Except that maize wasn't domesticated until long after wheat/cereals were domesticated in Eurasia.
Earliest maize - about 9000 yrs ago, about 2000 yrs ago for what's now the eastern USA.
Earliest wheat - about 23,000 yrs ago, in widespread use over 10,000 yrs ago.
Sources below:
The Domestication of Maize - History of American Corn: Maize: a 9,000 Year Old Radical Experiment in Plant Domestication
Wheat Domestication - The History and Origins of Floury Grains: The Origins of Wheat
Of course,
that time difference is probably due to the later arrival of humans in the Americas.
Probably not as much as you may be banking on. Remember that culture isn't linear or completely predictable. The Americas may have adopted agriculture a little later, but the time between the first recorded agriculture and the first recorded complex societies is also much shorter -- and occurring at roughly the same time as the Old World.
Unilineal cultural evolution is a myth that has been debunked by anthropologists for decades. I already said this before in this thread, but one can't just assume there's a single path for societies to follow and people who don't follow that particular one fast enough are 'backward', or to put it in another way, 'stuck' at some 'stage' in 'development'. In that sense it's meaningless to say
"okay they just arrived in this land as hunter-gatherers, so we can give them X amount of time before they become semi-sedentary and..." That doesn't work; real life is not designed by Sid Meier. As far as social sciences are concerned, time is not the primary mover of change. Not that there's much of a prime mover to begin with. You can get some ideas on how a people might choose to tackle their environment based on what's available, but there isn't only one way and it's ultimately up to that choice of a culture. Because history doesn't really work in 'stages', you can't judge a foreign culture by the development of one's own. For example, the Three Age system only
kind of works in parts of the Old World because of the coincidental convergence of certain cultural traditions through diffusion. We don't use it in other parts of the world, so for example it would be incredibly silly to say
"This culture developed sophisticated state societies with complex politics, accounting and engineering, able to manage highly diverse populations in excess of what the typical European city had, but they built their architecture with stone tools so they're a Stone Age civilization and therefore several millennia behind Europe".
Thankfully, there has been a rather successful history of outreach in education about the European 'Dark Ages' and how it's misleading to assume that 'progress' of some sort 'reversed' or 'stagnated' during this time when really people just adapted and came up with ways that benefited them more in those new geopolitical conditions than the old ways could have (and while we're on that subject, no evidence to suggest the Romans would have continued getting 'technologically advanced'). But what I think some people might not realize is this is the same logic we can apply to social and technological development in general.
It's also not a good idea to be like Jared Diamond and rely just on one framework for determining and predicting the whole human condition -- determinism is crap. Yes, external factors influence a society's actions. Yes, we must consider many of them. None of them override social agency and it is
very possible for human culture and individual decision to override our expectations for how they should act. Even if you think you have the whole culture figured out and have some idea of how that sum of ideas might respond to change,
then there's always going to be black sheep, unique groups and people with different ideas created themselves that will influence the larger culture and drive unexpected change. Sub-Saharan Africans independently developed iron working (and steel before it was common elsewhere) without a Bronze Age to speak of, or a long history of heavily urbanized agricultural state societies at that time. The infertile, sometimes toxic soils of the Amazon basin and southern Maya lowlands were the last places you'd expect complex, agricultural, state-level societies to arise, but people found a way that for a time benefited them quite well.
Well, I certainly didn't mean for this to turn into a mini-essay about historical teleology and cultural development. Topics like the pre-Columbian Americas usually come with a lot of misconceptions about the subject which usually tie in with the knowledge of anthropology as a whole -- maybe I get carried away. In short, though, just because a culture has a 'late start' doesn't mean it will never 'catch up'. Human beings as a whole are unpredictable and will always surprise you, defying our attempts at theory!
There was simply a lack of contact with vital developments that occured early in specific places within Afro-Eurasia that spread through trade and war. This made the advancement of each region much faster, instead of each civilization developing each milestone on their own.
- Agriculture (Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley)
- Chariots (Pontic Steppe to the Middle East, Europe, and China)
- Bronze Metallurgy
- Iron Metallurgy
- Diffusion of Alphabets
- and Paper, among others.
The
only way that Native Americans could possibly stand a chance is if the isolation of the Americas could be somehow broken, without causing direct colonization.
While a few of these things you mention are only useful 'advancements' within contexts peculiar to them, many of them were indeed instrumental in diffusing cultural ideas and societal complexity. Interestingly, in my opinion, the Americas just before contact seemed they were about to enter a new period of connectivity. A series of trade networks crisscrossed much of North America (including the Mississippi as a vital trade route). Traders followed the expansion of the Tarascans and Aztecs -- who had recently conquered some southern Maya kingdoms (even sending daughters to marry Maya lords, solidifying fealty). The Maya themselves were conducting long distance water trade throughout the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Not only were sailors from Ecuador still trading goods with southern Mesoamerica, but the Incas were beginning to conquer this region. And in addition to some southern conquests, Andean culture was also diffusing south of Tawantinsuyu. Andean-style ceramics, agriculture, and even llama herding was present in many parts of northern Argentina. And then, in addition to a very old trans-Beringian trade link, the Chukchi were starting to raid the Inuit of Alaska, which has interesting implications itself.
But to say a more interconnected America is the
only way for Native Americans to have successfully 'stood a chance' against Europeans might not be exactly true, at least, not in the strictest sense of allowing at least some parts to remain independent. The conquest of Mexico was dependent on a lot of 'right place, right time, right people' factors - Cortes happened to find Spanish shipwreck survivors who spoke Maya (allowing him to communicate), and then had multiple instances where he was very nearly defeated by both the Tlaxcala (before he allied with them) and the Aztecs, were it not for the choices made by individuals and pre-existing situations. Using Mexico as a base made the expedition to the south possible, and the conquest of the Incas was rife with similar instances of dumb luck.
the new world did indeed have a pretty good plant crop package. The problem was, it was scattered all over. Maize started out down in Mexico, and potatoes never made it out of Peru. There were some difficult small seeded grains here and there, but all of them were problematic in one way or another, and generally dropped when maize came along... there wasn't a good counterpart for wheat and barley...
While maize (and eventually the Three Sisters) became dominant over the Eastern Agricultural Complex, that's not to say it went completely away; the rest were simply grown on the side. Goosefoot was still a common crop in some parts of the Eastern Woodlands and especially the Eastern Seaboard, little barley stuck around as an inevitable secondary crop (or tolerated weed) that's hard to get rid of, and of course we know about sunflower and squash. The goosefoot that was domesticated by Native Americans also had larger seeds that were easier to prepare.
The Aztecs had pseudocereals of their own such as amaranth which comprised a large portion of the diet. Some of the largest cities in the world were built on these agricultural packages. Whatever do you mean by a 'good counterpart for wheat and barley'?