Quote:
Originally Posted by Ea
AFAIK that is certainly true of the Aztec, and in general the Middle American and North American native peoples. The peoples of the Andes less so, though of course oppression were taking place, also today. But they were far from wiped out.
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Check out
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelatio...0541634&sr=8-1 for a .... well, ebook... that covers this question.
Quote from the Amazon review:
"But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before."