Although they are considered an important part of native american culture, there were no what in the americas before spanish explorers arrived?

Native Americans in the United States fall into a number of distinct ethno-linguistic and territorial phyla, whose only uniting characeristic is that they were in a stage of either Mesolithic (hunter-gatherer) or Neolithic (subsistence farming) culture at the time of European contact.

They can be classified as belonging to a number of large cultural areas:

Continental US