What you postulate may be true and it somewhat goes with how Cahokia was built, which was not with stone (at least not large massive stones) which says something about what natural materials were available around Cahokia. Maybe without a lot of available natural stone formations, “organic” materials would have been used for whatever “records” they kept.
Which takes us back to the Inca and it makes me think others before the Inca built many of the massive stone works that have been attributed to the Inca, as I do not see the knotted cords of the Inca as equal to the task of transmitting the sophisticated methods in building the massiv stone works. I think maybe the Inca inherited them and just took them over. Maybe wh they took them over from were peoples who were there during the last ice age.
Like field stone fences, they found or created blocks of varying sizes that could be fitted. They then cut/chipped the stone down to a pretty close fit and applied a thin, special paste mortar when the stones were set. When wet the paste dissolved the last few millimeters of the rough faces of the stone, the paste washed out and the stone fit together with microscopic tolerances.
The close fit of irregular stone made the walls very earthquake resistant. Really freaking clever.