American civilizations are more recent than one might expect—the big iconic pyramids at Chichen Itza date from ~1000 CE. Plus, a lot of the historical data is vague or hard to get at—not just because of spanish missionaries, but also because a lot of the big North American civilizations left monuments in the form of huge earthworks, not stone, and their written records, if they existed, are lost.
There are definitely upheavals and discontinuities in the archaeological record (the one that really comes to mind is the introduction of corn to north america), but I’m not so sure about our ability to reconstruct nontrivial engineering-type metrics.
American civilizations are more recent than one might expect—the big iconic pyramids at Chichen Itza date from ~1000 CE. Plus, a lot of the historical data is vague or hard to get at—not just because of spanish missionaries, but also because a lot of the big North American civilizations left monuments in the form of huge earthworks, not stone, and their written records, if they existed, are lost.
There are definitely upheavals and discontinuities in the archaeological record (the one that really comes to mind is the introduction of corn to north america), but I’m not so sure about our ability to reconstruct nontrivial engineering-type metrics.