Immediately is the summer season solstice, which is an occasion I often mark with a weblog put up about archaeoastronomy. Immediately I’m going to do one thing a little bit completely different, although. Because the coronavirus pandemic has been dominating and reshaping life world wide for months now, endlessly, I’ve been studying up on previous epidemics and their impacts on the populations and societies of the Western Hemisphere, and in the present day I’m launching a sequence of weblog posts discussing these points. I don’t have a transparent sense but of how lengthy this sequence will go on or what the frequency of posting might be, however it would possible be fairly intensive. The literature on this topic is big and engaging, and I’m nonetheless working my approach by way of it.

To maintain some management over the scope of this sequence, I’m setting some primary tips prematurely for what it would embody. The principle focus might be on the Western Hemisphere and the impacts of illnesses launched by Europeans on Native American societies, though this will likely department out a bit into different geographical areas (e.g., Oceania and Africa) that provide fascinating parallels and/or counterpoints to the American expertise, and I may even look to some extent on the influence of epidemics on European settler societies as nicely, and in some circumstances additionally at doable epidemic illnesses that had been transmitted in the other way, probably the most well-known instance of which is syphilis. The temporal scope will begin with 1492, although with some consideration to the epidemiological and demographic landscapes earlier than that that formed the progress of occasions afterward, and finish earlier than the worldwide flu pandemic of 1918. The literature on the 1918 flu is huge and fascinating in its personal proper, however it’s simply an excessive amount of to include into what’s already a really formidable mission.

One of many main points on this subject, which has formed numerous the scholarly dialogue particularly over the previous 50 or 60 years, is the query of the entire Native American inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere earlier than European contact in 1492. Estimates of inhabitants have assorted immensely over time, with monumental implications for the way students have understood the character of Native societies, European colonization, and plenty of different essential points. I’ll go into way more element in regards to the numerous estimates and the controversy over them in subsequent posts.

Norton Sound Regional Hospital, Nome, Alaska

I’m calling this sequence “Virgin Soil, Widowed Land.” Each of these phrases have come up within the scholarly debate over epidemics and demography, and I discover it fascinating that they each use the identical (moderately distasteful, to be trustworthy) metaphor in very other ways. “Virgin soil” epidemics are those who influence populations with little or no preexisting immunity to the illness in query, so that they trigger intensive impacts nicely past these on populations with extra immunity. The present COVID-19 epidemic is of this kind, because the coronavirus in query is new and nobody on the earth had immunity to it when it emerged. Equally, New World populations lacked immunity to most Previous World illnesses, which due to this fact had catastrophic impacts on them. (Simply how catastrophic and what the precise impacts had been could be very controversial, in fact.)

The “virgin soil” idea refers back to the populations that an epidemic impacts, however it intersects with a separate use of the virginity metaphor with an extended historical past within the research of European colonialism: the “virgin land.” On this idea, the Native folks of the Americas had been few in quantity and made restricted, superficial use of the land, so the land was primarily unused and out there for the taking by European colonists. There’s numerous implicit racism and white-supremacist considering on this idea, however that’s numerous the historiography of European colonialism for you. As soon as some students began wanting extra intently at a few of the proof for pre-Columbian inhabitants and the impacts of epidemic illness within the wake of preliminary contact, the virgin land idea got here to look much less and fewer believable even descriptively, and in some circles it started to get replaced with the concept of a “widowed land,” during which the land might have been largely empty in lots of locations when European colonists arrived, however this was largely as a result of earlier impacts of virgin soil epidemics spurred by preliminary European contact.

This makes European colonization look quite a bit worse in some methods, although it arguably nonetheless lets the colonists off the hook an excessive amount of. One objection to the emphasis on epidemic illness as a consider Native depopulation is that it appears to indicate that depopulation was each inevitable after contact and in some sense probably not the colonists’ fault since they didn’t know they had been carrying lethal illness with them. As I’ll focus on in future posts, there could also be one thing to this however many researchers have pointed to different extra direct impacts from deliberate actions of the Europeans, who positively attacked, enslaved, and violently displaced Native teams from many areas in ways in which in all probability brought about substantial mortality on their very own along with amplifying the consequences of illness.

Anyway, there’s way more to say about these points each usually, big-picture phrases and on the stage of particular person microhistorical case research. This may occasionally appear a little bit far afield from my concentrate on Chaco Canyon, which lengthy predates European contact and the influence of those epidemics, however I see it as all a part of the identical massive story, and it definitely is topical and probably of curiosity in our present pandemic-dominated world. I can’t essentially say there are particular classes we will take for the COVID-19 pandemic from finding out earlier ones, however I believe it’s all the time higher to know the previous higher to tell decisionmaking within the current.

San Juan Regional Medical Heart, Farmington, New Mexico