don't have time to dig, but denevan (1992) and (2009) are at hand.  he also cites whitmore (1991), Lord and Burke (1991), cowley (1991), and schwerin (1991).  i completely acknowledge that parts of the SW were amenable to agriculture––hence the remains of more sedentary cultures (stone/masonry ruins) that we find there.  i also agree that glacial retreat may be good for hunter/gatherers as prey radiates into reopened territory, but i think you'd agree that H/G societies are generally not builder societies, due to the exegencies of that form of existence.  organized agriculture is required as a hedge against future food insecurity, along with the increase in yield that allows for the division of labor that i mentioned earlier.

 




 

Higher populations are certainly correlated with agricultural societies, but I think there is at least as good an argument to be made that agriculture is the cause rather than the effect.
Full disclosure; I haven't managed to finish Guns, Germs, and Steel.  But from what I have read I think Diamond is onto something with his east-west continental axis theory; I think that, along with domesticated animals, does help to explain why Europe and Asia took the lead with respect to technological advancement.
Having said that, I think there were a couple of reasons Europe eventually ended up taking the lead for good.
First: water.  Southern Europe, Eastern Asia, and Northern Africa were wrapped around the Mediterranean, allowing for quite a lot of cultural diffusion and conflict.  China strikes me as being geographically a bit more similar to Germany/Northern Europe - limited (relatively speaking) coastline, with rivers being crucial highways of material and information.  But there's a lot more of China a lot further away from the rest of the world via water than there is of central Europe.  Perhaps the best example is the particularly lurid piracy of the European peninsula - don't get me wrong, there's plenty of that in Asia, but throughout the centuries you have pirates from the Balkan coastline periodically dominating the Mediterranean and thumbing their noses at Roman rule; Muslim corsairs taking advantage of the slow but steady retreat of the eastern imperial navy and its fabled Greek Fire; successive waves of Germans and Northmen descending upon the British Isles, making deep inroads into France, and taking rivers down into the Black Sea; descendants of those men conquering Mediterranean islands for themselves; Muslims from north Africa raiding the English channel; privateers of all nationalities preying upon each other; and best of all, you have all of the various governments gleefully taking advantage of the plausible deniability provided by such privateers.
The second I already alluded to: cultural diffusion and conflict.  In relatively close proximity by the standards of the day you have two major religions, a significant minor religion, a host of splintering denominations related to those religions, and multitudinous more-or-less related linguistic groups.  And all of these cultures simultaneously informed the ideas and concepts of the others and tended not to like each other.
The third is related to the conflicts.  With those large populations all disliking each other and being more than willing to do something about it, these cultures enjoyed technological development tested in the crucible of those conflicts.  China had gunpowder several centuries before Europe.  Within a couple of hundred years of gunpowder arriving in Europe and the Middle East, however, those regions had made themselves masters of a new way of warfare.
And that leads me to my final point, and this is a point that I feel I cannot really explain or argue except to simply say that it seems to me that it happened.  Having the technology to do something, and the impetus to use it in a certain way, does not mean that a society is going to accept the ramifications of developing that technology and using it that way.  In short, Europeans in particular have developed a marked (and to a conservative, perhaps somewhat disturbing) ability to completely reinvent themselves.  The inertia and antipathy to change inherent in many cultures seems to have diminished throughout the centuries.  The Romans were nearly as conservative a society as they come (heck, they would retain priestships even after they began to be confused about the details of the gods those priests were supposed to serve); but they were ruthlessly pragmatic when it came to adapting, either militarily (look no farther than their reinventing themselves as a naval power to smash Carthage) or politically (transforming themselves from kingdom to republic to empire, all the while pretending that they hadn't changed anything - the consuls were given the power of kings; the princeps were given consular power, etc).  The Germanic peoples, who knew a good thing when they saw it, spent a thousand years trying to remake themselves in the model of Rome, and in the process disposed first of their pagan identity and then half of them disposed of their Catholic identity.  At the same time they created for themselves a model of chivalry, and then when they saw the flower of that chivalry mowed down first by longbows, then by firearms, and finally by an increasingly restive and influential groundswell of nationalism, leached the ideals of nobility and aristocracy of all vital power.  And ultimately all of these blows to ecclesiastical and secular authority laid the foundation for the return of democratic ideals and elevation of individualism we now observe in the American Republic.
And while Europe burned and transformed itself again and again, and finally exploded across the world stage, Asia entered an era of isolationism; and to a certain extent, acknowledging all the cultural and geographical and historical influences on those societies taking diametrically opposite paths, on some level I think the difference comes down to an increased ability of Europe to scrap its identity and start over (created, in part, by the stronger necessities to do so, at least initially), and an unwillingness of other cultures to do the same (having had less incentive to do so, at least until Europeans showed up and changed the rules of the game).
And like I said, this is somewhat disturbing to a conservative, because I find myself wondering if Europe and its daughter civilizations aren't on the verge of burning themselves out in a blaze of buttressed self-esteem and feelings of uniqueness as they systematically, and to an increasingly greater degree than ever before, cut themselves off from their own culture and the lessons and warnings of their past.
Maybe that doesn't make any sense.  I have faith that ARFCOM will critique me if it doesn't, which is why I'm throwing it out here.
 
 
 


 

There's at least two sites in Indiana.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mounds_State_Park

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Mounds

Nick

Large pyramids dedicated to the old way out there.


Ahh the good ol' days

Mexico has plenty of ruins.

interesting thread

And Little Rock.

I have found paleo arrowheads that date back 10-12 thousand years.

mormons

Speculative and prevailing/popular theories aside, the LDS church has no official position on the geography of the Book of Mormon.  People have attempted to fit the internal geographical references into places as diverse as mesoamerica, the present-day US, the Malay Peninsula, Africa, etc.

Speaking of old "ruins", I was just out on a ranch today in central SD that sits on the "old" Fort Thompson trail.  I was chatting with the rancher and was asking him about his family history in the area. Eventually in the conversation he pointed "down there" in to the river valley and made mention of the remains of an indian settlement from eons ago.  Supposedly the universities have been out and done the digging and surveying of the area and have asked him to not let anyone in the area for fear of "looting".  There are remains of both tee pee rings and earthen huts that pre-date whitey's settlement of the area.  This is south slightly west of Wessington Springs, SD, if you want to look on a map.  

Yeah, it's called, ....."Mexico."

The Grand Canyon is an ancient pool.

There is more and alot are on private property and kept secret so people don't try to dig.

I seem to remember a fairly recent story with some aerial photos of some very large pyramids or some such just found somewhere in Georgia.

First page, 18th post.

Though not in North America, but South America is Puma Punku.  

The construction techniques are fascinating, precision cut stones, special joining techniques, carvings, very sophisticated.  

Puma Punku

South America has sucked for thousands of years, civilizations showing up there relatively early is no surprise, it is predictable (just like the east coast of North America), it was crap for hunter/gatherers.  It takes way more acreage down there per person for survival of an individual than it does up here, always was the case, at least as long as humans have been here.  In the grand energy game, it is whoefully resource poor.  This would easily lead the clueless to think that populations were higher down there.  Flannery.