Writer of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. Also @charlescmann.bsky.social.
First, here’s the paper: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
If history’s any guide, novel crises like the pandemic inevitably generate panic, lies, and power grabs by elites and wannabe elites. Too often, journos did not call BS on people who were loudly asserting things they couldn’t possibly know. Too many times, they took sides. 2/4
Both the findings and the collaboration are, in potential, a big deal. Let me explain why I think this. 2/ gifer.com/en/O3R
@capitanswing The general thrust of the criticism is that the Conquest was justified – even that it was good for Indigenous Americans themselves. 2/7 
A bit of explanation. In the 1970s, the Quebec provincial gov't decided to develop a huge hydropower project in the James Bay region to the north. Nobody asked the Cree and Inuit people who lived there. They didn't like that--and sued in 1972. 2/10 
I’d only add that the conquistadors almost never saw these rituals. Instead they saw Aztecs horribly killing (torturing, skinning alive, etc.) captured Spaniards to scare and intimidate them. But there’s little evidence that regular Aztec ceremonies were quite that sadistic. 
One big example: In the 1880s Benjamin Harrison, a grocer and amateur archaeologist, claimed he found ~5 million yr old “stone tools”—chunks of chipped flint—in Kent. They were dubbed “eoliths” (Greek "eos", dawn, and "lithos", stone). (Cyril Chitty 📷 Maidstone Museum) 2/ 
A few seconds on Google told me his town was Three Rivers, in southwestern MI, pop'n 7,659 in 2019. It's an exurb of Kalamazoo with a weirdly high crime rate (lots of meth, I'm guessing). 
To give some idea of how huge that is, recall that annual life-expectancy declines of .1 yr in 2015, '16, and '17 were cited as evidence of social catastrophe--a plague of overdoses, obesity, and suicide hitting the white working class. Case & Deaton wrote a famous book about it. 
