesoamerican people such as the Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and Tarascans (Purépecha). One example from North America that hasn't been mentioned yet is the Iroquois Confederacy. The traditional governments of the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona are still in operation today as well.
 
As Metalinvader665 points out above, wholly independent writing was a rare event in human history; in fact, it's only been proven to have been generated twice, and one of these was in Mesoamerica. The Olmecs, Zapotecs, Mayans, and Aztecs all made use of sophisticated varieties of scripts in the pre-Columbian period, including an independent numeral system that encoded zero. The quipu system of the Andes was also likely a form of proto-writing.

More likely three: there is no evidence that China borrowed writing for Mesopotamia. For Mesopotamia and Egypt, the case is more complex, as the systems appear to be fully independent but general considerations suggest (without clear evidence at all) some degree of mutual influence in the basic idea out of simple proximity in space and time.
However, the certainly independent inventions of writing are two: Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.


While the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas are known for having polytheistic religions similar to the ancient Indo-European and Semitic ones, there were/are tribes with a concept of an omnipresent force or spirit that unites all other spiritual forces and lesser beings; in modern times this is often referred to as "Creator". The Lakhota Wakan Tanka or general Algonquian Manitou are examples of this concept.

This hardly counts as monotheism (unless you consider vaguely similar ideas in Hinduism and Daoism to do so).

As others have pointed out, there were many complex and sophisticated Indigenous governments in the pre-Columbian Americas, not least being the empires of the Incas and Aztecs, and the city-kingdoms of the Maya and other Mesoamerican people such as the Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and Tarascans (Purépecha). One example from North America that hasn't been mentioned yet is the Iroquois Confederacy. The traditional governments of the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona are still in operation today as well.

The Pueblo traditional governments are very small-scale though, and I suppose them to have been such since the fall of Chaco Canyon. Still, they appear to have institutionalized effective ways to minimize conflict. The Iroquois are indeed an excellent example of a sophisticated governance system (it has been said to have inspired the US Constitution. I find this dubious but not impossible).
In general, Native Americans had governance as complex and sophisticated as the any Old World society of comparable complexity, with some outstanding feats of management and problem solving.
 
My question regarding this topic: How did the Natives replace their original tools/weapons (bones,stone ?) with iron ? Did they made the spikes and devices of their Arrows,Tomahawks,spears themselves ? Did they eventually create iron ala Celts with European influence or did they craft iron devices they got from Europeans through trade ?
 
My question regarding this topic: How did the Natives replace their original tools/weapons (bones,stone ?) with iron ? Did they made the spikes and devices of their Arrows,Tomahawks,spears themselves ? Did they eventually create iron ala Celts with European influence or did they craft iron devices they got from Europeans through trade ?

I think they mostly got Iron through trade. There are known exceptions (the Inuit did work the natural iron deposits of Greenland, and they don't seem to have needed any European stimulus for that, but that was limited and extremely low-level metallurgy) but in general most Natives who were not subjugated post-contact had semi-nomadic lifelstyles that did allow little in the way of mining or metalworking - I think another exception were the Iroquois and neighbouring nations, as well as the Cherokee, after a certain time - but I suppose this was close to time they were going to subsumed into the European system.
 
They had a lot of those things, especially in Central and South America. The Nahua may not have had gunpowder, but they had a written language and huge cities - Tenochtitlan alone had more than 200,000 people in a highly dense urban environment serviced by multiple causeways, watered by at least two aqueducts and protected by a complex system of levees, functioning in a complex political society with a highly defined governance structure with city-states, nation-states and alliances. The city even had a neighbourhood structure based on urban planning. In some ways they were even ahead of western Europeans - I've heard it said that the people of Tenochtitlan used to bathe twice a day, while at this point in time the common thought in Europe was to wash only the parts of your body visible outside your clothes.

The Inca also had an enormously complex governance and especially economic structure (the so-called vertical archipelago).

You had complex societies in North America, too - the city of Cahokia, for ex, would've had about 40,000 people in the 1200s, and that was in southwestern Illinois. There's some evidence that the Mississippians were a complex and fairly advanced society in their own right. But between the De Soto expedition and the next contact, you had a hundred-year period during which epidemics killed a truly obscene number of people. Further north, the Haudenosaunee were (and still are) a complex democratic society with movable cities and an elective form of government.

A lot of this has been covered earlier in the thread by Calbear and others, but the First Nations had a lot of the things you mention. Gunpowder not so much. A lot of the advantages Europe had seemingly come from it having a much higher population. More people in a smaller space means more opportunities for trade and exchange of technologies. North America in particular is vast and a lot of its land is wide-open plains, and you have some mountainous barriers separating the coasts from the interior. It's hard to form a critical mass in population terms when your people are spread out across a huge steppe-like landscape.
 
I'm asking about North American plains (mostly). I know nothing about central or South America. I don't know enough about them. I don't want to discus the Aztecs or Mayans or any of the South American tribes. I realize the Pueblo built cliff buildings, which they abandoned with no real reason. I know the Cherokee developed a alphabet much later in the game and the Lakota people.

While you've gotten some good answers, people seem to have missed this bit so I'll jump in to try and give you a more specific answer. Simpy put, the Great Plains are a very difficult environment for large numbers of people (using pre-modern technology) to survive in, and most of what you've asked about requires a high population. Monuments, cities, centralized governments, a scribe class to do the writing, all of these require very large numbers of people-which in turn require lots of water and fertile soil to grow crops in. When you consider the fact that the Great Plains used to be called the Great Desert, it makes sense-they just can't support the abundant maize harvests necessary to feed a large population. That is why the Plains Indians generally did not have the same cultural structures as the more densely populated Native American societies. That said, some groups like the Mandan who lived alongside rivers in the Plains did have farming, and with it more centralized societies than their nomadic neighbors like the Comanche or the Lakota.

I could go on, I have a lot of questions but I will stop now. Perhaps I will ask more if there. If there is any interest in this post. One more thing, and it is a big question. Where would Indian's be today if there was no contact with Europeans today (pick your reason) like a huge plague in the world that wipes out Asia and Europe.

You probably want to read the book "Years of Rice and Salt", which is about a Europe that is almost killed off by the black death and basically part of the alt-Hist canon.

If we imagine an ASB sealing up the Americas in 1491...well, that's too big for one post. To focus on the Plains, IMHO it would still be home to nomadic peoples, albeit people with dogs (and llamas, if the sea trade from South America to Mesoamerica gets *really* intense) instead of horses. Different cultivars of maize and possible potatoes would create denser settlements along river valleys, but I can't imagine the Native Americans being crazy enough to try to cultivate the Plains as intensely as the Euro-American settlers. These river valley settlements will alternate between the influence of the nomads (trading with wandering bands, perhaps giving them tribute to stave off raids) and the influence of larger farming societies in the East and possibly in the South if Mesoamerican nations really expand their reach (paying tribute to distant kings in those areas, modelling their religious practices on these societies, etc.)
 
Sorry, I lost the remark about the Great Plains.
Regarding the cliff dwellings of the Southwest, however, they were abandoned for a very good reason, in one word: drought. The harvests were not sufficient to maintain the population in those areas when rainfall went too scarce or erratic, so people moved (to the middle Rio Grande, mainly) and adopted a pattern of smaller-ish settlements.
 
Central and South America just make much better cradles of civilization than North America, which outside of the Mississippi basin is really mostly plains and mountains.

In a lot of ways, North America's Great Plains and tundra regions have a lot in common with the Eurasian Steppe and Siberia - you have a vast, thinly-peopled grassland with a cold forest on top, and then permafrost. Even today, most of the North American population is concentrated on the coasts and around the Great Lakes, and the interior is sometimes given the label "Flyover Country." You get a similar pattern of nomadic cultures on the Great Plains and more concentrated cultures like the Haudenosaunee and the Mississippians drawn to the sources of fresh water and good land - the river and the Great Lakes, basically.

You did have some coastal groups; the Beothuk of Newfoundland, for instance, fished the Grand Banks as part of their way of life, until French and British colonial settlements pushed them out of their fishing grounds and forced them to over-hunt the caribou to try and survive. Even with their relatively small numbers they had some complex traditions, like the societal role of ochre and the distinctiveness of the mamateek. You've also got groups like the Mi'kmaq who moved to follow the smelt and the herring and then back to the seashore, choosing not to settle in part because Nova Scotia is just crap land for farming in the pre-modern world. (That's true for most of Canada outside the areas in the Great Lakes where the Haudenosaunee live, incidentally, and some parts of the West and the Okanagan region.) They still had complex systems of government and treaty negotiation, not just with outsiders, but with other tribes. As to the Haudenosaunee, their system of government was clearly defined and with an elective element, to the point that there's some mention out there of the American Constitution-writers taking some of their concepts. You got a range of societies in North America, from plains nomads to the Five/Six Nations confederacy.

There were plenty of functional societies and defined governments in North America. There were even cities, like Cahokia, or the settlements the Haudenosaunee would build where they'd have a city for a quarter-century or so and then move it somewhere else. Most of my knowledge is Canada-related, though, and Canada just has never been good land.
 
Better weapons not excluding gun powder better fighting formations.
It's noteworthy that North American indigenous peoples had the bow, presumably developed independently from the European bow, or from some genesis weapon from the days of the land bridge or other means of population movement.
 
Well, the Americas have those four huge mostly navigable river systems that drain into the Atlantic, which connect most of the eastern parts of the two continents - add coastal navigation and you have potentially a completely connected system.
A pity that most American agriculture developed elsewhere, in the Pacific side highlands - yes, both the Amazon and the Mississipi basins had settled societies and developed local crop packages (the Mississipian one later mostly overtaken by the richer one of Mesoamerican origin) but they remained relatively backward areas when compared to the highlands of the Andes and Mesoamerica, where the more diverse and productive crop packages had been developed earlier.

Which is really too bad for the Mississippians. I've wondered if they'd further developed their own crop package whether their civilisation wouldn't have been in such decline by the time Europeans showed up. It would give more diversity to their agriculture.

There's also other areas of potential that sadly never developed on their own, like California (San Joaquin River) and possibly the Columbia River valley. The San Joaquin Valley appears to be one of the most densely populated areas of California in the pre-Columbian era.

My question regarding this topic: How did the Natives replace their original tools/weapons (bones,stone ?) with iron ? Did they made the spikes and devices of their Arrows,Tomahawks,spears themselves ? Did they eventually create iron ala Celts with European influence or did they craft iron devices they got from Europeans through trade ?

They didn't. They were basically wholly dependent on European trade for their implements, though enough of it got into the trading networks that they didn't always need to trade with Europeans. But they were still dependent enough on Europeans that it really crippled them at times. Dependency on Europeans was noted on many occasions in colonial times by both settlers and Indians, and the Spanish even devised a way to gain the upper hand against various peoples who raided New Mexico by using their dependency on trade goods against them.

I think they mostly got Iron through trade. There are known exceptions (the Inuit did work the natural iron deposits of Greenland, and they don't seem to have needed any European stimulus for that, but that was limited and extremely low-level metallurgy) but in general most Natives who were not subjugated post-contact had semi-nomadic lifelstyles that did allow little in the way of mining or metalworking - I think another exception were the Iroquois and neighbouring nations, as well as the Cherokee, after a certain time - but I suppose this was close to time they were going to subsumed into the European system.

I thought everyone aside from the Mississippians, Puebloans, and possibly a few I'm missing north of the Rio Grande were semi-nomadic (or fully nomadic) to some extent, just they only moved every few decades once they exhausted the soil where their villages were at. Some villages moved more, and some relied more on hunting/gathering than others thanks to their less advantageous locations compared to others (like the aforementioned Mandan as well as those settlements on the Canadian Prairie I mentioned).

If we imagine an ASB sealing up the Americas in 1491...well, that's too big for one post. To focus on the Plains, IMHO it would still be home to nomadic peoples, albeit people with dogs (and llamas, if the sea trade from South America to Mesoamerica gets *really* intense) instead of horses. Different cultivars of maize and possible potatoes would create denser settlements along river valleys, but I can't imagine the Native Americans being crazy enough to try to cultivate the Plains as intensely as the Euro-American settlers. These river valley settlements will alternate between the influence of the nomads (trading with wandering bands, perhaps giving them tribute to stave off raids) and the influence of larger farming societies in the East and possibly in the South if Mesoamerican nations really expand their reach (paying tribute to distant kings in those areas, modelling their religious practices on these societies, etc.)

Llamas are pretty poor to do anything with but making them pull things and of course their coats. No doubt the Navajo will appreciate them.

If you had the right plows, you could introduce farming onto the Plains in general the way it is now, in which case I think you'd transition to small towns/villages around regional hubs (the way it is now). But I don't know who's going to be inventing them. And if no one ever gets a good riding animal, then the farming peoples will always have the advantage.

It's noteworthy that North American indigenous peoples had the bow, presumably developed independently from the European bow, or from some genesis weapon from the days of the land bridge or other means of population movement.

It was also a pretty late invention and in places took centuries to fully displace previous hunting technology. My interpretation is that it might've been accompanied by migrations and displacement/absorption of other groups going by what I've read about the archaeology associated with it.
 
Llamas are pretty poor to do anything with but making them pull things and of course their coats. No doubt the Navajo will appreciate them.

One idea I batted around (don't think it made it to any timelines) was having large animals using travois inspire the creation of a scratch plow. Mind you, plowing the Great Plains has it's disadvantages, i.e. the Oklahoma dust bowl during the Great Depression. However, this can be avoided by having fields lie fallow, and planting legumes or other plants that will return fertility to the soil.

Also, keep in mind that Mesoamericans had wheels. If highland Mesoamericans actually did get llamas, adapting their wheels from toys to wagons would act as a force multiplier for the loads llamas can help transport (though pound for pound it might still be more efficient to have llamas transport things on their backs).
 
Sorry, I lost the remark about the Great Plains.
Regarding the cliff dwellings of the Southwest, however, they were abandoned for a very good reason, in one word: drought. The harvests were not suffic BMTient to maintain the population in those areas when rainfall went too scarce or erratic, so people moved (to the middle Rio Grande, mainly) and adopted a pattern of smaller-ish settlements.

The most recent science suggests the droughts were not severe enough to cause the abandonment. Rather, the droughts along with ideological changes among the Rio Grande Pueblos (most likely the adoption of the Kachina) created a push of the drought along with the pull of a more functional society led to the abandonment.
 
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