Listen, okay. (I would like to note that what I am about to say was permissible when I did it in 2000; the site has now been cordoned off because too many damn people couldn’t behave themselves when presented such a treasure.)
I have literally SAT IN THE REMAINS OF A 900-YEAR-OLD MULTIFAMILY DWELLING RIGHT HERE IN ARIZONA. It’s called Castle “A,” (yes, with the quotes, no idea why) and is part of the Montezuma Castle cliff dwellings, which actually had nothing to do with Montezuma and were occupied by the Sinagua nation between 1050 and 1400 CE.
You can’t go in anymore because of course dipshit tourists mean we can’t have nice things and people kept stealing rocks (which destabilizes the whole structure, if you’re wondering why that matters), but when I first visited the site, as long as you were being careful and respectful there were still two rooms (well—the outlines of rooms, there’s not much left but the floor and walls a brick or two high) where you could walk in, and a ranger did in fact let me do just that. So there’s a picture of me, somewhere on a CD-ROM and probably lost forever at this point because the early 2000s were Like That, sitting on the floor of Castle “A” next to a stone used for grinding masa flour. In Arizona. In America.
And it’s not even the oldest Native structure in America. It’s not even the oldest in Arizona. It’s not even the oldest IN THAT SPECIFIC STATE PARK. The oldest Native structure in the Montezuma Castle National Monument park is an irrigation canal that flows out of Montezuma Well and was built circa 700 CE, and while parts have had to be reinforced due to, you know, 1300 years of flowing water, it is indeed still fully functional today.
Incidentally, the oldest Native-made structure in the United States is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It’s a ceremonial (we think) mound called Mound B, which was built up over a couple of millennia and is (depending which part of the mound we’re talking about) 11,000 to 8200 years old. Its companion mound, Mound A, is about 7500 years old.
Stonehenge has an oldest-possible date of about five thousand years ago.
The Step Pyramid is about 4700 years old.
The Parthenon is 2500 years old.
The oldest known town ruins in Europe are a site called Solnitsata, in Bulgaria, and they’re about 7500 years old.
The oldest-known “we think it was a temple probably, we’re not really sure” in all of Eurasia is Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey, which is believed to have been built over the course of several centuries sometime between 9500 and 7500 BCE.
In other words, Native American ceremonial architecture by a tribe so old we don’t actually know who they were IS OLDER THAN ANY STRUCTURE IN EUROPE.
SUCK your “nothing is old here.”
