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> Interesting stuff on the no-cattle, no-metals farming there,
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A quick note on the North American farming. It was mostly of the trinity of corn (maize), beans, and squash, all grown together. The corn was planted in clusters, with the beans planted next to it, able to climb up the stalks of the corn. The squash vines could sprawl between the clusters of corn.
This style of planting is entirely different from single crop fields planted in furrows. It worked well for that combination, as the three plants are fairly complimentary. For example corn takes a lot of nitrogen out of the soil, but beans fix nitrogen back into the soil. There are other complimentary aspects too, which made this farming reasonably efficient even with all labor being manual.
Note that without domestic herbivores, they didn't have manure for fertilizer, nor did they practice anything like three field rotation (at least in north-eastern north America, I'm not sure about down in Maya/Aztec lands). As a result field productivity would drop fairly quickly, so this was mostly slash and burn agriculture--burn down the trees for a new field, giving a nice dose of fertilizer to the ground from the ashes, use it for a number of years, then move on.
Without domestic herbivores there was not need to fence the fields.
Meat was almost totally obtained from hunting, which has all sorts of cultural implications.
There was farming in at least parts of the great plains, pre-contact, but once horses were introduced into the plains this declined. Apparently horse nomads out-compete plow-less farmers for the most part.
Remember too that most impressions of the native americans were gathered by europeans who were going through a disease ravaged dark ages. Populations may have been as low as 10% of pre-contact numbers in some areas. So the degree of development and sophistication tended to get under-estimated by the europeans at the time. They were doing more or less the equivalent of moving through Glorantha in in the dawn age, with populations thinned out greatly and societies stripped of quite a lot of their complexity.
But such cultures could be fairly sophisticated all the same--trade networks apparently linked everything from the great lakes to the gulf, atlantic coast to the rockies. And there were birch bark scrolls recording important information, large tribal alliances, established trade routes, and so on.
--Bryan
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