Isnt it getting a little bit out of hand with all these tribes becoming civilizations all of a sudden?
Cant Firaxis just stick to real civilizations for the Civilization game? We can have the Disney civs in another game perhaps?
Keep it real.
Because obviously anyone who doesn't use the Latin or Greek alphabet and isn't a Judaeo-Christian culture can't build cities and develop advanced societies.
There were "advanced" "tribes" in the Americas that developed what we would consider "civlizations". Take for instance, the
Pueblo that Firaxis was thinking about putting in, who developed sizable communities around large canyons (a rather unique innovation) and utilized agriculture and road systems in their civilization, and who traded long-distance with the Aztecs and other MesoAmericans to the south and various other "tribes" to the North. These cultures of the southwest dominated the region for many centuries, from as early as the first millennia BCE to a century or two before the coming of the Europeans.
Or, as another example, look at the
Mississippi civilization, which is in fact a convenient grouping of many different cultures that dominated the Mississippi river basin until the Europeans came, when they were mostly wiped out by disease. They built towns and cities, many structures of which were built on mounds (which is why they are often called the mound builders). Examples of these large, often walled settlements can be seen
here,
here, and
here. Based off of archaeological evidence as well as the oral tradition of the descendents of the Mississippians and a few Spanish sources, we know that the Mississippians definitely had complex political and religious systems in their society. They also practiced agriculture.
There's also the case of the
Pacific Northwest "tribes", whom I find absolutely fascinating if only for one reason - they are one of the few, and possibly the only, culture of hunter-gatherers to live a sedentary lifestyle in towns and villages. This sort of adaptation is usually only among cultures practicing agriculture, but it appears many of these groups had so much surplus food from fishing and such that they could afford to settle down.
These are just a few examples. Of course, many societies in the Americas weren't as urbanized, but even they had their complex political, economic, social, and religious systems. You don't need to have gigantic settlements and a writing system to be a highly developed society.
To say these cannot count as sophisticated, developed societies - which the term "civilization" denotes - harks back to the 19th century of European imperialism, when the West classified anyone not following
their style of advanced society as less than a "civilization".
? I don't know, you would be surprised what you find at libraries. I have found Jesuit documents regarding the Iroquois at mine from the 1700s, internment camp records from the Aleutian islands, and other microfilm/primary documents at mine.
