@Kyresti Do we have reliable pre-writing records from Native American civilizations? (Other than the Maya, who had a writing system that is now well-understood) My understanding is that the records we do have start from the oral histories (which get less reliable as you go back further in time) that were written down by the invading europeans, but if we have good records before that I'd be interested to learn more!

And yeah, untangling truth from fiction is difficult a lot of the time. We've lost a lot of information about a lot of societies because the records they left were incomplete or destroyed, either intentionally or unintentionally

Untangling fact from opinion can be hard as well. It's usually easy enough to tell that "King Whoever ruled from Date to Whenever" is either true or false, but "King Whoever did Goodthing and/or Badthing" is harder. Did king whoever actually do it, or did someone else? Was the thing actually good or bad?

we're not a historian and don't know how to answer all these questions, just find ancient history to be an interesting topic. I wish we knew a lot more than we did about a lot of ancient peoples.
-F