Civilization has at its root the concept of cities, so by that standard it's fair to say that large parts of North America had no civilizations.
Whether this is particularly important is open to debate; I prefer to think that it is relevant (cities allow for specialization) but should not be considered a sign of sophistication.
Most archaeologists and anthropologists don't like the term 'civilization' as a whole because it's overloaded with these outdated connotations that reflect the biases of the speaker rather than anything meaningful about the society under discussion. You can repeat the first sentence to any Americanist you like and see if they agree with the spirit of what it says.
I'm not going to bother with the conspiratorial bits beyond to say that Machines as the Measure of Men is a book you might find interesting to engage with. The precolumbian Americas are a fundamentally alien continent that evolved separately from Eurasia. Europeans, explorers and scholars alike, had fundamental misunderstandings of how differently societies can evolve and judged them by how similar they were to European societies. Not surprisingly, entirely alien societies evolved a bit differently and get misjudged harshly on that mistaken basis.
However, to engage with your position in good faith, it's worth going through the sorts of things Indigenous American societies were incredibly advanced at. Let's talk list some fun facts about American urbanism:
* Teotihuacan during its heyday was one of the largest cities on earth.
* Some modern cities like Tucson have continuous urban habitation stretching back to before the founding of Rome.
* Tenochtitlan was equal to or larger in size than any city of Western Europe at the time of contact. Other cities like Cusco were merely "extremely large" by European standards.
* The Valley of Mexico at contact was one of the most densely populated and urbanized regions on earth, far exceeding anything in Europe at the time.
* One of the largest residential structures at approximately the size of the modern Kremlin is Pueblo Bonito in modern New Mexico. By room numbers (though not sheer area), later Rio Grande pueblos would rival Versailles.
* Parts of modern Chandler and Mesa, AZ, as well as most of Southwestern Colorado have approximately the same population density today as in precolumbian times.
As an archaeologist I don't think any of these are particularly meaningful metrics (or that comparative work is all that useful), they're just fun. I could probably go longer with other areas and facts, but it gets boring quickly. More meaningful would be discussions of agricultural intensity or resource efficiency or systemic resilience. American societies were phenomenally competitive on these sorts of metrics. They constructed the largest irrigation networks in the world, achieved per-acre calorie densities that wouldn't be seen again until fertilizer and intensive automation were invented in the 1950s, and practiced agriculture in some of the most arid locations on the planet, where Eurasians never succeeded.
To really put the cherry on top, it appears there were even large cities further north that we didn't know about until fairly recently, such as Cahokia[0]. Gardens built on rafts were functionally an early form of aquaculture, too.[1][2]
Not a single pre-columbian city in the americas had a million people.
In North America, the largest city, Cahokia, had 15,000 - 20,000 and peaked around 1100 AD. North America was mostly a stone age culture without a lot of cities.
You had more advanced civilizations in central and south america.
The Aztecs were the biggest. The largest urban area were the two sister cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. Again, population estimates are hard to come by, but 200,000–400,000 inhabitants are estimated for Tenochtitlan and half that for Tlatelolco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan
Teotihuacan was the largest city in the Americas during the classical period, beginning to decline around 600 AD and virtually dissapearing by 1000 AD. Peak population of 150-250,000 around 450 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan
The absolutely fascinating Olmecs (with the enormous heads and jade masks), were the largest before then, but they died out around 450 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmecs
Population estimates for their biggest city, La Venta, are about 20,000 people.
Teotihuacan had about 125K around 500 A.D, but again collapsed by around 1000 AD.
In South America, the largest Incan city, Cusco, had a peak population of up to 150,000.
> Not a single pre-columbian city in the americas had a million people.
Hardly any cities anywhere had ever had 1m people at that time. A quick google puts ancient Rome at 450,000, ancient Athens at 200,000, and London in 1500AD at 50,000 (200,000 by 1600AD)
The UN scheme deliberately uses the term "Northern America" to differentiate it from the continent of a similar name. The second sentence on the wiki page says as much:
> Note that the continent of North America comprises the intermediate regions of the Caribbean, Central America, and Northern America.
The UN uses that scheme because Mexico is part of the Latin America region and makes more sense grouped with them for statistical purposes than with the US and Canada.
Even if you interpret my comment to mean something other than what I meant, what I said is still true: Large parts of North America had no cities prior to European settlement.
Like everything in archaeology, that depends on your definitions. Restricting the scope to the lower 48 for sanity and taking Michael Smith's attributes of urbanism (a good default starting point), a good chunk of the US had pre-columbian urbanism. The southwest and southeast are inarguable. The Midwest had similar urban agglomerations on a smaller scale. The PNW and California (aside from the bits already described by 'the southwest') displayed most attributes aside from "true agriculture", which is a silly eurocentric concept anyway. That leaves the Northeast where I'm simply not familiar enough with the archaeology to comment.
Florida, possibly a bit of the plains, and the upper northeast could be said to lack cities, sure. That's a far cry from how I understand your statement. What am I missing here?
Is there a point be made by including areas that continue to lack cities and urbanization even today? I was assuming that you were making a point about pre-contact demography in North America being unique in some way. If you were just stating random characteristics it shares with every other continent, my mistake I guess?
Most people in the world don't seem to have any problem with distinguishing North-America-the-Continent from North-America-the-Region depending on context. For example in my native tongue there's not even a way of phrasing them differently. Yet humans can somehow disambiguate the two just fine.
Whether this is particularly important is open to debate; I prefer to think that it is relevant (cities allow for specialization) but should not be considered a sign of sophistication.