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Comment by marstall | Hacker News Reader

stunning! though curious about the sewage situation.

Sewage was taken out of the city by boat via the system of chinampas, i.e. canals cutting through the man-made patches of reclaimed land within the lake. Almost all of this was destroyed/filled in under Spanish occupation and is likely one of the major factors in the spread of disease and decimation of the native population.

That is tragic. Europeans, with inferior civil engineering skills but superior military weapons, decimate a civilization instead of transferring and absorbing their technology and then take a few hundred years to catch up. It's a tech lesson that some of us still fail to understand.

Turns out that Tlaxcaltecas did most of the work in conquering the Aztecs. They also had vast privileges granted by the Spanish once the conquest was over. For example, they were granted the title of Don. Not as black and white as it might seem.

Yes, the Tlaxcaltecas defeated the Aztecs but they did not succeed in establishing themselves as the dominant power for very long. The Spanish returned with a greater military force and eventually dominated them.

There is admittedly plenty of nuance but my comment was intended to decry the tragedy of conquest, where a conquering party does not recognize the genius of technology implemented by the conquered party and proceeds to destroy that technology, to their own detriment.

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