re: #375 sagehen

A handful of adobe settlements in the Southwest; on territory that wasn’t even part of the U.S. until 1848. For the most part, the indigenous peoples of this continent built with biodegradable materials and they’re long gone.

If you’re looking for stone structures, you have to go south of the Rio Grande.

Not entirely true. Around here there are canals that were dug out starting around 600/700 CE by the Hohokam. Some of the canals were simply repurposed and reused by Mormon farmers in the late 1800s, because they were superbly engineered over a thousand years before.

More to structures, there’s a huge platform, 27 feet high and the length of a football field made out of caliche a few miles to the northwest of where I’m sitting. It’s called Mesa Grande and was a Hohokam settlement during the late period (1100-1400) It was owned by “B” movie actress Acquanetta before she sold it to the city back in the 1980s. Not a whole lot of excavating has gone on (due to money issues) but it’s a pretty huge complex.