Just been watching a documentary about the pyramids of
Túcame, Peru. (Which that Wiki page doesn't directly discuss, you have to wander onto the links regarding the Lambayeque/Sican people to even get a flavour of the nature of the subject.)
It strikes me that if there's a Dwarf Fortress player (or set of them, in collaborative/succession mode) playing with our own world, this is one of the more obvious examples of them having chosen an embark area and played with it.
To badly summarise a doubtless dramatised retelling of the tale, pyramids are
the major theme, in this particular area. There are huge numbers of brick-built pyramids (of a local stepped- and flat-topped- style). One site has a single huge pyramid, another has pyramids 'cleansed' by fire and abandoned. The ultimate site, however, has twenty-six separate constructions. Like
all the structures throughout this valley, each had taken an inordinately long time to build, probably through an overwhelmingly use of the available human resources (in brick-making, building with the bricks, otherwise feeding and supplying the workforce) in order to accomplish the megaprojects concerned. Complex rampways between raised areas reserved for workshops, kitchens, nobilic residences and the like.
And, at the end of the civilisation concerned, something very similar to a Tantrum Spiral may well have occurred, before the site was finally burnt and abandoned and the last residents dispersed.
Very Dorfy, the lot of it.
(I was wondering whether this discussion belongs on the 'upper' or 'lower' forums, and plumped for here. Feel free to ignore it if you think I was wrong. I had also first searched for both "Tucame" and "Túcame", among other terms. The former doesn't exist on the forum, the latter seems to break the search algorithm and give way too many results, of which none of those checked appear to actually feature the term concerned.)