And what of significance did they accomplish? Learnt how to build tents? Got proficient at making human sacrifices? Built a few pyramids? As i said, the real history of America started when Europeans came in.
Or maybe you'd want to consider instead the Mayans. Their astronomy was on par with--or better than--contemporary Eurasian astronomers. Their calendar is sufficiently precise, and their written legacy vast enough, that we know the chronology of successorship in polities and rulers for the Classical Maya where we struggle to even identify the existence of those same entities in contemporary Europe (although, to be fair, the Age of Migrations is responsible for a lot of that). And, personally, I think the Mayan writing system is more wonderful than anything derived from the Phoenicians or the Chinese.
But why stop with the well-known urban civilizations? Several cultures challenge conventional notions about the development of civilization. The Mogollon culture developed impressive aqueduct systems to enable farming in a desert without any evidence for a centralized authority. The quipus of the Wari and the Inca challenge the notion of writing system. Norte Chico challenges the idea that agriculture is a necessary precondition for urban civilization.
Pre-Columbian America developed very differently from the Eurasia. If you try to fit its development to a Eurasian development sequence, you will find that it doesn't match very well. But that doesn't mean it didn't develop civilization, and pretending that it does misses a wealth of fascinating advancements that they did.
Most archaeologists would also have some quibbles with describing Hohokam irrigation as truly decentralized, particularly in e.g. the civano phase, but it's accurate enough I guess.
the Aztecs were sacrificing people to Huitzilopochtli (their war god), when europeans were teaching and learning in Oxford an Cambridge.
Same with the mayans. We can discuss all day long, but their civilizations were not any more advanced than old egypt ones, and the ones in the Levantine era (Prior to the Roman period). Which were about 2080-3500 years prior.
Oxford is a strange callout. It was founded in 1096. About 700 years before the enlightenment. I doubt they were teaching heliocentrism and the scientific method.
According to Aztec records, for the consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, 84 000 people were sacrificed IN FOUR DAYS.
You can't even begin to compare the numbers. Many historians agree that the reason a small number of Spanish soldiers could conquer the big Aztec empire is because they could forge alliances with the neighbouring tribes that were completely fed up with them. The Aztec were the Nazis of their time.
My point was to show that the claim, "they had a civilization but they were way behind those both of europe and asia", because "europeans were teaching and learning in Oxford and Cambridge." is a nonsense argument.
With regard to belief in mysticism and exercising religious violence they don't seem dissimilar.
Maybe they seem more different because sacrificing 84k people at a pyramid is less familiar to us than Catholics and Protestants butchering each other in the streets and defenestrating each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
You can find plenty of sources there.
It's hard to create an industrialized society without them.
Even assuming "industrialized society" is the ideal, which, given our multiple ongoing ecological catastrophes, isn't necessarily a safe assumption.
In terms of agricultural resources, you don't need the plow to effectively farm the land in most of urbanized Pre-Columbian America (the Great Plains are a different matter). Aquaculture is a wonderful supplement--it's suggested that the founding agricultural crop in the Norte Chico region may be a flax instead of a staple food crop, and the early date of its monumental architecture may predate agriculture for food (although this is very much in debate right now). In terms of population, Tenochtitlan achieved a size greater than all but the very largest cities in Europe, and had no issues feeding its population out of the resources in the Central Mexican Valley.
It's also not necessary for trade: the vast trade networks of North America are pretty well-documented, and they continue down into the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America. Indeed, it's been suggested that pottery was introduced to the Mississippians via trade with Amazon tribes across the Caribbean. Waterborne transport makes a lot more sense in the Americas: the Mississippi and its tributaries provides a strong link for much of North America, and of course the Amazon region even today relies almost entirely on water transport. If you look at Andean civilizations instead, the topography makes any form of cart completely impractical, and llamas and alpacas were already domesticated for use as pack animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel is one controversial book on the topic.
I was thinking more in terms of raw power than agriculture: before we could develop coal-fired industry it was useful to have draught animals to carry heavy loads and drive equipment.
Not an expert, but it's clearly a lack, and the correlation between variety of domesticated animals and industrialization is interesting.
https://scihubtw.tw/https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/wha...
"Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel."
This kind of psychologizing looks pretty silly to me and I'm not sure what any of it has to do with the arguments made in the actual book.
I found the book an interesting meditation on the connections between land, plants and animals, the kind of society that can form as a result, and knock-on effects from that process (like the dependence of diseases on city living). The level of hostility to this work in the linked reviews seems out of proportion to its alleged deficits.
You can do better on this, though; for instance, it turns out there's a whole subsection of the AskHistorians wiki covering GGS, with entries observing:
* Diamond's understanding of genetic data for the human disease load during colonization is faulty
* The inability of Spanish conquistadors to hold conquered territory once captured
* That Diamond risibly oversimplifies the naivete of cultures like the Inca, which somehow spent centuries conquering an entire continent only to be left ignorant of the very concept of invaders (I liked this one because it referred to Diamond as "not even an anthropologist").
* That Diamond's understanding of the Inca empire as being absolutely controlled by Atahualpa and thus his overthrow --- which is also apparently rendered inaccurately in the book --- doomed the Incas... where was I with this sentence? At any rate, it's apparently not true.
* That the most important conquests of Central America occurred between native powers, and that colonizers had repeated false starts during them and took root mostly after wars between indigenous people had ravaged the continent.
I thought I might take a stab at summarizing everything r/AA and r/AH have to say about the book, but it'd be like summarizing Wikipedia. I own Diamond's book and have read chunks of it and remember enjoying it, but here am just reporting that among experts in these fields, it doesn't have a good reputation, even as pop science. The criticisms seem mostly procedural (and, to an extent, about turf --- Diamond's training is in hard science, not social science), not political.
However, in that entire thread, no one is saying that having large, domesticated animals wasn’t useful.
I’m not saying Diamond was right about everything, I’m saying it seems self-evident that you can get farther down the technology path, faster, if you have more power available.
Animals were a very important part of the power story in pre-industrial times.
Where am I wrong?
If you absolutely insist on silly "comparative metrics" though, many areas of the pre-columbian Americas were home to incredibly advanced agricultural civilizations whose productivity far exceeded that of their European contemporaries. This isn't a useful perspective for academic work, but maybe it'll help you come to grips.