This Thanksgiving I'm thankful for /u/Reedstilt. Here are a few of his greatest hits this week...

• Did Native Americans really use all parts of the buffalo?

• What about Native American urban centers in North America?

• How has the ecology of North America changed since European contact?

• And an enlightening write-up on the first person to cross North America

In classic form, /u/profrhodes knocked it out of the park with his two-part discussion on Was Rhodesia as racist as South Africa? He's got pretty much everything in there, and really good elaboration beyond the main answers themselves.

I really enjoyed /u/AnacreonInHeaven's answer (So in depth it had to be broken down into two parts) to my inquiry into the History of Paedophilia, Sexuality, Sexual abuse & how in turn historians link them all together:

Part 1 of answer & Part 2 of answer

This was a good week for answers.

I thought /u/Reedstilt gave very in-depth answers on two separate questions:

• First there was a description of the urban centers of Coosa and Apalachee in answer to the question Did European explorers/settlers encounter any Native American urban centers in the in modern-day USA and Canada?
• After that was this answer to the question Did Native Americans really use "all parts of the buffalo"? which answered the question and then diverged into differences between European and Native American interactions with their environment and specific examples of land management in the Americas.

In addition I read two answers that I thought were great because they were a bit different from most of the answers on this subreddit.

• /u/khosikulu gave numbers on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I thought this was great because I've never seen hard numbers on the slave trade before and assumed they didn't exist at this level of detail. It was also interesting to see how the rise and fall of the slave trade tied back to other specific historical events.
• /u/alriclofgar gave several nice answers in a question on the accuracy of Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles series, covering some of the debate and recent change in the study of post-Roman Britain. I liked these answers because it's nice to hear about a fictional work that actually covers history well and it was very cool to see how an answer to that question could expand into such depth.

I thought /u/textandtrowel gave an [excellent response] (http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nkgcd/alcoholic_consumption_in_the_byzantine_empire/cmekcfl) regarding the centrality of wine to the Byzantine diet in [alcoholic consumption in the Byzantine Empire] (http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nkgcd/alcoholic_consumption_in_the_byzantine_empire/).