Spanish Conquest of Aztecs

You mean like the Aztec empire that practiced human sacrifice and tortured other tribes?

Ahem ... Cortez and the Aztecs? Pizarro and the Incas? Wiped out the natives and their lifestyles long before there was a United States.

It's not an exaggeration.As the other response notes, Tenochtitlan was possibly the largest city in the world at the time, and the Aztec empire contained many other cities with populations over 10k. The Inca built a massive empire (8-12M people) centered on the Andean mountains linked together by roads and suspension bridges and built monumental architecture using masonry techniques that are impressive even today. We're just starting to get a handle on the scale of the Mayan empire,

You do know that there are tribes other than the Mayans?

I hate to sprinkle blow on your parade, but coca was a different civilization 3000 miles and a few centuries away from both the Maya and the Aztecs. The only thing they have in common is they or their descendents eventually had their history erased by Spanish colonizers in the name of "civilization".

I'm not saying they were referring to Columbus as the person who conquered Central America. I was amused by GP's insinuation that the Aztecs had somehow collapsed before Columbus.> Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).On a second reading it seems that GP had most likely meant that they were deforesting before Columbus, not that they had collpased before Columbus, but it's still strange to

Well the aztecs did the same before the europeans:"Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs eradicated many Mayan works and sought to depict themselves as the true rulers through a fake history and newly written texts"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codicesI dont mean this to be taken as a justification or something, but there is this tendency o

Possibly, although I think the Aztecs specifically was likely doomed from the start because they were a very young society and a brutal military conqueror and everybody they dealt with hated them, but you never can know. However the Aztecs were far from the only significant America Native society or civilization. There were many others, especially to the South, that we know were far more stable societies and governments producing more advanced goods and had high levels of trade amongst each othe

While it’s true that the conquistadors had immense success in their initial encounters with the natives, the Aztecs would have adapted eventually to counter the Spanish had they not been crippled by the European diseases. This seems to have already been the case in the siege of Tenochtitlan where the Spanish suffers huge casualties despite having similar numbers (together with their allies) to the Aztecs. This was the case with many of the North American tribes and even with the diseases it took

Yeah, it seems to be a relatively common (false) belief that the Mayans died out or even mysteriously disappeared. In reality their “classical” civilization declined and was eventually completely conquered by Spain, but as you point out, the people are still around. There are still millions of ethnic Mayans, who still speak Mayan languages, primarily in Guatemala and to a lesser extent in Mexico.The Incas were separated from the Mayans by thousands of miles of jungle (and their civilization r