Muddy, When I said "stone age", you go on to find examples of some various feats done by various indians. ok, sure. Sure, stone-age primitive folks can come up with some pretty inengious things, build some nifty shelters, etc....
But let's cut to the chase here: ALL IN ALL, when comparing those Europeans arriving here in North America versus the indians they met here ....... which was more advanced, technologically speaking ? Think real hard ......: The ones who had been "repressed via their religion which forbade technological explorations/inventions, etc..." or the one here in north america, with no notion whatsoever of this repressive stiffling religion?
Not sure if technology the best comparison for me, but who followed who's established trade and travel routes?
How many towns today are in a locale used previously and why?
Heck, around here many of the roads follow the old paths. Despite the change in environment created by logging and progression following.
The water routes are prized homesites though trespass gets to be an issue when riff raff wants to walk the edges of course.. The summer beach locales are used in the summer with a retreat to winter valleys same as the natives used them.
Have you tried your hand at selecting raw material and tempering material for making pottery?Then shaped it, followed by successfully hardening it then cook with it?
How about flint knapping? Artifacts show more than a crude attempt at a functional tool.
Wood,metals,bone,a variety of stone CRAFTED beyond utilitarian design that few store supplied folks can create today.
The time to have to craft on any scale, even if by guilds can only be a result of having food and not warring.
No broad spectrum of only one religion existed coast to coast, as far as documented, but many existed.
Some followed a progression of time, from the beginning to the present.
Did those early colonists turn down a chance to survive in Jamestowne by sticking to a repressive history, no.
They were bailed out. Repression had no factor...until 1622. After which religion took a back seat to deliberate extermination.
The focus was not, or has it ever been on the natives technological inventiveness if left to themselves where they had lived for eons.
There is no comparison other than opposites in who suppressed whom. Dead is quite suppressed. Who was suppressed; and why was that again?
Suppression was and is needed with our religion of money and consumption. From air to water,earth wind;what has technology not fouled?
We build mounds. Not of earth but the waste of a consumptive technology that has defiled the resources as quickly as we could.
Buy water. Buy food. Buy everything. Then throw it's waste stream somewhere besides where you are.
Be careful not to drink,eat,or breath what others have not deemed safe because there are yucky side effects to what has been done.
But we are the advanced conquerors.