You're probably familiar with or at least heard of several of the great pre-Columbian cities in the Americas.

Places like Tikal, Guatemala, Copan Honduras, and Tenochitlan, Mexico are some of the great legacies of the civilizations that came before.

However, all of those population centers were located in Mesoamerica.

Most of the people who lived in what is today the United States and Canada were nomadic and never built any large cities or structures.

With one major exception, learn more about Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian settlement in North America, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Before Europeans arrived in the new world there were several major

civilizations in the Americas some of which already had fallen by the time

Columbus arrived the Incas the Olmex the Maya and the Aztecs were just some of the people who left behind

monumental stone structures that we can still see today.

All of these cultures had traits that would be defined as, quote,

civilizations. They had highly complex social structures, a system of writing,

and highly organized systems of intellectual, cultural, and material development.

But this gets into a weird distinction between a culture and a civilization.

When we use the term civilization, we tend to use it for cultures that built monumental

structures.

But there were many advanced cultures in the Americas that didn't necessarily leave behind the

type of structures that the Maya or the Aztecs did.

In many cases, they had very complex social structures but their communities

just weren't very big and they didn't necessarily build permanent structures

out of stone. When we look at cultures north of Mexico, most of the people were either nomadic or lived in small communities.

When Europeans showed up in the new world, they didn't find any quote-unquote advanced civilizations in North America.

However, there was something that would be called an advanced civilization.

Archaeologists would call it the Mississippian culture and it's a name given to them retroactively not one that they use themselves.

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