Archaeologists have studied the history of the disappearance of several Indian settlements in the southern United States and came to the conclusion that it was not the conquistadors who were to blame for the genocide of the Indians after the discovery of America, but, most likely, the missionaries who came to America a century later than the conquerors and travelers.
A large-scale study of the remains of the Columbian Indians showed that most of them did not die out immediately after the arrival of the Europeans and their diseases, but about a century after the discovery of the New World, probably due to the emergence of missions, according to an article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Today, history books and many scholars say that the Indian population in South and North America declined sharply in the 15th and 16th centuries as a result of the penetration of conquistadors and other European travelers. As a result, less than half of the 20 million Indians who lived before the advent of Columbus remained.
In particular, anthropologist Henry Dobins wrote back in 1983 that the diseases brought by the conquistadors had wiped out about 95% of the total population of America since 1492. Many other researchers point out that approximately 97% of the population of the former Aztec empire and about 90% of Peruvians died from European infections in the first century after their conquest by the Spaniards.
In recent years, as Matthew Liebmann of Harvard University (USA) and his colleagues write, these estimates have become the subject of increasing criticism due to new fossil evidence that is incompatible with the theories of Dobins and his followers. For example, in 2014, genetics, analyzing the remains of the inhabitants of Peru in the 5-10th centuries AD, found traces of the tubercle bacillus in them, which was considered one of the reasons for the extinction of the Indians in the Columbian era.
Liebmann's group found further evidence that the extinction of the Indians was not directly related to the first European "aliens", having studied the remains of people and traces of two dozen settlements of ancient Indians who lived in the territory of modern New Mexico.
This study was carried out, as the authors of the article say, with the help of modern laser radars, capable of "peering" under the soil layer and study what is hidden under it. Using such laser images, scientists were able to estimate the size of each settlement studied, count the number of inhabitants in it, and find out when they began to die out.
As it turned out, the extinction did not begin immediately after the arrival of the conquerors from the Old World, but about a hundred years after their appearance, starting in 1620. In the next 60 years, a real catastrophe occurred - during this time the population in these settlements fell sharply by 86%, and then they were all abandoned.
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The consequences of this extinction of the Indians were colossal, and they led, as scientists write, to global restructuring of ecological systems - the forests of North and South America recovered, since the Indians no longer cut them down or burned them, and began to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This, in turn, led to a decrease in its share in the air, which somewhat lowered the average annual temperatures and increased the period of cooling of the climate, the so-called "little ice age", which lasted from the 16th to the 18th century. As Liebmann and his colleagues emphasize, it would still have happened if the Indians had not died out, but its power would have been less pronounced.
Why did this abrupt and sudden extinction happen at all? The authors of the article do not have a definite answer to this question, but they believe that it was associated with the activities of Catholic missionaries who penetrated this region of America and other parts of the New World around 1621-1626.
They could bring with them European diseases and their intensified contacts with the local population, including the traditions of mass baptism, could contribute to their spread and mass death of Indians, as well as to the increase in the number of conflicts between baptized and unbaptized groups of the “first peoples” of the New World.