The depopulation of native America

Abstract

The replacement, for the most part, of native American populations by immigrants in the centuries after 1492 is one of the great demographic shifts of the modern world. It is fundamental for American archaeology, of course, and makes the background for acute moral and ethical issues, which will become more visible as the 500th anniversary of the Columbus landfall nears

Consequences of colonialism: A microbial perspective to contemporary Indigenous health

“…Unquestionably, the most devastating effect of colonialism was the introduction of novel pathogens. Globally, Indigenous populations were decimated by epidemics of infectious diseases introduced by colonists; some of the hardest hit areas lost up to 90% of their population (Cook, ; Kunitz, ; Zubrow, ). In the Americas, no specific case study can be reliably ascertained because the speed by which the pathogenic agents spread and obliterated the Indigenous population outran European ethnohistorical records, leaving only indirect archaeological evidence, such as specific demographic patterns in mortuary samples (Hutchinson & Mitchem, ; Milner, ).…”

“…Infectious disease would have directly altered the microbiome, but the consequential human depopulation would have also altered human population structures, both genetically and socially, further impacting microbial transmission to surviving generations. While there is little agreement on the timing of depopulation, the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, or the overall mortality rates, there is a shared consensus on the indirect impacts of disease on the Indigenous population; high mortality and morbidity would have disturbed subsistence activities and the labor force, reduced political influence, and forced social reorganization (Cook, ; Dobyns, ; Milner, ; Snow & Lanphear, ; Zubrow, ). Survivors of one community decimated by disease often resettled among different communities, contributing to the spread of disease and influencing horizontal microbial transmission among different communities (Warrick, ).…”

New world complex societies: Recent economic, social, and political studies

“…Perhaps symptomatic of this is the fact that archaeologists working in Latin America have made virtually no contributions to one of the most important issues in New world culture history: the postcontact population decline. Most Latin American studies of this process rely solely upon historical data (e.g., Chance, 1989;Cook and Lovell, 1991;Reff, 1991;Sanders, 1970), while in North America, archaeologists participate vigorously in research and debate on this topic (e.g., Ramenofsky, 1987;Snow and Starna, 1989;Zubrow, 1990). Culbert and Rice's (1990) edited volume, Precolumbian Population History in the Maya Lowlands, is a notable exception to the general neglect of demographic methodology.…”

An evolutionary framework for assessing illness and injury in nonhuman primates

“…For example, a n epidemic of dysentery is believed to be responsible for the deaths of 26 pregnant macaques in the Cay0 Santiago colony in 1940 (Carpenter, 19401, and a presumed yellow fever epidemic was believed to have halved group sizes of howler monkeys on Barro Colorado Island and resulted in unusual movement of animals between groups (Carpenter, 1953(Carpenter, , 1962. But while any serious epidemic of infectious disease may have resulted in an evolutionary "bottleneck" effect, as in the post-Columbian New World (e.g., Dobyns, 1983;Ramenofsky, 1987;Zubrow, 1990), the natural history of infectious disease suggests that small and nomadic groups of nonhuman primates would not have maintained such virulent infection. Therefore, it is traumatic injury and chronic, endemic infection that may be relatively more important in determining both populational and individual reproductive success for many taxa.…”