> It depends on your definition of treasure, of course.

Wouldn't it still be a tiny fraction of what was/can be found in Europe no matter how you define it?

You'd be surprised. Mexico & Central America in particular were very well populated - Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan were among the largest cities in the world in their respected heydays, and the overall population of both Mexico and of the Andes + Amazonia were on par with European nations of the time.

(Ed. - Noting that the thread here was specifically about the US, those populations were also much larger than most are aware, and also had a fairly rich material and social culture, especially in the Pacific Northwest, though admittedly both smaller and unfortunately more biodegradable than the empires in the south. Book recs below still stand.)

If you're interested, Charles Mann's 1491 is a fantastic read on the pre-Colombian Americas - these were large, sophisticated, well-established civilizations before smallpox. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything also spends a lot of time with the various North American civilizations.

> these were large, sophisticated, well-established civilizations before smallpox.

I'm not arguing against that. It's just that their metallurgy industries were quite underdeveloped in comparison to those in Europe/Asia. Some types of artefacts etc. are just preserved better than others.

e.g. we have massive amounts of clay tablets left by the Hittites, the Ancient Assyrians, Babylonians etc. We have very few or almost no little texts written by (and know relatively overall about them in general) more 'advanced' and 'developed' civilizations like the Etruscans, Carthaginians or the Achaemenid Empire because they used more perishable materials for writing (or possible weren't really that into writing things down like the Persians).

Same applies to many other types of material culture. Neolithic Europe for instance was fairly densely populated and possibly quite advanced yet people lived in wooden houses (the climate is of course also much more humid) and didn't write stuff down (possibly due to their more egalitarian nature compared to middle eastern civilizations) and we barely know anything about them too. It's possible that one of the largest cities on earth during the 4th millennium BC were in what is now Ukraine yet we know almost absolutely nothing about them (they had ample supplies of wood, so there was no need to make houses out of mudbricks and due to whatever reasons they had no inclination to build massive tombs or temples)

Well, if you're interested in written materials in particular, the Maya and Aztec codices were in abundance at the time of the Spanish arrival, as were the Incan quipu (which seem to have been an actual writing system and not just an accounting method). They didn't survive contact - the Spanish burned as many of them as they could get their hands on, and today we've only really got a handful of extant examples left. That's unfortunately the answer for what happened to a lot of New World culture (although the climate and terrain deserves its due especially in Central America, where there's oral history of large cities which we're only now finding by lidar because the jungle's so aggressive).

The Olmec are an interesting case here, too - beautiful, just stunning sculptural works, going back to ~2000-1500BC. There's really quite a bit of cultural artifacts found and to be found.

I'm not really trying to downplay or deny the significance of pre-contact American cultures and civilizations. Everything I said was in the context of:

> It depends on your definition of treasure, of course. Wouldn't it still be a tiny fraction of what was/can be found in Europe no matter how you define it?

Which I think still holds true (again certain materials (especially in combination with certain climatic conditions) just survive for much longer than others).