GIThruster wrote:Are they "wild game ranches" or is the game domesticated? If what you're talking about is like a wild game preserve, where a large tract of land has a 12' high fence around it and the game is left to itself, it's hard to see how to call that domestication.
I believe most of them are in what you would call "pens" not just fenced in areas. They are fed from troughs for the most part and can be housed in barns. This is true for most of the hoofed animals. Certain ones, like the bears, I believe, are kept in a more natural habitat and are fed from hanging food cages.
Sorry, I'm not that familiar with all the different farms, but my brother-in-law does run a wild-game restaurant, so I've seen a couple of the farms and how they're run.
I take "civilized" to literally mean "possessing those social refinements necessary to live in a city, a community large enough that you do not personally know most of those you encounter regularly." This is not dependent on any particular technology beyond spoken language.
On the other hand, some degree of civilization is a requirement for more than the most primitive of technologies to be developed.
GIThruster wrote:Point made but please note, Native Americans did not develop writing, not even pictographic writing as did the Central and South American tribes. Writing is one important hallmark of civilization--especially symbolic as opposed to pictographic writing. They didn't develop sewers, which is what is necessary to build cities. No cities, folks! This example of a large group of houses on the northern boarder of one of the Great Lakes is an example of failure, because they didn't build sewers to carry off human waste. The group of houses there were suddenly evacuated because putting so many people so close together without a way to carry off the waste is fatal. When we see this in 6,000 year old remains in the Middle East, we handily call it a failure.
No mathematics to speak of, at least none we know about. No significant buildings. No silos. No agriculture. No domestication of animals. No chemistry. No firearms. No steam power. None of the technological advances that made Europeans the dominant civilization of the time.
Just seems silly to me to object to calling them savages. They were technologically 6,000 years behind the people who displaced them.
End of story.
Romans had sewers, London didn't really until the 1800's. You still can't blame the N.A. Indians, they didn't have the staple crops or domesticateable animals to support settled farming/towns. As mentioned, technology doesn't cross the equator as easily as a common east/west route. When corn was developed south of the equator it did migrate to N.A. in time to produce the mound builders, but before they could make further advances the worst drought in centuries crushed them.