I've been reading Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston, which details the process around the rediscovery of a now-defunct ancient city in the Mosquitia region of Honduras. It's fascinating - as someone who is passingly familiar with the much more famous Mayan culture to the north of this area, it was very interesting to learn about the vast numbers of unique cultures throughout Central and South America during the past 3,000+ years that I had never heard of.
One thing about the ruins produced by the culture from Mosquitia that they mention is that while there are a lot of platforms and altars, there are few full stone structures featuring things like roofs or walls - which the archaeologists ascribed to the use of organic materials like hardwoods and fabrics in construction, which degrade very quickly upon abandonment and leave little to no tangible trace. As one would imagine, this makes locating such ruins substantially more challenging than locating e.g. the massive stone pyramids associated with the Mayans to the north.
This got me thinking about my backyard (in the USA), and the fact that we have little stone construction here. In fact, while I'm by no means an expert in the topic, the only ancient city site I can name offhand in my country's borders is Cahokia, while I could rattle off a list of 10 Mayan sites without blinking. Is my lack of knowledge in this area a cultivated ignorance, as it were, in that there were large ancient cities here that I'm simply unaware of? Were there cities that, like the Mosquitian culture featured in LCotMG, used primarily organic materials that degraded over time and have left harder-to-find and/or less substantial sites? I'm aware that, particularly among western tribes in North America, there exists a more itinerant nature to the culture - does that play into this?
I'd love to explore closer to home the way tourists are able to in Central America at places like Coba, Chichen Itza, and Copan, so any guidance to opportunities to do that are greatly appreciated.
Here is a discussion on architecture and cities in North America from our FAQs. Here is another. Both are by u/Reedstilt and both are excellent. What you need to look into is the Mississippian culture. This is a period in which native North Americans developed large cities (sometimes with defensive perimeters [palisades]) with temple mounds , intensive maize agriculture, shell tempered pottery, social and architectural heirarchy and certain ceremonial items and motifs associated with the Southeast Ceremonial Complex in their material culture. The Mississippian culture was active from about 800 CE to 1500 CE, and extended from the East Coast to Arkansas and from Wisconsin to the Gulf Coast. When DeSoto entered the Southeast in 1539 he found many of these cities occupied and a complex system of polities with which they were aligned and affiliated. These polities were governed by political leaders and sub-leaders. They are rather notorious examples of Complex Societies with complex architecture, but the architecture was based on earthworks and wooden and wattle and daub construction.
There are many Mississippian sites in parks that you can visit. I was at Moundville, Alabama this summer and it is a well maintained large Mississippian site that is worth the visit.
See: Time's River: Archaeological Syntheses from the Lower Mississippi Valley edited by Janet Rafferty, Evan Peacock. University of Alabama Press, 2008
Hi there -- while you wait for an answer, you may want to start by reading a couple older threads from our FAQ:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vawry/what_hypotheses_are_there_for_why_after_the/
Just to clarify something about the premise of your question: are you asking mainly about stone cities? Native Americans lived (and still to this day live) in settled cities throughout the American Southwest that pre-date Columbian contact with Europe, including (just off the top of my head) Taos, Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta and Jemez, as well as other pueblos. The native Americans of the eastern woodlands and southeastern America lived in settled cities that have mostly not survived until today due to timber construction, as did Indian groups on the west coast. The Plains Indians were certainly nomadic, and other groups could be semi-nomadic or mix settled agriculture with some hunting/roaming behavior, but cities certainly existed (and exist) north of the Rio Grande.
Just to clarify, but there are no pre-Hispanic cities in the U.S. Southwest, at least which would fall under the same definition of city that cities in Mesoamerica do. That not to say there were no monumental architecture and quite large agricultural populations in the Southwest, but there were no "cities" in a strict sense.
You might be interested in this previous discussion of large populations in the U.S. Southwest (and what I think comes closest to a city).