
Life in the Americas Before Columbus (2002) - benbreen
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/?single_page=true
======
rthomas6
It's easy to forget how much disease aided in the European colonization of
America.

"The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out.
Eventually it found __a recently deserted Indian settlement. __The
newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for
underground stashes of corn. [. . .] When the colonists came to Plymouth, a
month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through
the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their
houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted."

The native Americans didn't have the same natural resistances to the diseases
the Europeans brought. At some points, Smallpox traveled so quickly through
the native populations that whole villages would die before the Europeans even
got there.

~~~
turar
When you think about the differences between human results of North American
vs. South American colonization by Europeans, it becomes clear that there was
something more at play than just the clean and guilt-free narrative of
"disease wiped out the Natives" that is being taught in North American
schools.

Today, only in the US and Canada, i.e. Anglo-Saxon colonies, the Native
populations are dismally low. Just across the border in Mexico you already
start seeing largely Native and mixed Native-European populations thriving,
instead of being wiped out. The same story continues throughout Central and
Latin Americas.

~~~
benbreen
Mann talks about this in the book version of 1491, as does the historian David
Noble Cook in _Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest_. Neither are
trying to claim (at all) that the enormous population declines of the early
modern period were due only to disease, or to minimize the role of mass
murders, intentional starvation, wars, etc. But this comment fails to consider
the demography of the New World prior to 1492. Mesoamerica and the Andes
(modern day Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, etc.) were home to widespread
agricultural civilizations with settled urban populations. In fact, pre-
Columbian Mexico City was one of the largest urban areas in the world (early
conquistadors described it as like Venice, but bigger).

Granted, agricultural societies existed in North America too, but aside from
the pueblos in New Mexico and some urbanized communities associated with the
Mississippi Valley Civilization and its offshoots, the population density and
urbanization didn't compare to Mesoamerica and the Andes. This has a lot to do
with why present-day Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, etc. have large indigenous
communities relative to Canada and the US: there were higher populations there
to begin with. It doesn't necessarily mean that the proportion lost to disease
and warfare was any less.

~~~
te_chris
The history of Mexico and mesoamerica in general is fascinating. I was lucky
enough to spend a week in D.F. (Mexico City) in January and I fell in love
with the city. I highly recommend to anyone who hasn't been to go, it's such a
great city.

To bring this back to the parent comment: The anthropology museum [1] in D.F
is incredible both in depth and scale. It covers the history of the city and
area so thoroughly. I had no idea about the extent to which civilization had
persisted in Mesoamerica before I spent half a day wandering around this
museum. It's such a fascinating history and it's available to see right there
through the recovered artifacts and the current ruin sites both in D.F and
just outside (such as Teotihuacan [2]).

Oh, and if you go stay here:
[http://theredtreehouse.com](http://theredtreehouse.com)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_Nacional_de_Antropolog%C3...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_Nacional_de_Antropolog%C3%ADa)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan)

~~~
WildUtah
Agreed on Mexico City. It's wonderful.

Cortés arrived in Mexico with a few hundred men and allied with locals to
overturn the Aztec empire, but natives were always the majority of his
alliance. And natives have always been the majority of the ancestors of
Mexicans, even today. The pre-Hispanic civilization persists in every aspect
of life from street grids to artistic styles. There are still more Mexicans
living on canals than Venetians.

I was bicycling through the mountains of Milpa Alta one day; Milpa Alta is
inside the Federal District of central Mexico City but more rural by virtue of
steep mountainsides rising straight up from dense valley development. I came
to the town of Milpa Santa Anna where I rode to the charming central square.
Narrow old streets are colorful and lively there with some cross streets
passing each other on bridges due to the steep hillsides. There was a public
notice board in the central plaza where all notices were posted -- ten miles
from the denser parts of Mexico City -- in Nahuatl -- the original Aztec
tongue -- as well as Spanish. Except there was one notice posted only in
Nahuatl. I can't tell you what that one said because I don't speak the
language, but it really makes you feel like a foreign traveller in the deep
past when public notices are still written in Aztec.

------
ChrisNorstrom
"Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112
million people... in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe"

And they were all clean and free of any diseases? Only the Europeans had these
"devastating" diseases?

"The native Americans didn't have the same natural resistances to the diseases
the Europeans brought."

How did the European diseases kill off the Native Americans but not the other
way around?

~~~
hmmdar
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393317552](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393317552)
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared M. Diamond does a great job of explaining this
in detail, and not just in the North Americas, but examples throughout the
world.

It boils down to a few basic ideas

1: Native american's had no real concept of quarantine. If someone was sick,
the extended family would take care of them. In turn the extend family would
become infected, and infect the rest of the village/tribe as they travelled.

2: Europeans lived in cities with much greater population densities. Their
immune systems were much more accustomed to dealing with a large variety of
infectious agents. Whereas the native americans live is small homogenous
villages. With very little exposure to outside influences, other than other
tribes/villages.

~~~
davidw
I think the most important takeaway was actually that Europe and Asia have
huge swaths of land at roughly similar latitudes, so that it was easy for
crops and domesticated animals to spread east/west. Those allowed for more
intense agriculture, and along with them went diseases.

Here's the wikipedia page, which actually goes into more depth:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel)

~~~
benbreen
Agreed, Diamond's most salient points are 1) the latitudinal axis of Eurasia
compared to the longitudinal one of the Americas and 2) the role of
domesticated animals as disease vectors. The stuff about pre-Columbians not
paying attention to quarantine is quite frankly rubbish (both because
Europeans had no modern notions of quarantine either, and because it's
impossible to make a blanket statement about how two continents-worth of
civilizations conceptualized disease), as is the stuff about lack of
urbanization (at least in the context of present-day Mexico and Peru, which
indeed did have urbanization on a scale to rival Europe).

A personal pet peeve of mine is that Alfred Crosby wrote about this stuff in
the 1970s ( _The Columbian Exchange_ ) and the 1980s ( _Ecological
Imperialism_ ) but Diamond gets all the credit for it because he successfully
repackaged it for more popular audiences, without adding much.

------
WalterBright
This is a great read. It's always fun to read about how much we don't know
about even the recent past.

~~~
benbreen
Mann's books ("1491" and "1493") are even better - great examples of longform
journalism as history. They also update some of the facts in the article,
since we've learned a lot more in the past decade.

