Hello Brig. I'm a relative newcomer, led here from the Stone Pages. Loie and I have been to a dozen or so Native American sites if we include both rock art and building sites. Well, now, with those on Hawaii, maybe a few dozen! None of them obscure: places like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. It was a sidelight with us when we first began travelling.

"American" history is usually divided into pre- and post Columbian. Pretty Eurocentric but that was a watershed. North American tribes had painted pictorial histories, but no written ones. So in a sense, "prehistory" ended in North America with European contact.

Ideographic "writing" on stone may have been begun as early as 500 BCE in MesoAmerica, and paper came along sometime later.

Do we need a thread on your American site?