There's a common misconception that aboriginal societies in America were savages, uncivilized. How much is there into that? How advanced were those societies in reality

by ImNotAnAlien

I was having a talk with a friend and this came up.

biliskner

This is a topic where it's very, very important to evaluate the premise of the question. Specifically, what is your definition of "advanced." If your definition is a mercantilist or capitalist society, with traditionally western ideas of gender roles (aka, men work in a public space while women work in the domestic space), and Christianity (as it was for Europeans traders and settlers then Americans), your answer will be a resounding "hell no." If you want to relate the use of technology with being civilized (something I personally would very strongly disagree with), then you've already answered your question. If your definition includes a religion, social expectations and roles, an intra-societal political structure, and inter-societal relationships--basically, a group of people coming together with shared culture, then they absolutely were advanced. This question is further complicated by the fact that aboriginal groups throughout the Americas differ dramatically from each other. So the answer (assuming we're taking the latter definition of "advanced") will vary in its particulars from group to group.

Anyway, when you say "America" I'm going to assume you mean within the borders of the modern day United States of America (otherwise, I'll point you to the examples of the Aztecs, Maya, or Inca, all of whom have "advanced societies" that are much more comparable to European ones). But I think a very important example are the people who lived around Cahokia, near modern day St. Louis. In general, there's this idea that prior to the arrival of Europeans, NAs lives were static and unchanging as the millennia passed them by. But that's really not at all true--population centers and cultures rose and fell prior to the arrival of Europeans. At Cahokia's height (in the 13th century), estimates place as many as 30-35 thousand people living there. They were agriculturalists, cultivating maize; they had a complex political and religious classes that stratified their society, and they engaged in trade with the many other population centers that surrounded them. Cahokia is one of the best examples of the Mound Building civilizations who existed around the Mississippi Valley (Monks Mound as an example). They were an "advanced" society. Unfortunately, we don't really know a lot about them because they, like many other Native American groups in the modern day United States, did not used writing.