I understand. This came as a surprise to me too, and it took a lot of my own research before realizing how much the scientific consensus is changing in just a few years. This is covered at length by modern historians and geographers, who are revisiting the work of previous generations, and realizing that much of it is distorted by the political and ideological biases of the past centuries. As it turns out, a large share of history we take for granted is basically cargo-culting.

Here are a few pointers to get you started.

William M Denevan: The Pristine Myth. In this work Denevan acknowleges the role of disease, but highlights the many other causes of death which have been overlooked or intentionally downplayed in the past. Link: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.htm...

Sherburne F. Cook: The conflict between the California Indian and white civilization. Here Cook tallies up specific death numbers by cause in California. Spoiler alert: disease was not the main cause of death, neither in early conflicts with the Spanish, nor in later conflict with the US Army. (A reminder: the primary role of the US Army for a long time was killing Indians, another topic modern Americans are not too comfortable discussing). Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ck1w556

Benjamin Keen: The White Legend Revisited. In this work Keen explains that historians "accept uncritically a fatalistic 'epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity' explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors... which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections." (spoiler alert: by socioeconomic factors, he means the adverse effects of war, colonization and the destruction of traditional lifestyle). Link: https://www.scribd.com/document/264650329/B-White-Legend-Rev...

And a few longer reads:

Ned Blackhawk. Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West.

David E. Stennard. American Holocaust: the Conquest of the New World.

Winona Laduke. The Militarization of Indian Country

> In a lot of cases what Europeans did would have been impossible without an initial spread of disease. For example, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he was preceded by a plague that upset the political order in a way that made it possible for him to insert himself into it. It's unlikely the Inca would have been as easily conquered (if at all) without that plague. Likewise, when the Plymouth colony settled in Massachusetts, they moved into the homes of recently deceased natives. Had the original natives been alive, they never would have been able to settle there. That's just a couple of examples and this whole thread is about civilizations that disappeared completely just prior to European colonization, too quickly for the Europeans to have done it through conquest.

This is a strong assertion. I'd like to see a more complete argument for it. :-)

More seriously, the way you present these facts is a good illustration of the problem I'm describing. For example, you are correct that the Plymouth colony found native colonies already weakened by disease spread by earlier traders. However, they did not just "move into the homes of recently deceased natives". They pressed their advantage and waged total war against the tribes, in several cases killing entire villages including women and children. Then they moved in. This is amply documented, but oddly absent from the popular narrative which we were tought in school.

So, as you can see, even when disease has played a role, the way that role is depicted is problematic, because it creates a narrative where violence is swept under the rug. You yourself just perpetuaded that narrative in your comment.

Pre-empting your request for more documentation, here is a quote from a participant in one of the massacres:

those that scaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Plymouth_Plantation

> > allowing us descendants of settlers to conveniently avoid taking responsibility for the institutionalized genocide that is at the heart of our culture.

> This is a silly thing to say. European settlers obviously weren't angels, but conquest and colonization is a common thread through most civilizations worldwide, including pre-Columbian American civilizations. (Both the Inca and the Aztecs were empires after all.) The difference with European expansion was simply the scale of the process.

You are engaging in whataboutism. What other cultures are guilty of is irrelevant, this isn't an innocence contest. My culture (descendant of the Europeans who colonized North America), which presumably is yours too, is guilty of not acknowledging the central role that institutionalized genocide played in our history. As long as we don't come to terms with that past, honestly and openly, we will be crippled as a society, and even worse we will be blind to the role of that past in modern problems. Do you really think our modern crisis, from gun violence to the resurgence of white supremacy, have nothing to do with our history of killing people to take their land, and building a political system celebrating those who managed to secure the most land in the process? To me it's obvious that there is a connection. By refusing to acknowledging where we came from, we are robbing ourselves of the chance to control where we go.

I also recommend Empires of the Atlantic World by J.W. Elliot. Although the book is broad-ranging and not focused exclusively the causes of depopulation, it presents details of how Spain viewed inhabitants of the New World in the same way as it did those of territories it had recently conquered in Europe: as vassals who would provide the labour, while the conquerors sat at the top of the social hierarchy and pursued the consolidation of the conquest and extraction of resources.

From this perspective, the subsequent depopulation was not the intended goal of the conquerors, although they indeed caused it through disease, wars against resisting groups, and disasterous attempts at improving the agriculture system to fit European models.

> From this perspective, the subsequent depopulation was not the intended goal of the conquerors, although they indeed caused it through disease, wars against resisting groups, and disasterous attempts at improving the agriculture system to fit European models.

Depopulation might not have been the goal of the Spanish, but it was a very explicit goal - in fact the foundational goal - of Anglo-American settlers.

For example, in order to become a state, newly settled territories had to meet specific criteria which included a minimum ratio of settlers to native. That created powerful incentives to drive away natives by any means necessary.

The history of Tennessee is a brutal example of this, but there are (literally) dozens of examples to chose from.

That is also why, in the US independence war, most tribes that participated chose to side with the British Empire. They understood very well that between a distant empire focused on resource extraction on the one hand, and a fast-growing nation of settlers focused on land acquisition and ethnic cleansing on the other, it was in their interest to pick the lesser evil.

One example. In the area I grew up in the US, millions of acres of virgin forest were stripped (but not cleanly) within a century. This expedient, wanton and careless destruction also largely destroyed the means of 'self-determination' for tens of thousands of natives - oftentimes forcing them into dependence on meagre handouts. Never mind the cultural disruption.

    Abstract. The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness, -a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.- There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. With Indian depopulation in the wake of Old World disease, the environment recovered in many areas. A good argument can be made that the human presence was less visible in 1750 than it was in 1492.

You can read The Conquest of the Inca by John Hemming for an account of how disease affected the Inca before the Spanish invaded.

You can also read just about any history of Plymouth Colony to know that the settlers found an empty harbor to settle in. Accounts of Plymouth Colony like yours frustrate me because you imply that the settlers had to massacre people in order make an initial settlement when the massacre you refer to happened seventeen years after the initial settlement and comes from an incident where natives for fought alongside settlers. This is because the Plymouth settlers were initially welcomed by local tribes hoping to use them as support against their enemies.

This is why I bring up the universality of violence and empire. Oftentimes when people talk about colonialism as something that was done to the natives, as if the natives had no agency or understanding of their own. It reads like a sort of benevolent racism but I think that what's really going on is the replacement of one oversimplification with another.

Violence is not just a part of European and a few other civilizations but a part of humanity generally. This is important to understand. You can't treat the conquest of the Americas like it was some sort of aberration or the result of something specific to European culture that can be rooted out. This is a broader condition of humanity generally. So no, I don't think that modern gun violence has anything more to do with the conquest of the Americas than it does with the conquest of Babylon by Assyria.

"Abstract. The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness, -a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.- There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. With Indian depopulation in the wake of Old World disease, the environment recovered in many areas. A good argument can be made that the human presence was less visible in 1750 than it was in 1492."