>>54390511As far as I know, the cities fell before Europeans arrived, but you're right that they existed.
The likely reason they were in the same place as major European settlements is that people tend to settle cities in the same places.
To my knowledge, writing never spread north of Mexico, so they left behind no records. I would like to think that the English wouldn't have been as retarded as the Spanish, and if there had been written records, they wouldn't have been fucking burned like the Mesoamerican records were.
Interestingly, one of the biggest reasons civilization never progressed as far in the Americas as in Eurasia is the lack of horses and other draft animals. Peruvians at least had llamas, but Mesoamericans and Mississippians had nothing.
The other reason, of course, is that they couldn't get their hands on easy-to-access copper. The Aztecs were technically still in the Stone Age when the Spanish arrived, although they were a great deal more advanced than any Stone Age culture in Eurasia.
