Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Revisionist history you're pushing here. I'm well versed about the native tribes in the area, definitely more than the average North Texan. A very interesting history, don't get me wrong. They didn't develop cities like anything you'd think of as a city today. Small roaming developments of maybe a few hundred people tops mostly. So when we're discussing "urban design" it's pretty irrelevant. That some branch of a nomadic tribe might have used my neighborhood as a hunting ground 15,000 years ago has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development.

The Caddos would be the closest to making cities in the area, but the people living around there date back over a thousand years these larger communities we might call towns were still mostly small enclaves that didn't last more than a few hundred years at the longest mostly. And they were mostly a pretty recent, being a few thousand years newer of a civilization than Greece et. al., as they appeared well after 1,000CE

Meanwhile Athens and what not can easily be seen as an actual city even 2000BCE.

> Revisionist history you're pushing here.

Which part of the Texas history link is incorrect?

Civilisation is civilisation . it comes with and without attributes such as cities and agriculture .. the point made is that the timelines in Texas strecth back 13,000 years.

> has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development.

Their urban development consisted of light footprints, seasonal migration in worn patterns, walking, etc.

That can be contrasted with how contemporary US citizens live, how the Dutch live, how varies other people still live today.

This is a discussion about urbanism, not just broadly "civilization". Nomadic tribes didn't live in urban environments.

The city I live in practically didn't exist until very modern times. The fact some people used to to hunt around here 16,000 years ago has little impact to the modern way the city was laid out and designed or the people who mostly live here today.

There's practically zero way to draw the roots of this town back to some group that camped here 16,000 years ago. Any form of lineage of civilization was lost a looooong time ago. Extremely few people would even draw their roots back to the Caddo, who are far more recent than anyone you're suggesting here.

This is a discussion about community - See thread title.

Some communities move - Not a hard concept for most.

Yeah, they moved. Away from here, for many reasons, often under bad situations. And most no longer exist, and are thus irrelevant to the discussion of lineage of current towns.

Insane you're really arguing a suburb of North Texas is older or at least as old as Rome or Athens.

So yeah, as an identity, this area is extremely young in comparison. It absolutely does not draw its roots back 16,000 years. We are not an extention of the Caddo people, they were not an extension of the first peoples who were here.

> Because we have mainstreets, buildings, blocks, community centers, parks, American-style squares...

Seems to me we're talking urban design here! That's kind of the whole point of the article, looking at urbanism in Europe to the US. Maybe you're imagining some other topic, but urbanism is deep in the discussion overall. I don't think nomadic groups had a lot of thought to how wide their highways were or planning our their parking lots.

> Insane you're really arguing a suburb of North Texas is older or at least as old as Rome or Athens.

That's your strawman.

I merely pointed out the area you live in has a long history of civilisation.

As pointed out in part by @1659447091 upthread, and as does North America in general - there was a great variation in culture across that area, some parts had very stable communities and reportedly taught the Europeans a thing or two about trade agreements and democracy <shrug>.

There's an odd bit in the HN guidelines

  Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously;

seemingly that's a hard concept for some.

You have a nice life. All the best.

If you're going to cite the guidelines, I thought your "not a hard concept for most" was rather out of line.

I agree ..

It was a throw to now removed usage by the person I replied to in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342642

That and a few other choice phrases were well over the line.

They significantly edited their comments after I started using their own words in my replies.

Cleaning up after I quote the guidelines citing their usage leaves me looking the worse .. but so it goes.

I have a genuine interest in human history across the globe, they had a visceral reaction to the mere suggestion of prior occupation and use of land in Texas .. let's just mark that down to them having a bad day.

You know what's snarky? Suggesting a suburban city actually draws it's roots to 13,000 BC when it definitely doesn't. Suggesting it does is a disservice to those people who were forced away.

Not trying to compare Greece with North Texas(or Louisiana) in 13000BCE here. There are ancient sites with "sophisticated" cultures/societies that spanned large parts of the current mid to east US -- and were also unlikely to be nomadic tribes passing through.

There is evidence of major construction projects, large trade centers/complex societies along the Mississippi Valley covering large areas with a trade network across the mid/eastern/southeast US. Watson Brake is currently the oldest* at ~3500BCE[0], but less studied and smaller. Poverty Point ~1700BCE[1] is more like a city or major trading hub. The effort to build the mounds and ridges is far more impressive than is likely from a roaming tribe. The construction is not haphazard, there is evidence of housing and many astronomical markers/alignments throughout the mound builder cultures of North America.

Cahokia Mounds[2] (far more recent) is considered an urban settlement, occupied from around 800CE and at its peak 1050-1150CE, thought to be larger than London or Paris at that time.

* Watson Break was discovered in the 1980's and the 6th mound at Poverty Point discovered in 2013. There could be many more that have been overlooked/undiscovered or razed -- being that we still don't fully understand them and they hardy look like what we are use to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_Brake

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia

I'm well aware of these. And yes, lots of areas around North America had quite complicated and developed societies with large trade networks and even "highways" connecting ancient cities.

But, these things are practically entirely disconnected to the societies of people living in the US today. And that's the point I'm making, this area is very young in terms of what is here now. That some other group developed something like a city several hundred miles away thousands of years before this town existed has effectively zero impact on the development of this place and the lives of the people who live here. This isn't necessarily the same for cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years which still even has some of the same streets and buildings of history.

You'd be hard pressed to find a single structure still used here today that was older than 1940 in this town outside of a few notable rare examples dating back to the 1920s, that's a closer example to my point. What's the age of the oldest building in Paris? How about London? Athens? Trier? These are places that have had a practically uninterrupted flow of people living in dense urban places for many hundreds to thousands of years. This is just not true for massive parts of the US. Few cities draw their roots back to even the 1500s, with many having their roots go to the 1800s or even newer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com