"Pre-European cultures in America are found to be diverse, complex"
by David Chandler, GLOBE STAFF
(reproduced without permission)
CHICAGO - Scientists studying the earliest records and archeological
remains of Native Americans just after the first European contact five
centuries ago have found that the population may have been far larger
and more diverse and had a more complex society than earlier studies
have indicated.
By the time Native American societies were described and their popula-
tions estimated, many of them had already been devastated by the effects
of disease introduced by the explorers, the scientists have found.
The scientists presented their conclusions here at the annual meeting
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
It is well known that Native American populations were reduced by
diseases introduced by the Europeans, but in recent studies of
isolated tribes in the upper Amazon basin, Francis Black, a physician
at Yale University, found that the diseases may have spread through
the water or been borne by insects even before physical contact was
established. In their first encounters with native populations,
Europeans thus may have been finding people whose society had already
been affected by diseases.
Linda Newson, an anthropologist at Kings College, London, said her
studies of Native American populations in Central America indicate
that the larger, more urbanized cultures suffered the earliest impact
from introduced diseases because the Spanish explorers tended to
concentrate on establishing contact with the larger groups. But the
large population size of these groups also allowed them to make a more
complete recovery than smaller tribal groups, she said.
In many cases, said anthropologist Henry Dobyns of the University of
Oklahoma, tribes with their memberships depleted were forced to join
with others in order to survive. As a result, separate tribal groups,
and in some cases groups from entirely different cultures, merged in a
a way that makes it almost impossible to reconstruct what the original
pre-contact cultures, traditions and languages were like.
Dobyns has traced a series of devastating epidemics that took place in
wave after wave through the 16th century, drastically depleting the
native population through smallpox, measles, bubonic plague and
influenza.
The reason the Native American population was so vulnerable to these
diseases, Black said, was because of the relatively homogeneous genetic
makeup of that population. All Native Americans are believed to have
descended from a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait
during or immediately after the last Ice Age, which ended about 12,000
years ago.
The resulting epidemics weakened the whole population so much that
they were made easy prey for colonization.
The most extreme example of the distorted picture that Europeans
formed, said Ramenosky, is the "picture that we have developed of
Native Americans as mounted hunters of the plains." That picture, in
contrast to the large populations, major urban centers and richly
diverse cultures that came before, "was a result of what had happened
in the 300 years" since the European arrival, she said.
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst