What do you mean by "subsistence society?" If you mean 'focused only on subsistence and not producing a surplus of food or other resources' then the answer is an emphatic no.

To provide a few examples, although by no means comprehensive list, the Mississippian culture built a series of large towns (and even a few cities) through the use of monumental urban architecture from about 900 to 1600 AD. Mounded sites of that style actually predate the Mississippian culture by many centuries, such as in the case of Poverty Point. Mississippian agriculture was extensive. Fields of maize (corn) and other agricultural products covered the fertile flood plains of rivers in the mid west, generating a large agricultural surplus. Studies of Mississippian sites show that they had a great deal of economic specialization with full-time or part-time artisans and craftspeople making a variety of decorative objects from lapidary work, to shell carving, to salt mining (Cobb 2003). The Mississippians also had a very hierarchically organized society and a complex organized religion.

In the southwest United States, the ancestors of the Puebloan peoples (sometimes called the "Anasazi") built large towns (a few might be classifiable as cities) with stone architecture such as those in Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde. Agriculture among the Ancestral Puebloans was managed by units composed of large extended families or groups of families that could be thought of as "clans." Their agricultural strategies included the construction of irrigation channels as well as localized burn-plot agriculture where plants would be burned in specific places to create pockets of nutrient-rich soil for planting (Kohler and Matthews 1988). This also allowed for the production of agricultural surplus, which in turn allowed them to use surplus labor to construct large stone complexes, fortifications, and complex political and religious organizations (Saitta 1997).

To list a few other complex societies in North America, there's also the Calusa of Florida built a complex political system while drawing most of their resources from coastal estuaries. Cultures in the Pacific Northwest united states like the Haida, Salish, and others had large powerful chiefdoms that supported themselves with an abundance of food sources combining fishing and small-scale supplemental agriculture.

To summarize, many (if not most) Native American cultures in what is today the United States in the centuries leading up to European conquest were far more complex than most people realize. They were not entirely focused on subsistence, and many had agricultural or other food systems that produced large surpluses of food, which allowed them to focus on producing other things like large monuments, specialized crafts, and complex political and religious institutions.

• Cobb, Charles. 2003. Mississippian Chiefdoms: How Complex? Annual Review of Anthropology. 32.

• Kohler, Timothy A. and Meredith H. Matthews. 1988. Long Term Anasazi Land Use and Forest Reduction: A Case Study from Southwest Colorado. American Antiquity 53 (3). pp. 537-564. Society for American Archaeology.

• Saitta, Dean J. 1997. Power, Labor, and the Dynamics of Change in Chacoan Political Economy. American Antiquity 62 (1). pp. 7-26.

Another question: did any of these societies use money or have the concept of currency?