Why aren't Native American historical indicators everywhere?

Great Debates
21

None of this is strictly true. First of all, “the Native American concept” implicitly lumps all aboriginal American tribes as being part of one continuous culture while just within the bounds of what is now the continental United States there were at least nine distinct regional cultures encompassing several hundred tribes that were loosely aligned as ‘nations’. We do not have extensive details on the cultural and legalistic practices of many of these tribes because most were catastrophically depopulated even prior to official contact with European expeditions (due largely to disease that proceeded the colonists) but while the personal ownership of property in most of the cultures was limited to at most small items such as bedding, tools, and weapons, tribes definitely had ownership of tribal assets and territory.

Many cultures (or at least many tribes within them) did live in what is lyrically described as “harmony” with their environment for the very pragmatic reason that it was necessary in order to ensure sufficient resources to sustain their population without access to tools and animal husbandry to engage in large scale agriculture. (Many tribes are also hypothesized to have practiced various measures of population control to prevent unsustainable growth.) There were, however, cultures such as the Mississippians and the Ancestral Puebloans, that constructed large settlements, engaged in stationary seasonal cultivation, and left large monuments and fortifications that are still visible today where they have not been destroyed by vandalism or modern development. Many of these cultures declined or failed because of a combination of warfare, unsustainable exhaustion of scarce resources, and regional climate changes.

Of course, there were numerous Mesoamerican cultures from the Olmec through the Teotihuacan, Mayan, Toltec, and Aztecs, as well as the South American cultures such as the Marajoara, Taino, and Incans, many of which were thought to be as sophisticated (if not more) in the art, architecture, irrigation and resource management, et cetera, as the pre-Renaissance cultures of Eurasia, and built monuments and fortification so extensive that we are still discovering them in overgrown jungle forests centuries after they were abandoned.

The notion that the native peoples of the Americas were a culturally uniform bunch of noble savages who lived some kind of idealized communitarian existence without property or internal conflict, which is often promulgated by people who want to justify some theoretical political or ethical belief, does not reflect the complex, diverse, and constantly evolving cultures of those peoples. In reality, they built some enormously sophisticated urban developments and trade infrastructure, developed complex mathematics and calendar astronomy that we are still trying to understand, and had a wide array of cultural practices, beliefs, and conflicts over the several millennia for which we have a significant amount (albeit still manifestly incomplete) archeological evidence.

Stranger

22

You say that as if there’s such a thing as “Native American culture”. North America was as diverse as any other continent before Europeans arrived. Some cultures might have believed that, but others didn’t. As evidenced by the fact that some Native American cultures did, in fact, leave deliberate markers and monuments.

23

Guys/Gals, I did not suggest the Native American societies were a monolithic culture free from conflict and strife. I am well aware of the diversity that covered the pre-Columbian continent as well as the disaster that eventually engulfed these peoples. The OP was asking about Wisconsin, not Mexico and Peru. I was simply stating that perhaps the people inhabiting that part of North America apparently saw no need to create any lasting historical indictors of their presence for others to find at some future date, and what we have found so far is coincidental.

24

Even this more restricted statement isn’t correct:
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-004/

Stranger

25

Which the OP mentions specifically in their first sentence, and discarded. They are asking about pictographs and stacks of boulders. If you have any info to share relating to the OP’s actual question, please do so.

26

I’m pretty sure the Mississippian Culture (formerly known as the Mound Builders) extended as far as Wisconsin.

27

.In my neighborhood I regularly kayak the Conemaugh, Kiskiminetas, and
Loyalhanna Rivers/Creeks. All are names derived from Native American words.

In Saltsburg, PA the Conemaugh and Loyalhanna join to form the Kiskiminitas.

28

I could see that would be confusing when I posted but got distracted by a shiny object and didn’t edit it to clarify. It’s a cumulative problem starting with the original English spellings used for names that didn’t use common syllables and combinations, and the slow drift of pronunciation and spelling in English over time that have lost much of the sense of the original words. Add to that the misinterpretations of the original words which may have some locations named after a phase that meant “I don’t know” in the original language.

29

I’ve found Indian artifacts on and near my property, basically just stumbled on what I’ve been told are paleo era or maybe archaic stone tools.
Grand Rapids had burial mounds but they were excavated.

There are Woodland era mounds in my township, unmarked and on private property but previously identified. Many of the small museums in the state have similar artifacts from pre Colombian times. Donated by farmers and collectors.

30

In the region that I grew up - which was just barely developed forestland - there was no shortage of obsidian arrow heads and bedrock mortars to be found.

I’m unaware of any art having been left behind but I understand that the local tribes moved around a bit and mostly used products like wood, skins, bone, and shells that had been traded in-land for construction, clothing, and decoration. Most of these will simply break down over time or appear little different from animal remains. Only the shells would stand out and, just as plausibly, those could come from modern humans who visited the beach and brought some stuff back.

One general thing to note is that the things that we have which came down to us are those which happen to have survived well. Sometimes, that means that they were made of durable materials but other times it means that the local climate is good for preservation. Ethiopia, for example, has almost no archaeologic history despite almost certainly being a fascinating region because the whole territory is fairly wet with lots of green growing things. Archaeological remains tend to get broken down quickly and destroyed.

Depending on your specific region, there just might be a greater or lesser probability of artifacts remaining.

31

Well, in fact there are petroglyphs (rock carvings) in Wisconsin:

As for why there is not more artifacts, and specifically painted pictographs or signs of megalithic constructions, there are a combination of possible answers, including a wet climate that would tend to weather away painted pictographs over periods of centuries, a surfeit of soil suitable for structural mound-building not found in the Southwest, a flat arable landscape that has been extensively developed for agriculture, and a lack of federal protections from such development (the vast bulk of federally protected land is in the American Southwest and Intermountain West), so that many possible artifacts such as stone walls would likely be scavenged for building materials.

In general, the cultures of North American natives did not generally engage in building large hengeworks or erecting dolman-type stone structures found across Europe, and instead most of their lasting large artifacts are settlements, defensive fortifications, and large soil mound structures of unknown purpose. While they certainly had applied astronomy practices for predicting seasonal variations and recording celestial observations, the cultures of North America did not generally engage in multigenerational megalithic construction projects like the pre-Celtic Europeans and South Asians.

Although the o.p. postulated pictographs of the American Southwest (primarily produced by tribes of the Ancient Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam cultures) being produce by the “young dumb and full of cum Native American doing this 5,000 years ago on a cliff”, in fact many of the surviving pictographs (and certainly the carvings) were in locations difficult to access, required a large amount of effort and resources by peoples living at a sustenance level, and to the extent that we can made informed speculation about peoples for which we have no written records and only a fragmentary oral history that has doubtless gone through many reinterpretations, were almost certainly made for both practical and metaphysical reasons, not as spurious vandalism by youthful malcontents as suggested by the o.p. There is certainly little in the way of errant vandalism of today that we could expect to last for centuries, and even our most durable structures beyond excavations, widescale earthworks, and the durable wreckage of metallic structures will leave much in the way of immediately visible evidence for future archeologists thousands of years in the future.

Stranger

32

One issue wirh Petroglyphs, specifically, is that they are difficult to impossible to date, making them sorta the redheaded stepchild of the prehistoric story. They often get deemphasized because thet are very difficult to draw conmectioms to.

More broadly, the midwest seems to have been pretty densely inhabited by a sequence of distinct cultural groups for thousands of years. They built in wood and earth, most of which was destroyed. The reason you don’t know about it that by amd large, it is a story that is ignored.

33

They absolutely did. In fact, Fort Atkinson has an intaglio mound. Someone in the 1800s - Increase Lapham, maybe - drew a map of all of the mounds he found in Wisconsin. Only a fraction remain.

34

This was my instant response. I am astonished that nobody posted it sooner.

35

When I hike in Utah, I wonder the same thing. There are occasional dwellings, petroglyphs and pictographs, but not as many as I would expect given that people lived in the area for thousands of years. Even the remaining dwellings are not decorated very much. They are basically just stone and mud structures with little adornment. However, the pottery shards are often very well decorated and have good artistic expression. They may have fine lines and intricate texture details. That makes me wonder if they were more interested in decorating portable items rather than drawing pictures on walls and decorating their dwellings.

For instance, this is a ruin called Moon House:

It is one of the few I saw with any kind of adornment, and it’s rather simple at that. With how beautiful their pottery was, I would have expected the dwellings to commonly have some kind of artistic expression. But in almost all cases, there was no adornments to the dwellings.

36

Not all cultures prize the same things we do. Imagine a world in which buildings were temporary and seasonal, and the great arts were storytelling and dancing. We think of making monuments and art for the ages, but in cultures which see time as cyclical, not lineal, with no empires or emperors, artifacts will be very different.

Some California native tribes, stone age hunter gatherers, made some of the finest baskets in the history of the world.

37

Probably not exactly what the OP was asking for, but here in the Chicago area, the roads are set out pretty strictly on a N/S/E/W grid. If you encounter a road that is crooked - like Ogden or St Charles, it is a good chance it was an old native american trail.

38

I mean, in our modern culture, it’s rather unusual for houses, themselves, to be decorated. People might hang up art on the inside walls, but we don’t usually put art directly on the walls themselves.

39

Art in the form of decorated ceramic tiles is pretty common; the art isn’t usually primarily created by the people living in the houses, but I think that probably reflects the fact that in the modern world, by no means everyone creates art

40

The British colonized and ruled over India, as their servants. They grabbed a bunch of wealth and trinkets and boated it back to England and preserved it. A lot still remained in India, as well.

Some groups, in history, enslaved people and tried to keep them separate and independent, using their native language, so that there was no racial mixing and so that they couldn’t understand what the owners were saying. Other groups rounded everyone up and murdered them so that the people simply didn’t exist anymore. Of those, some destroyed the conquered’s possessions and others didn’t. Yet other groups worked to dissuade the people from continuing with their culture, forced them to speak the master language, and convinced them that they should try to breed their way to sharing a similar appearance.

There’s all sorts of different paths that things can progress along. For example, here’s how the Aztecs approached conquest:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02757206.2022.2060215

One presumes that, if they had expanded into more distant lands or come up against a group that they felt some form of disgust towards - due to there being too great a cultural difference - that they may have treated the other group worse. The Romans, for example, are reported as salting the lands of Carthage which is, effectively, genocide. But, generally, they didn’t do that because the conquest of smaller nations wasn’t viewed as all that exceptional.