Why is the information to archaeologists about early native American cultures very limited?

Answer 1

The information available to archaeologist about early Native American cultures is very limited because the race was at risk of being completely eliminated by the Europeans. The people and the belongings were destroyed. Therefore the culture had a lot of history erased.

Answer 2

The information available to archaeologist about early Native American cultures is very limited because the race was at risk of being completely eliminated by the Europeans. The people and the belongings were destroyed. Therefore the culture had a lot of history erased.

Answer 3

One of the primary methods archaeologists use to study ancient people is the burial sites.

One primary reason, a trade in buffalo bones that were sent east to make buttons in factories. When these traders ran out of buffalo bones they simply started digging up or desecrating burial sites and sending the human bones to be made into buttons. All of the burial artifacts were also taken or uncovered to climate during these harvests of the ancestor's bones.

Second; As native Americans valued the esoteric and impermanent things they used every day those articles are fragile by nature. Many tribes broke pottery at burial sites as well as a way to send tools to the ancestors in the next life. Similar to burning the body in pagan ritual to insure it returns to gods. This is very good for the people of it's time but very bad for archaeologists as paint on pottery especially native pottery is degraded when in contact with climate. Many archaeologists are coming to conclude that some tribes took their dead away from the sites they occupied to be buried elsewhere. Native Americans will also relate many stories of elders and the sick going off to die alone to spare the family grief. This is a vast continent and they could have went anywhere.

Third; Native Americans had a very loving and childlike joy for themselves as a people and were very content to just be " the people of this place''. Things were for the purpose of living and not hoarded but were there for the glorification of " the people of this place" and artifice was simply not valued. Things were a means to enriching the happiness in day to day life, not a means to acquire more. So few artifacts from such a people are found. Without writing or artifacts there is no assumption about what they mean. Make no mistake, it is all assumption without written language and writings.

Art was the act of joy from living in these many nations of North America.Living out of balance with the earth mother was as foreign to Native Americans as not stealing gold silver and jewels would have been to European genocide for capital gain "explorers"Even the Maya the Aztec and the Inca who were awash in gold and silver simply used it to adorn temples and structures to their gods and rulers as decoration to glorify the sun gods. It had no monetary value.It was representative of the color and reflective properties of the sun.

Such a people north and south are a foreign concept to those trying to study them.

Only listen to Native Americans on the subject when you can they have a real insight into what these articles mean. It is a case of conceptual thinking of the people who dwell in a place.

The answer is simple , there is little evidence left behind by a people who live FOR the balance with nature and think before doing anything of how it not only affects them but their children and their children's children and above all else the Earth Mother and the Great Spirit of all life.

When there is nothing left to study, all things being made to an organic fashion it degrades and decomposes like the bodies of the ancestors. Ten thousand years of flesh bone and life of the ancestors are beneath American's feet as they claim a place as their own and it's foundation remains "the people of that place" and the plants an animals that were there for millions of years before the genocide began.

When an archaeologist begins with "I think" and not what native Americans have to offer they will never know the answers. And we all know whitey is going to be right, first, then consider any truth that might be offered that makes his theory stronger.