Underrated Cultures

[ShortHair]

Always wanted to look into pre-Columbian cultures of Middle and South America. They've just re-opened a dig near Ayacucho in Peru.

Saw a piece on History Channel recently on lost civilizations. There's a site in southeast Turkey that doesn't belong to any known civilization, and it's thousands of years older than Stonehenge. It's a certainty that there were cultures of which we haven't found a trace--or if we did, we didn't know what it signified. They could have lived anywhere, reached any technological level, and then killed themselves off--the way we "modern" people tend to do.

One theory holds that the Black Sea was dry at one time. Something happened, possibly rising sea levels, and the people living there were inundated. The few survivors would pass down the widespread myth of the Deluge. There's a similar trope in Randall Garrett's Gandalara books.

There are carvings in the Sahara Desert that hint at a culture there before it became desert. Can anyone say for sure that all the deserts in the world are natural?

Yes, I shouldn't get archaeological theories from TV. I don't have time to go to the library or sift through all the BS on the Internet.

Other suggestions. Mongols as the good guys. Tibet? I've never heard of anything but Lost Horizon that even tried. The early Christian and proto-Christian sects who got weeded out by the early Roman church. There's a sect in Ethiopia that may have the real Ark of the Covenant.

[Steerpike]

Shorthair, read 1491, by Charles Mann.

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Sorry for the necro, but I didn't want to create a whole new thread around a small rant of mine.

Is anyone here interested in pre-Christian, pre-medieval Northern Europe? I'm talking the Celtic, Germanic, and other "tribal" peoples whom the Greeks and Romans derogated as "barbarians". Honestly, whenever I world-build using Counterpart Cultures, I usually base my Northern European analogues on the pre-Christian cultures rather than the standard Middle Ages.

I am. I've been thinking about basing my next work's main culture on them. The only problem is, I hate doing research.

[Ireth]

I'm very interested in the Celtic myths; the backstory of my vampire novel is heavily steeped in Celtic lore and mythological beings, and my Fae duology has more of the same.

[Chekaman]

I'm interested.

[Helleaven]

There are many underrated cultures in the world. Most of them unfortunately have been forgotten.

For example, I just admire the ruins of Angkor Wat but I don't have any idea who built them or what kind of a culture they had.

For me, one of the most neglected side of the history is Turkic tribes. They were mostly nomadic people and it might look like they had no life except fighting and hunting. But they had mythical stories which is so underrated that even the Turkish people doesn't know anything about them. Pre-Islamic Turkic history reaches far behind anyone can imagine. From Hungary to Bulgaria, from Scythian to Avar Empire, from Turkestan to Uighurs, from Azerbaijani to Seljukians, from Gokturks to Great Hun Empire... Ottoman Empire is another example, but they had many resemblances to other Islamic cultures. I admit that it's kind of annoying to feel like ones culture is left out as if it had never existed.