Sunday,
October 07
Don't Blame
The
ANNOTICO Report (This is a Reprint from an
ANNOTICO Report and the NY Times October 29, 2202)
The conquest of any people in our modern civilized society is not victory, but
oppression. Attitudes were much different 500 years ago, when Conquest was accepted
in all Societies, and Cannibalism, Sacrifices,
and Slavery were accepted in Native American Cultures.
As you read this keep in mind however,
We know that disease took it's toll on both the
Europeans and Native Americans, who had no immunity to each other diseases. But
it is revealed here that the Native Americans were not in the good health we
have been led to believe.
Thanks to
Walter Santi for reminding me
DON'T
BLAME COLUMBUS FOR ALL THE INDIANS' ILLS
New York Times
By John Noble Wilford
October 29, 2002
Europeans first came to the Western Hemisphere armed with guns, the cross and, unknowingly,
pathogens. Against the alien agents of disease, the indigenous people never
had a chance. Their immune systems were unprepared to fight smallpox and
measles, malaria and yellow fever.
The epidemics that resulted have been well documented. What had not been
clearly recognized until now, though, is that the general health of Native
Americans had apparently been deteriorating for centuries before 1492.
That is the conclusion of a team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists who have completed a
wide-ranging study of the health of people living in the
The researchers, whose work is regarded as the most comprehensive yet,
say their findings in no way diminish the dreadful impact Old World diseases
had on the people of the New World. But it suggests that the New World was
hardly a healthful
More than 12,500 skeletons from 65 sites in North and
The researchers used standardized criteria to rate the incidence and degree of
these health factors by time and geography. Some trends leapt out from the
resulting index. The healthiest sites for Native Americans were typically the
oldest sites, predating
years. Then came a marked decline.
"Our research shows that health was on a downward trajectory long
before Columbus arrived," Dr. Richard H. Steckel
and Dr. Jerome C. Rose, study leaders, wrote in "The Backbone of History:
Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere," a book they edited. It
was published in August.
Dr. Steckel, an economist and anthropologist at Ohio
State University, and Dr. Rose, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas,
stressed in interviews that their findings in no way mitigated the
responsibility of Europeans as bearers of disease devastating to native
societies. Yet the research, they said, should correct a widely held
misperception that the
free of disease before 1492.
In an epilogue to the book, Dr. Philip D. Curtin, an emeritus professor of
history at Johns Hopkins University, said the skeletal evidence of the physical
well-being of pre-Columbians "shows conclusively that however much it may
have deteriorated on contact with the outer world, it was
far from paradisiacal before the Europeans and Africans arrived. "
About 50 scientists and scholars joined in the research and contributed
chapters to the book. One of them, Dr. George J. Armelagos
of
The surprise,
Dr. Armelagos said, was not the evidence of many
infectious diseases, BUT that the pre-Columbians
were not better nourished and in general healthier.
Others said the research, supported by the National Science Foundation and
"Although some of the authors occasionally appear to overstate the
strength of the case they can make, they are als o
careful to indicate the limitations of the evidence," Dr. Curtin wrote of
the Steckel-Rose research. "They recognize that skeletal
material is the best comparative
evidence we have for the human condition over such a long period of time,
but it is not perfect."
The research team gathered evidence on seven basic indicators of chronic
physical conditions that can be detected in skeletons - namely, degenerative
joint disease, dental health, stature, anemia, arrested tissue development,
infections and trauma from injuries. Dr.
Steckel and Dr. Rose called this "by far the
largest comparable data set of this type ever created."
The researchers attributed the widespread decline in health in large part to
the rise of agriculture and urban living. People in South and
These were mixed blessings. Farmi ng tended to limit the diversity of diets, and the congestion
of towns and cities contributed to the rapid spread of disease. In the
widening inequalities of urban societies, hard work on low-protein diets
left most people vulnerable to illness and early death.
Similar signs of deleterious health effects have been found in the ancient
Middle East, where agriculture started some 10,000 years ago. But the
health consequences of farming and urbanism, Dr. Rose said, appeared to have
been more abrupt in the
The more mobile, less densely settled populations were usually the
healthiest pre-Columbians. They were taller and had fewer signs of
infectious lesions in their bones than residents of large settlements. Their
diet was sufficiently rich and varied, the researchers said, for them to
largely avoid the symptoms of childhood deprivation, like stunting and anemia.
Even so,in the simplest
hunter-gatherer societies, few peop le survived past age
50. In the healthiest cultures in the 1,000 years before
In examining the skeletal evidence, paleopathologists
rated the healthiest pre-Columbians to be people living 1,200 years ago on
the coast of
Conditions also must have been salubrious along the coasts of
The least healthy people in the study were from the urban cultures of
Mexico and Central America, notably where the Maya civilization flourished
presumably at great cost to life and limb, and th e Zuni of New Mexico. The Zuni lived at a
400-year-old site, Hawikku, a crowded, drought-prone
farming pueblo that presumably met its demise before European settlers made
contact.
It was their hard lot, Dr. Rose said, to be farmers "on the boundaries of
sustainable environments."
"Pre-Columbian populations were among the healthiest and the least healthy
in our sample," Dr. Steckel and Dr. Rose said.
"While pre-Columbian natives may have lived in a disease environment
substantially different from that in other parts of the globe, the original
inhabitants also brought with them, or evolved with, enough pathogens to create
chronic conditions of ill health under conditions of systematic agriculture and
urban living."
In recent examinations of 1,000-year-old Peruvian mummies, for example, paleopathologists discovered clear traces of tuberculosis
in their lungs, more evidence that native
Americans might already have been infected with some of the diseases that were
thought to have been brought to the
Tuberculosis bears another message: as an opportunistic disease, it
strikes when times are tough, often overwhelming the bodies of
people already weakened by malnutrition, poor sanitation in urban centers and
debilitated immune systems.
The Steckel-Rose research extended the survey to the
health consequences of the first contacts with American Indians by Europeans
and Africans and the health of European-Americans and African-Americans up to
the early 20th century.
Not surprisingly, African-American slaves were near the bottom of the health
index. An examination of plantation slaves buried in
On the other hand, blacks buried at
The researchers found one exception to the rule that the healthiest sites for
Native Americans were the oldest sites. Equestrian nomads of the Great Plains
of
to farms or cities.
In a concluding chapter of their book, Dr. Steckel
and Dr. Rose said the study showed that "the health decline was
precipitous with the changes in ecological environments where people
lived." It is not a new idea in anthropology, they conceded, "but
scholars in general have yet to absorb it."
Don't
Blame Columbus for All the Indians' Ills
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/29
/science/social/29INDI.html?ex=1036954621&ei=1&en=ff2a7804610ffe49
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