Whew don't you try to post counter points Aztec Sacrifices Laid to Hunger, Not Just Religion The New York Times Based on evidence he has gathered, Dr. Michael Harner, a professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, contends that in the 15th century, just before the Spanish conquerors arrived in Mexico, the Aztecs had the most cannibalistic culture known to modern anthropology. Although most sources on the Aztecs note that human sacrifice and cannibalism were practiced, they seldom suggest that it was anything more than an occasional religious rite. Dr. Harner's theory of nutritional need is based on a recent revision in the number of people thought to have been sacrificed by the Aztecs. Dr. Woodrow Borah an authority on the demography of ancient Mexico at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently estimated that the Aztecs sacrificed 250,000 people a year. This consituted about 1 percent of the region's population of 25 million. As an Aztec state-sponsored ritual practice, human sacrifice ends in the 1520s. There are some records of a few sacrifices taking place after the Spaniards arrive, but the state-sponsored ritual sacrifices end in the first ten years after the arrival of the Spaniards
It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas up to eight million indigenous people died, primarily through the spread of Afro-Eurasian diseases,[30] in a series of events that have been described as the first large-scale act of genocide of the modern era.[48] Las Casas wrote that the native population on the Spanish colony of Hispaniola had been reduced from 400,000 to 200 in a few decades.[49] His writings were among those that gave rise to Spanish Black Legend, which Charles Gibson describes as "the accumulated tradition of propaganda and Hispanophobia according to which the Spanish Empire is regarded as cruel, bigoted, degenerate, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of reality".[50][51] Historian Andrés Reséndez at the University of California, Davis asserts that even though disease was a factor, the indigenous population of Hispaniola would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to.[52] He says that "among these human factors, slavery was the major killer" of Hispaniola's population, and that "between 1492 and 1550, a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more natives in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza or malaria."[53] With the initial conquest of the Americas completed, the Spanish implemented the encomienda system in 1503. In theory, the encomienda placed groups of indigenous peoples under Spanish oversight to foster cultural assimilation and conversion to Catholicism, but in practice it led to the legally sanctioned forced labor and resource extraction under brutal conditions with a high death rate.[55] Though the Spaniards did not set out to exterminate the indigenous peoples, believing their numbers to be inexhaustible, their actions led to the annihilation of entire tribes such as the Arawak.[56] Many Arawaks died from lethal forced labor in the mines, where a third of workers died every six months.[57] According to historian David Stannard, the encomienda was a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths."[58] The Spanish and Portuguese genocides of indigenous peoples of the Americas wiped out approximately 90% of the indigenous population, and most agriculture and infrastructure.[59]: 3 According to ecologist Simon Lewis and geologist Mark Maslin, the scope of these genocides was so extensive that it prompted the global temperature decrease between 1550 and 1700 as forest regeneration resulted in additional carbon sequestration.[59]: 3