I am currently studying world history and a major part of that is understanding the agricultural revolution and the transition from hunter and gathers to a more sedentary lifestyle with farming. Now, the neolithic era brought on division of labour, settlements, etc, but historians and many people know that castles and large stone cities were erupted all over Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Northern and Eastern Africa. Now, I know that the agricultural revolution happened around the same time all over the world, the Olmec, the Mesopotamians, and the Shang Dynasty all started around the same time due to the neolithic revolution happening around the same time. So why is that when you look at Mesopotamia, Europe, Africa, and Asia we see see castles and large stone structures, but when looking at North America, we see natives were still using wood, leaves, mud, and sand for their structures.
P.S. I am aware that in South America and Central America, the Aztec and Incas did have large stone structures and cities, which were marvellous, but I want to know specifically about North America. Why did the European settlers not arrive to see Stone castles in New England, as they were so used to in Europe?
I'm going to limit my answer to Northeastern North America as it is my area of expertise rather than all of North America. I think the important point to get across is that the agricultural revolution did not occur at the same time in Northeastern North America as it did in the other cultures you mentioned. There is some evidence of 'domestication' of certain plants such as sunflower, goosefoot, and wild rice; however, none of these plants underwent significant genetic and morphological changes that are the hallmarks of domestication and their significance to the diet of peoples in the area seems negligible.
The major domesticated crop of the New World (corn) did not become a staple to the diet of people living in Northeastern North America until approximately A.D. 1000. This is mainly due to the significant differences in climate that corn had to adapt to in order to become a major food item. Ontario, for example, can go from +40C in July to -40C in January.
The way people incorporated corn into their diet varied in the Northeast. Algonquian groups for, example, continued seasonal rounds, often returning to fields of maize to plant and harvest but otherwise building no permanent structures. Iroquoian groups did build semi-permanent structures, however they tended to move villages every 10 years or so. As such there was really no need to build permanent fortifications such as castles to control land if you will abandon them within a generation. Now there were fortifications, The Late Woodland period is often identified as when large villages constructed palisades, however these would need to be semi-permanent.
So to wrap up, the settlement and subsistence patterns of people living in this area of North America did not readily lend themselves to the construction of large fortifications. This is not to say they could not build a castle it just means there was no point in building one.
Sources:
Birch and Williamson, 2015, Navigating ancestral landscapes in the Northern Iroquoian world. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 39: 139-150.
Ellis and Ferris 1990, Archaeology of Southern Ontario to 1650 A.D. (It is rather outdated, however the core principles are still relatively sound)
Katzenberg, M.A. 2006, Prehistoric Maize in southern Ontario: contributions from stable carbon isotope studies. Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize, pp. 263-273
Munoz et al. 2014, Synchronous environmental and cultural change in the prehistory of the northeastern United States. PNAS 107: 22008-22013.