Yahoo Movies

[MadMike]

Yahoo Movies refers to Conquistadors as "Spanish pigs"

Apocalypto

"This one movie has given entire Anthropology departments migranes. Sure the Maya did have the odd human sacrifice but not to Kulkulkan, the Sun God, and only high-ranking captives taken in battle were killed. The conquistadors arriving at the end of the film made for unlikely saviors: an estimated 90% of indigenous American population was killed by smallpox from the infected Spanish pigs. "

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/10mosthist...inaccurate.html

Yours, Mike

[Graydog]

Wait, it doesn't say Conquistadors are pigs. It says smallpox was brought to the Americas by Spanish pigs. I think they are making reference to animal vectors in disease. Such as the bird flu or mad cow.

[hurricane]

My wife who is half Mayan says that's an affront to pigs. Conquistadors were lower than pigs...

-- Hurricane

[Diosa De Cancion]

Ahoy,

Hurricane's 1/2 Mayan wife here....

Here's my thought. Sure, I can see the reference being the illnesses and such... but there could be more to it...

For the Mayan people, everything they did (whether bloody or not) was done for reason, with a ritual attached. Heck, to this day, if you go up into the mountains in Belize, you can talk to the Mayans who will tell you they can only make new thatched roof huts on particular days, with the cycles of the moon, as a respectful gesture to nature and for the health of the tree.... they still operate that way...

If you lived where everything in life was 'ritual' and a bunch of clanking guys came in, chopping and burning as they moved along, trashing anything in their way to get gold and other valuables they wanted, they would be seen kind of like pigs.... just rutting around looking for stuff.... and making a mess...

didn't help that they brought diseases with them....

[Brit.Privateer]

Actually, they are most likely referring to real pigs. The Spaniards did bring a lot of pigs with them. I remember studying this in a couple of my classes here in college. It sort of goes along with that whole "Guns, Germs, and Steel" book (though it probably deserves it's own class with the amount of information you can get out of it). When De Soto came in at Florida and went through the South, he had pigs with him, and several of them got loose and into the wild. Pigs aren't native to the Americas. The pigs spread the diseases that they had to the environment and then it spread to the animals. Then the disease went to the Native Americans and devistated their population. De Soto reported many populous native villages, in particular in Arkansas. Many years later when Europeans came into the area again, the same area was significantly depopulated. Guess what was the cause? That's right, the root is the pigs.

[hurricane]

True enough, but many scholars point to a person in Cortez's army who had smallpox. He may have gotten it from the pigs aboard ship, but he's the one that carried is ashore...

The disease followed the Spanish conquistadors into Mexico and Central America in 1520. With fewer than 500 men, the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés was able to conquer the great Aztec Empire under the emperor Montezuma in what is now Mexico. One of Cortés's men was infected with smallpox, triggering an epidemic that ultimately killed an estimated 3 million Aztecs, one-third of the population. A similar path of devastation was left among the people of the Inca Empire of South America. Smallpox killed the Inca emperor Huayna Capac in 1525, along with an estimated 100,000 Incas in the capital city of Cuzco. The Incas and Aztecs are only two of many examples of smallpox cutting a swath through a native population in the Americas, easing the way for Europeans to conquer and colonize new territory. It can truly be said that smallpox changed history.

Encarta's entry...

-- Hurricane

[MadMike]

Smallpox is not transmitted by animals or insects-

http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox/overv...sease-facts.asp

Yours, Mike