Paleopathological examination of a skeleton can reveal intricacies in the life way of persons of the past. Several studies have been conducted to obtain information for a comparative analysis of post-contact diseases inflicted upon the Americas to trace the origin or presence of certain infectious diseases, particularly those normally associated with Columbian contact e.g. the syphilis (Gerzsten et al. 1997). It should be noted that evidence of pre-contact syphilis in South America is not present. This paper examines several separate studies of disease and trauma in pre-Columbian South America. Gathering several sources that cover a broadd scope will present insight on diseases and other stressors that affected the South American population prior to colonialism through a full analysis of the body. Taking this approach will subsequently create a plausible image of life, socio-economic inequality, and subsistence of various strata in the emerging settlement hierarchies and the latter social stratification as indicators of South American health differences.
The natural aridity of some South American regions, the taphonomic processes, created numerous mummies. The dry climate decreased the rate of decomposition to stagnation, preserving a categorical amount of specimen to analyze. This rendered each natural mummification process a true asset, due to the undisturbed burials, many in situ and with soft tissue for potential DNA analysis. Therefore, research analyses conducted was largely done so on mummified remains.
DISEASE OF THE SKULL
The largest quantity of data came from the analysis of the skull. This is most likely due to the preservation rate of the skull and consequently, to the aforementioned climate-assisted mummificati...
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...on, especially in South America altered the health of pre-Columbian South American peoples, who were stricken with a majority of the same diseases as the concurrent civilizations of Europe. Labor and occupational stressors were present in both male and females though expressed differently in the archeological record, deafness development of shellfish diving men and Pott’s disease of basket carrying women. Life in pre-Columbia South America required rapid adaptation to varying environments and growing populations. There is a co-morbidity rate with the emergence of agriculture that resulted in occupational, environmental, and social separations. Therefore, emergence of some pathologies tell an excellent story of pre-Columbian health and life of ancient South American peoples, through the extensive natural mummification process and recent advances in DNA analysis.
It is also said there were about three hundred languages spoken at the time. Anthropologists have tried to summarize “the cultural practices and reduce the cultural complexity” and they have come with twelve major cultural areas. But, material artifacts and modes of subsistence give a geographical area rather than a social organization or a people’s way of life, including their family relationships” (Mindel, 1998, p.382). Similar family structures can be traced in almost every Native American family, from their basic family structure to marriage rituals. Europeans introduced the disease to the Native Americans.
...Andrew L. “Yellow Fever and the Late Colonial Public Health Response in the Port of Veracruz.” Hispanic American Historical Review 77, no. 4 (1997): 619-644.
Beginning in the fifteenth century with the arrival of Columbus, natives of the Americas were infected with European diseases that proved to be deadly to the Indians. The population in northern Mexico suffered an immense decimation of 2,500,000 peoples to less than 320,000 by the end of the sixteenth century (Vargas, 30). The Spaniards’ cruel treatment of the natives aided this vast reduction in the Aztec and Mexican population, enabling the Spaniards to conquer the lands of the Aztecs and other native tribes. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards had expanded their conquests into the southwest region of what is now known as the United States of America.
Verano, John W. and Douglas H. Ubelaker., ed. Disease and Demography in the Americas. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
The Columbian Exchange was a trade network that was indisputably a major event in world history due to the exchange of ideas, crops, animals, and diseases between the Old World and the New World, making the world “smaller”; it is undeniable that had the Columbian Exchange not happened, all of our lives today would be drastically different. During 1450 to 1750 – the time period of the Columbian Exchange – the mumps, a virus that was originally discovered in Europe, was transferred from the Old World to the New; in both hemispheres, diseases were transmitted unknowingly until people started noticing the correlations between those who got sick and what might have caused them to contract it, which led to diseases being used as weapons in biological warfare, causing the indigenous peoples to die off and allowing the Europeans economic prosperity.
Cultures had been flourishing thousands of years before the Europeans arrived to the New World. Great empires such as the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas inhabited the vast lands of Central and South America. These three major powers controlled the land before Columbus or Cortez were even born. Although the Pre-Columbian civilizations and the Europeans shared some similar ideas, life was very different in the New World compared with that of Middle Age Europe.
Perhaps the most notorious of burial practices originating in Egypt is that of mummification. Why such an extraordinary attempt was made to preserve cadavers may seem
...Lord, 4). To put this in perspective, “The 150 years after Columbus’s arrival brought a toll on human life in this [the Western] hemisphere comparable to all of the world’s losses in World War II,” (Lord, 4). In his book, Plagues and Peoples, William McNeill attributes this population reduction with the old world diseases that “swept across the hemisphere far faster than the Europeans that brought them,” (Lord, 1).
The Aztecs discovered the economic value of human waste by using it for salt making, tanning, and fertilizer (158). While these practices reduced the overall amount of waste, they also increased the community’s risk of being exposed to illness. The use of excrement as fertilizer allowed the pathogens to return to the soil and survive and therefore infect members of the community (159). Once the excrement was on the ground, it could also reach water sources through runoff and pollute them. The Aztecs also placed restrictions on locations that bodily functions could occur (158). These methods for disposing of waste were effective at reducing the overall contact with noxious materials, they also placed the community at risk if the maladies were able to pollute water sources or flourish in the
The Columbian exchange was the widespread transfer of various products such as animals, plants, and culture between the Americas and Europe. Though most likely unintentional, the byproduct that had the largest impact from this exchange between the old and new world was communicable diseases. Europeans and other immigrants brought a host of diseases with them to America, which killed as much as ninety percent of the native population. Epidemics ravaged both native and nonnative populations of the new world destroying civilizations. The source of these epidemics were due to low resistance, poor sanitation, and inadequate medical knowledge- “more die of the practitioner than of the natural course of the disease (Duffy).” These diseases of the new world posed a serious
Microbes from Europe introduced new diseases and produced devastating epidemics that swept through the native populations (Nichols 2008). The result from the diseases brought over, such as smallpox, was a demographic catastrophe that killed millions of people, weakened existing societies, and greatly aided the Spanish and Portuguese in their rapid and devastating conquest of the existing American empires (Brinkley 2014). Interaction took place with the arrival of whites and foreigners. The first and perhaps most profound result of this exchange was the imp...
Europeans first touched the shores of America, Old World crops such as wheat, barley, rice, and turnips had not moved west across the Atlantic, and New World crops such as maize, potatoes, and sweet potatoes had not traveled east to Europe. Americas, there were no livestock, all animals of Old World creation. Except for the llama, alpaca, dog, and guinea pig, the New World was not identical to the trained animals associated with the Old World, nor did it have the viruses associated with the Old World’s small populations of humans and such associated animals as chickens, cattle, black rats, and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Among these germs were those that brought smallpox, measles, chickenpox, influenza, malaria, and yellow fever. The Columbian exchange of crops affected both the Old World and the New. Amerindian crops that have crossed oceans for example, maize to China and the white potato to Ireland has been incentive to population growth in the Old World. The latter’s crops and livestock have had much the same outcome in the Americas. The full story of the trade is very long, so for the hope of shortness and sharpness let us focus on a certain area, the east...
2) Thomson, Mark. "Junior Division Winner: The Migration of Smallpox and Its Indelible Footprint on Latin American History". The History Teacher. 1998.
The great explorations and subsequent migrations of Europeans to the Americas in the 15th-18th centuries opened up those entire continents to the fatal impact of the infectious diseases of Europe. European conquests owed a good deal of their success to the effects of disease on the indigenous peoples, especially smallpox in the Americas. Before Spanish conquest of the New World, there was no sickness or great health related issues that Natives were forced to face. That all changed, however, when European explorers, Spanish conquistadors in particular, unknowingly brought the deadly disease of smallpox into Latin America. A recollection of days before the Spanish by an Indian of the Yucatan from the book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel shows just how disease free natives were before the Spanish arrival: “There was then no sickness; they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; they had then no burning chest; they had then no abdominal pain; they had then no consumption; they had then no headache. At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here.” Then, after the Spanish came to the New World and spread smallpox to the natives, over 95% of them were killed. The Taino population of Hispaniola that was once estimated to be as large as 8 million went virtually extinct. Central Mexico’s population went from 15 million in 1519 to 1.5 million a century later. ...
Weeks. The strength of this report resided in the exponential amount of detail and recording of all available data, including measurements, photographs, charts, hieroglyph translation, drawings, and even chemical analysis of pigments and plaster. An additional strength within this report would be the detailed description of conservation methodology which can be adapted and used at archaeological sites around the world. The only notable weaknesses within this report would be the inclusion of excessive description of flood debris which is not extremely relevant to future research, and the lack of explanation regarding the claim that this tomb is the final resting place of the sons of Rameses