I have placed "modern technology" in quotes, here, in order to highlight its difference from technology as such. All humans, as we know them, have expressed technology; it has been argued, in fact, that technology is the defining difference between humans and their precursors, the homonids. Certainly, indigenous people of the Americas were already in possession of very useful technologies.
By "modern technology" I mean a radically new epoch in human history in which technology has taken on a very new character. It is a very recent epoch, beginning in England in the second half of the 18th Century and proceeding through the rest of Europe in approximately a century of time. The most basic change in this technological epoch is our relationship to energy; it is, indeed, the epoch of unlocking energy resources, storing them in energy reservoirs, and using them on demand. The conceptual change was documented by Henry Adams in his brilliant chapter "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (The Education of Henry Adams (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918)) and it has been philosophically interpreted by Martin Heidegger in his essays "The Question Concerning Technology" and "The Turning" (The Question Concerning Technology (Harper & Row, 1977)). So long as the human exploitation of energy remained simply energy-transfer humans remained dependent upon a cooperative relationship with the natural occurence of energy. (The windmill, for instance, was completely dependent upon the blowing wind; only then could it transfer wind energy into grinding energy.) Firing wood or coal to run a steam engine gave humans the capacity to generate energy whenever they wished. Perhaps wood, coal, and water are required, but they can be cut, mined, and held back long in advance. The radical characteristic of modern technology is its ability to store energy and to use it anywhere at will, hence, its apparent release from any cooperative relationship with nature and natural processes.
It should be clear that this epoch is intimately connected with the transition from traditional agricultural lifeways to modern industrial lifeways. The farmer must work in tune with natural cycles; the manufacturer can work without regard to nature. The important change to note, here, is not that modern people possess technology but rather that modern people's peculiar kind of technology has allowed them to largely ignore nature. Thus, the adjustment to place seemed irrelevant to immigrants of the 19th Century and indigenous people seemed like children-of-the-past, still fully caught up in a natural world that Europeans were now hastening to ignore. Indeed, it seemed to Europeans of the period that the obligation faced by humans was to transform the natural world, tame it, and bring it to serve human interests. In a way, "place" is what we make of it --- not something in itself waiting to be understood.
This remarkable transformation of human technology has had a particularly striking effect on Americans because it took place well within the timeframe of America's growth and development. Spanish colonization from 1600 onward remained essentially aggrarian, indeed, feudalistic, well into the 19th Century, when Mexico finally lost its residual control over American territories. English colonization from 1600 onward remained aggrarian well into the 18th Century, when Capitalism began to turn colonials toward manufacturing, especially in the northeastern colonies. It can certainly be argued that the rise in Capitalist spirit of the colonials was a major reason for the ultimate break with England, leading to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Thus, the birth of the nation and the resulting flood of immigrants may be timely consequences of this new epoch in human technology. Not only did this new epoch guide the development of American industry from 1800 onward, but it also had a major impact on the character of the American frontier. To be an "American" is to be in a particular kind of struggle between culture and place --- often, indeed, to be in outright antagonism between culture and place. Perhaps there is no more telling icon of this antagonism than the emigrant's wagon, a bizarre creation of European technology, hawled across the plains, mountains, and deserts of the American West, bearing as many of the material implements of European civilization as possible into an unknown and hostile land. The Emigrant Trail was strewn with cast-off implements and graves, sorry indicators of the fact that human society is a mere flash-in-the-pan compared with the balancing forces of the natural world.