Posted by pseudolus 10/27/2025
The Maya are still around! I spent a few months in the Guatemalan highlands last year and all the kids in the village spoke Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages, at home.
(Young people speaking the language is key to language health.)
They're comparable in that sense to the Heculaneum manuscripts, which researchers have lately made great progress on with deep learning [1]. I hope an equivalent initiative someday starts on the Quipu.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu [1] https://www2.cs.uky.edu/dri/herculaneum-papyrus-scrolls/
It's unlikely any complex narratives could be encoded there, though.
Possibly a bit like the e.g. the Mycenaean Linear B script. Which is fully decoded and well understood. But despite having a full fledged writing system they mainly used it for accounting and such. They can tell us about how many goats, sheep and various good they had they had but don't tell as much about the society or history as such.
Heculaneum manuscripts are kind of the opposite from the Quipu in the sense that we have zero issues understanding the actual text/symbols just extracting them from the destroyed scrolls is rather complicated.
Minoan tablets are maybe a bit closer and little progress has been made there (then again we are fully capable of reading the script just have no clue about the language it was written in).
For a long time, it was thought that they indeed contained only the latter, but my certainly non-specialist grasp on the matter is that we now know they were used to encode much more than that. In addition to being used directly to verify calculations [0], they contained "histories, laws and ceremonies, and economic accounts" or, as the Spanish testified at the time: "[W]hatever books can tell of histories and laws and ceremonies and accounts of business is all supplied by the quipus so accurately that the result is astonishing"[1]. My---again crude---understanding is this was through embedding categories, names and relational data in addition to numbers, signaled not least through texture and color [2].
I likely come across as if I'm trying to over-inflate the Incan knots, but really it's just to say they appear to be a rather fascinating in-between of legal-administrative inscriptions, whose discovery transformed understanding of Roman institutions over the last century or so, and the straight-forward manuscripts of the Herculaneum.
[0] My elementary and probably out-of-date recollection: an emissary would come to towns with Quipus containing work orders, which would be validated with the community on the spot.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/27087183
[2] https://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-abstract/65..., https://www.jstor.org/stable/483319
Potentially a graph to be completed by the owner via verbal communication/interpretation as a supplement to the material instrument; a single source of information that could be interpreted differently depending on the societal role and vocation of the owner.
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.
So yes, extremely evil even by the standards of settler colonialism.
It's hard to look at the on-the-ground details and come to any other conclusion.
"The ends justify the means" is certainly a valid metric by which to judge things, but an honest application of it leads one to conclusions such as "Mao Zedong was the greatest humanitarian to have ever lived" (as seen here: https://i.imgur.com/3QUXVi3.jpeg).
It's valid to ask a similar question about the Americas. What would life be like for people today? It's probable that the Aztecs or their descendants would have taken over the Americans, since they were by far the most technologically superior. Would they have evolved into a prosperous industrialized society today?
You seem to be saying that colonialism advanced society even for the oppressed, but the causality of history is complicated. As far as we know, you may as well say that the extinction of the dinosaurs as it happened was essential for human proliferation. Maybe the dinosaurs would've gone extinct at some point, or diminished greatly, or maybe the dinosaurs and humans would coexist. Just because a somewhat plausible scenario presents itself does not mean it is compelling. You have brought up counterfactuals, so use your imagination seriously, instead of taking the easy way out. If you have a motivating belief on the matter, it is untoward to speak as if you are unbiased and objective.
So your theory is that civilizations are the way they are because of exogenous rather than endogenous factors? That seems difficult to reconcile with the historical record. Your viewpoint just begs the question. For example, why was Europe in a position to colonize the Americas in the first place? Why weren’t the Spanish greeted by Aztecs with swords and guns?
Why indeed was Europe technologically advanced? Why were the Americas not so much? Resources are one factor, which is why obtaining resources from other lands is valuable. But the main impetus for advancement surely isn't based on one's "skill in advancing". Most people could be trained to fix cars, if desired. Also, Rome fell, but people now live where Rome was with far greater technology. I posit that, if the indigenous peoples of the Americas were given the desire to advance to the level of Europeans, the resources to do so, and time, similar advancement would arise.
I have provided as many facts for my argument as you have for yours.
After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how.
European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?
Just speaking personally I have a pretty dim view of genocide and slavery.
Jump cut 300 years later to 1776, when Europeans first learn about the New World - when an Aztec galley lands in Cornwall.
But it was not actually a good excuse. Burning those books was still wrong. Even people around him understood how wrong it was. We do not have to view colonialism from the stratosphere, we can judge the actions individually down at the ground.
We know why he wanted to focus on other things than the things he was actually personally responsible for, but what's your motive? Got a project of your own to defend?
Executions in Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined are estimated to have been 1000 in total. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt#Execution_statistic...
Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too? Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
Didn't intervene? You act like it was an act of charity. We didn't "intervene" until the germans declare war on us.
> And then look at tens of thousand of people being mass murdered by a genocidal civilization and complain that Spain intervened because...
Spain "intervened"? The genocidal civilization was Spain, not the aztecs. The aztecs didn't wipe themselves out. The spanish did.
> Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too?
Who is we? Who destroyed half of europe to stop germany?
> Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
Did we wipe out the germans? Did we wipe out the german language, culture, history, etc? Are you really equating what we did to germany to what the spaniards did to the aztecs?
When meeting Europeans, 90% of the Americans would catch some European disease and die. This was widely seen as the will of god(s) by both sides. Often the disease spread faster than the Europeans, so when they got to an area most people were already dead.
The following conquest is seen as barbaric and unjust by us modern people. But for the people of the time, it was just how the world worked. The Aztecs would have been overjoyed to conquer Spain the same way.
(As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.
The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).
You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it
Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely.
While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit.
They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
The benefits for this was entirely with the aristocracy and wealthy, not with the average Spaniards.
What else would you call what has been done to the German people for 80 years now and seemingly for the foreseeable future as they are very psychologically and emotionally broken people from the perpetual "blood libel" abuse that has been perpetrated against them and their children from the earliest memory on throughout all their life? Is that healthy, to forever fixate and obsess and bring up and accuse people of things that happened several generations before they were born, and perpetrated by very specific and limited people who were punished for it? Do you think the German people are uniquely due for the most utterly evil and vile practices of collective guilt?
Since you seem to assume the "jewish people" qualify as being referenced with "the most unhinged and narcissistic people", why would you think that people are collectively guilty, not even to mention across generations?
What we witnessed in Gaza is an evil that is far worse than what was perpetrated 85 years ago, will you also collectively shame and abuse and berate all jewish people of the world with constant references of how they deliberately played games of shooting starving children in different body parts for points?
You really should reexamine your messed up perspective if you want to believe yourself a good person. No people deserve collective guilt, unless they are collectively engaged in something. What humanity should make of the polling in Israel and the USA among Jewish communities about their views of whether a genocide was happening, whether it should happen, and whether there are any innocent people in Gaza, is something that may need to be reexamined. At least the Nazis lied to their populations about what was going on, because it was a totalitarian dictatorship (as you were told all your life too). What is to be made of the fact that Israel is a democracy and a very civilly engaged and politically aware democracy?
Maybe think about some of those things instead of just reading with Automatica response tricks you have been trained to perform.
> "what has been done to the German people for 80 years now and seemingly for the foreseeable future as they are very psychologically and emotionally broken people"
Germany is a highly developed and successful economy which is a center of power and wealth in Europe. Its population is well educated, healthy, with a high standard of living, and generally content. From my position in the United States (so: not an expert), I don't see much evidence that modern Germans are held responsible for the events of 80–90 years go. Maybe you can include more detail for those of us who lack the context to guess what you are talking about. Who is it who has done this supposed damage to the German people, and what precisely do you think they did?
Can you elaborate about what you think makes Germans "psychologically and emotionally broken"? Do you mean because they have been economically dominating less-developed nations of Europe, and you think they should instead aim for more continent-wide integration and development? Or like, you were hoping for a German military invasion of Austria or France?
* * *
You seem to have mistaken me for a supporter of the Israeli government. You may want to redirect your misplaced lecture someplace else.
Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either.
Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain.
In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic".
Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries.
e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time.
> Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?
That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.
Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
> It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves
Seems tangential?
The Reconquista partially led to the Inquisition. The Reconquista started 711 and ended in 1492. How could it not be relevant?
Everything partially led to everything. We might as well talk how the Persian - Roman wars led to the Spanish Inquisition as well.
I actually spoke to a friend of mine who basically knows a huge amount of history (he is at University doing some sort Masters in a related subject), because some of the replies on this subject in sibling threads are so ignorant they actually gaslite me.
So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale.
For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...
Millions of people (on all sides) were killed in the Reconquista, over a few centuries, with many others enslaved, imprisoned, driven out of the peninsula, or forcibly converted. Those who converted to Catholicism were rewarded with centuries of further discrimination and persecution. (Disclaimer: I am not expert enough to know detailed figures here; feel free to search for expert sources if you want something precise.)
Scattered lightning strikes are not meaningfully comparable to large-scale genocidal war.
Try to find a single reliable source supporting this claim. You might be surprised to find that it doesn't exist, and that it's also an example of citogenesis. [1] This is another perfect example of what I'm talking about. After Muslim armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula they created a system of government with a tiny minority of Arabs at the top with everybody else treated as distant second class citizens. They started trying to force people to convert and imposed taxes and other penalties on those who did not.
The predictable rebellions against this were the start of the Reconquista. It spanned many hundreds of years but was almost all extremely small scale. And they weren't driving anybody out in large numbers. The Arab and Berber tribes never engaged in mass migration or anything like that. Iberia remained overwhelmingly native Iberian with a tiny Arab elite. The same Spaniards and Portuguese you know of today are the ones that were there under Islamic rule as well.
[1] - https://xkcd.com/978/
That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.
the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers.
I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.
A Mexican goes to Spain, accosts the first Spaniard he sees, and lays into him: “I demand an apology, sir - your ancestors pillaged my country!”
The Spaniard blinks. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Your ancestors did that. Mine stayed home.”
Let’s not forget the slaves sent to the fields after Spanish conquest. Irish, African, Portuguese, Indian, all found their ways to the sugar canes.
That era was literally groups of humans exploiting every other group of humans they could find.
The first wave owners children found themselves going to war with the crown or being a member of the crowns second wave to further entrench the royal riches. It became extremely political.
Are people on HN now not even able to think themselves out of a wet paper bag or something? You think that Spain and the UK sent their best, smartest, most sane, not at an all religiously zealous to the Americas and Australia? So yo think that Africa and Asia and Central/Southern America are sending their best, brightest, smartest, most sane, not at all criminal to the USA/Europe, even though that would solve so many of their problems?
Are people here children or something? Hell, I WOULD SEND ALL MY WORST if I were leading the "third world", because it is the only rational and sane thing to do; you improve your situation in one thousand dimensions, and degrade the "west" in that many and more. Who would not do that?
You look around the USA and Europe and you think to yourself that everything is working out really well, that immigration and the eradication and corruption of the indigenous cultures and people that produced everything we have will result in positive outcomes? How could you? No, I am seriously asking, I don't understand how the equivalent of, e.g., sabotaging or subverting the company you work for, that pays you and has done nothing but treat you well, will result in positive things for you or anyone. Now scale that up to all of Europe, the USA, and Australia. I guess China is assumed to be the natural heir to everything that Europe produced over thousands of years, but is effectively foreign to them too?
Like I said, hate Europe and the USA all you want, but I don't see the value, let alone sanity of cutting off your limbs to spite your face; and that's what is happening even though clearly the brakes are being pumped hard right now, as we are still speeding towards the abyss at far too great a speed. America is already minority made up of the people who made the Constitution and freedom possible, built the country and all it produced. Do we just scrap the Constitution because the creators do not embody the "diversity" of the people for whom the Constitution was not created? What happens then? We just end free speech? Ban the ability to defend against state power? No defense against warrantless surveillance and seizure? It's already bad enough with the treasonous assaults on the Constitution, what happens when the pretense is abandoned and the glass is shattered? You don't like being free? A creation of those horrible no good European men that create the Constitution?
But it does not matter if you think I am wrong or even a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person of saying things that are not your favorite things to hear; reality is not going to care what you nor I think or wish.
Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.
The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods".
Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices.
Strange times, those, eh?
My favorite group is the Mapuche who managed to hold out against the Spaniards until they were conquered by Chile and Argentina in the late 19th century. They managed to thwart the conquistadors for centuries! It wasn’t until the modern era where military logistics got good enough to unseat them and overcome the advantages they had.
As I learned it, most of the conflicts were between not against. Native Americans, became a term as a general catch all but those peoples saw themselves as quite diverse, and as such is something of a misnomer.
Indeed, it's actually an example of problem I lamented: the disinterest in covering Native American history post-founding of the US. The last of major conflicts between different Native American tribes took place around the 1850s, the lingering effects of the Lakota being pushed onto the Plains [1]. From that point on, all of the main conflicts are between the US and the various Native American tribes for a variety of reasons, although mainly "the US wants your land and isn't going to take 'no' for an answer."
[1] If you want to analyze the broader historical context, you of course have to ask "why did the Lakota move onto the Plains?" and following that thread of logic leads you to the first cause being "the English settled on the eastern coast."
This is a wild jump to make. I'm not sure I can take your comment in good faith as being serious.
Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever. Then colonization and disease and westward expansion. Look up the Trail of Tears, the genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
Your education may align with propaganda. Even today, first people nations are actively having their history taken. Pete Hegseth, sec of def/war, has pushed to close the door on the massacre of wounded knee, enshrining the medals earned for slaughtering woman and children. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/us/hegseth-wounded-knee.h....
Look up how the US government stole native kids and sent them catholic schools to have the Indian taught out of them. A system that was purpose built to stop their way of life. Or forced, non-consented sterilization of native woman that was happening in the 60s and 70s.
If you somehow didn't know the US government's history of conflict and abuse of Native Americans, you should question your formal education. And you should do some light research.
> Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever.
sounds like you're confused what point you are arguing.
this is an obvious contradiction. how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there? troll better
For example I've been studying the Mississippi river cultures [1] which left behind lots of mound villages formed into chiefdoms and paramount chiefdoms. Those cultures suffered a decline around the mid-15th century likely due to environmental changes which we can see in the distribution of villages and mounds changing. We can also see how warfare evolved based on defenses and the distribution of arable land to houses (i.e. are they clustered villages for defense or spread around their fields for efficiency?) Historians then compare them to the accounts of the Narvaez and de Soto expeditions which provides a baseline for post-contact (mid 16th), where we can also see a large decline and social restructuring before the English and French came in to finish the job (the Spaniards more or less gave up on that area as economically uninteresting except for the occasional slave raid).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_shatter_zone
You can come up with all the juvenile “fun facts” you want but what’s the point if you’re not actually going to say anything to add to the conversation?
is this a serious question? what defines history as a subject is precisely that it is not the present.
None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans.
No that's exactly what it makes it, as their conflicts subtract from those with newer arrivals. Different groups fighting each other, and then other different groups from Europe came, and made allegiances with specific local groups, then collaborated in their conflicts.
It's worth understanding that 'western colonization' wasn't a singular coherent force. There were different foreign groups with different interests - who were fighting with each other in North America.
Similarly there were 'Native Americans' (quotes as this is a colonial term) pursuing their own interests, even going to Europe. I'm not sure it's your perspective but there is a popular historic image of native americans being a defenceless people who foreigners came and wiped out which simply isn't correct, and ironically quite colonial.
Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory. What else do you call that?
The various tribes also engaged in near constant warfare with each other, defeating them, taking their territory, and making the rest slaves. Cortez was only able to defeat the Aztecs because he was able to enlist the aid of the non-Aztec tribes, who hated the Aztecs because of the depredations of Aztecs against them.
The Inca empire was only recently formed before the Spanish arrived.
In North America, the Commanche carved out an empire in the south at the expense of the tribes that had been living there. See "Empire of the Summer Moon":
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
In this case, people A are responsible for most of the demise of people B, surely. I don't deny that history education should be improved on these matters, instead of choosing a villain and a victim, but your view is not much better.
So they couldn't murder/expel (unlike the British/American colonists) most of the native population (especially considering that North America was much less densely inhabited to begin with) if they wanted someone to work in the mines and plantation (again relatively not that many slaves were imported to the mainland colonies as well).
France was similar (except they struggled even more with getting enough people to move to the colonies).
While all the other American conflicts with tons of Indian involvement (both sides, esp civil war) had it downplayed.
One of my first realizations of slant put on history.
I asked for directions and just got blank stares until someone who spoke Spanish in the village explained, lol.
That was the Aztec, an entirely different culture from the Mayans. The Mayan Kingdoms lasted until 1697.
Wheels are great if you have something stronger than a human to pull it, or you only have to move it a short distance, or if you have a hard paved road. But pulling carts or wagons or wheelbarrows through rough terrain or muddy roads with just human power is absolute trash and not worth the effort, and moving things over small short distances alone isn't worth the specialized labor and cost of making decent wheel and axle systems without machine tools.
If you are still unsure, ask yourself why hikers and campers don't pull a cart or push a wheelbarrow everywhere they go instead of using a backpack even though they can have ultra light aluminum construction with pneumatic tires and ball bearing axles. All the effort you would save by using a wheelbarrow on smooth parts of your path would be undone by just a handful of random sticks or rocks you run into with it along the way.
Is the weather in the tropics so similar that year-on-year mismatch stops mattering?
1. Pregnancy. 260 days is roughly the gestation period of a baby, so this may have been the inspiration for tracking this duration. (For what it is worth, modern Maya timekeepers cite this as being the reason for the length of the 260 day ritual calendar.)
2. In the tropics there are two days of the year when the Sun passes through the zenith and objects cast no shadows. In the latitude where the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations emerged, the length of time between these two days of the year is about 260 days.
3. Numerology. 260 is the product of 20 and 13. 20 was significant in Mesoamerican culture because it was the base of their numbering system and was associated with the human body (given that we have 20 fingers and toes). And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos. So the number 260 represented a kind of interlocking between the human and the cosmic.
It's also worth noting that the Maya also tracked a 365 solar cycle, so they did have a concept of a more standard kind of "year." The 365 cycle was used for civil purposes. The 260 day ritual cycle was used more for divination.
(Shameless plug, but if you want to learn more about Mesoamerican astronomy I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and I talked about it on the last episode: https://songofurania.com/episode/047)
Any reason number 13, of all numbers, has been so significant in different parts of the world, sometimes associated with completely opposite meanings (e.g., between Jews and Persians/Europeans)?
1/7 in base 20 takes surprisingly short form of 0.(1h) (h is 17), unlike 1/9 or 1/11 - so I wonder if there's Mayan prejudice on those instead
That's the explanation?
The Mayans did not want to give up their lifestyles even in the face of crippling population growth and surrounding natural resource depletion... which led to their downfall.
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/77060/mayan-def...
From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.
They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.
I've heard some speculate that this introduced European diseases, and unlike many Native American tribes, the Mayans lived in dense cities. Such disease would spread like wildfire.
(Certainly, some disease made it the other way too! Tuberculosis and syphilis are examples)
I've heard numbers like 95% died, and it was decades between first contact and serious conquest.
That leaves a lot of time for people to grow up with no one to teach them trades, or even how to read.
If we lost 95% of our population, so many active skills would be lost.
The end of the Incan empire is a really striking example of this dynamic. The Spanish landed on the South American mainland in ~1524, European diseases started spreading, and in 1527 the Incan emperor died from one of the diseases without an heir. This triggered a really brutal civil war of succession that weakened the empire. The Spanish started the conquest proper of the Incan empire in ~1532 and were successful in part because how weak the empire was after the civil war.
So essentially, by arriving early and (inadvertently) initiating the disease epidemics, the Spanish put in place conditions that made the conquest possible a few years later.
For comparison, estimates of the deaths from the Black Plague in Europe are 30% to 60%. It's a huge error bar, despite having a lot of written records that survived.
