blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2010/11/22/thanksgiving-guilt-trip-how-warlike-were-native-americans-before-europeans-showed-up/ I found this article randomly and read through it. I found some of the comments on the article even more interesting than the article its self. like this comment was quite interesting even though it used the word yankees in a negative way.
There were established Indian settlements in North America before the Europeans turned up, I've read about the archeological digs at what can only be described as a city that was somewhere in the midwest. They were all gone before the Europeans arrived. It took hundreds of years of white settlement before this was known. Did they choose to give up their nascent sedentary civilisation? Or were they forced back into nomadic roaming by their own cultural decline. We'll probably never know. I've also read about the region coalesced into the State of New Mexico. The recent history is the Americans took it off the Spanish, who had displaced the Mexicans. Apparently, and this is less certain, the Mexicans took the region off the Indians. Which tribe/Nation? Hard to know, up to 8 Nations had fought over the region for centuries, each one displacing the other with mass battles and massacres of the noncombatants of losing nations. Hardly peace love and mung beans before the Anglo-Saxons turned up.
^^^^ they weren't doing particularly well judging by the early photographs.... this is backed up, (from memory) by most of the first accounts from early french & english anthropologists describing them as being continually on the verge of starving !!!
