Civilization Never Left: Rethinking Deep History Beyond Empire

What if we stopped viewing history through the lens of collapse and conquest? What if we stopped asking, "What used to be here?" and started asking, "What still remains?"

Across the globe, civilizations labeled as "ancient" or "lost" have living descendants, ongoing cultural practices, and architectural or agricultural legacies that continue to shape the land. It is not that these civilizations disappeared. It's that the lens we use to see them has been filtered through colonization, Eurocentrism, and the idea that civilization looks only one way.

Let's take a look at Arizona.

Too often imagined as a blank frontier, Arizona is the site of millennia-old desert civilizations like the Hohokam, whose irrigation canals literally form the foundation of Phoenix's water system today. This wasn't a temporary settlement or a nomadic pass-through. These were builders, engineers, and farmers who sustained city-like settlements in extreme conditions for hundreds of years. They made a home of the desert, and much of what they built is still around us, buried beneath concrete and suburbia.

In the same way we regard Egypt as a living country with thousands of years of cultural continuity—even as its language and religion have changed—so too should we view Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the American Southwest as zones of deep, living civilization. Mexico is not just a post-colonial state. It is the heir to Toltec, Maya, Aztec, and hundreds of regional powers. Their traditions, cosmologies, and forms of governance persist—sometimes obviously, sometimes quietly.

We see similar truths elsewhere. In Papua New Guinea, European explorers in the 1930s were shocked to find the Highlands were not a wild jungle, but a massive cultivated system, a landscape designed, shaped, and maintained by generations of human intention. They called it a garden. They compared it to a park. But it was neither wild nor European, iit was something older: a civilization that didn’t build with marble, but with landscape. A continent carved with kinship, memory, and food.

Australia offers another case. When the British first arrived, they described the land as an empty, cultivated plain. They imagined it was made for them. But in truth, Aboriginal Australians had long shaped the continent with fire, movement, and ecological design. It wasn’t an empty land—it was a deeply known and tended one.

The problem isn’t that these civilizations lacked writing or monumental architecture. The problem is that we equated "civilization" with our model: urban density, stone buildings, extractive economies, and written archives. But other models exist. They always have. And they were sustainable for thousands of years.

To decolonize our view of civilization is not to erase history. It is to enrich it. It is to honor Indigenous design, memory, and continuity. It is to say: the story didn’t stop with conquest.

Copyright © 2025 Ryan Badertscher. All rights reserved.