Well, I said I would probably continue to do posts here while I was guest-blogging for Keith Kloor, and obviously that didn’t happen. I did write some posts over there that would probably be of interest to my readers here, especially on the concept of “collapse” as applied to Chaco and Mesa Verde. I’ll have some more posts here soon, but that’s what I’ve got for now.
Questioning Collapse
August 30, 2010 by teofilo
Posted in Archaeology, Chaco Canyon, Northern San Juan, Paleoclimatology, Weather | 6 Comments
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Have you consider virulent and fast moving disease as a cause of “reorganization?” There are European accounts of healthy people leaving for the fields in the morning and lying dead in those same fields by evening– such accounts would not exist in the SW record but there is certainly the possibility of the events. One trader with a flea ridden dog could have left quite a trail…. as usual, your post was an interesting read. Thanks.
It’s certainly a possibility, and was suggested in comments to one of my posts at Collide-a-scape, but there just isn’t any way to clearly see something like that in the archaeological record. The European accounts, of course, were generally describing diseases that the Europeans themselves had introduced, which made them particularly virulent.
Actually I was thinking of accounts of the Black Plague in Italy as well as others. It is, don’t you think, a bit of ethnocentric thinking to regard Europeans as the only “foreigners” in the SW? Surely to the average Anasazi, a trader from Western Mexico or the Mississippi, or even just the other side of the Rio Grande was every bit as foreign. It is only European eyes that see “Native Americans” as all the same people. This lumping together of disparate people has made for some sloppy conclusions, again IMHO. I, for one, look forward to actual DNA evidence that, say, modern Pueblo peoples are the direct and only heirs of the SW peoples of 1100 A.D. Again, thanks for some interesting things to think about!
Oh, certainly people from other parts of the continent would have been just as “foreign” as Europeans, and I don’t mean to imply otherwise. When it comes to pandemic disease, however, the degree of foreignness really does make a difference, and the relevant measure is the extent of immunity in a given place rather than the perceptions of the residents there (which are of course important in other contexts). The Black Death in Europe, having come from Asia, is an example of this, as are the disease brought to the New World by Europeans. Which is not to say that similar pandemics couldn’t have occurred in prehispanic times; indeed, increasing evidence for long-distance contacts makes this more and more plausible.
There has actually been a fair amount of DNA research on both ancient and modern Southwestern peoples, and it does indeed show the great degree of continuity that would be expected from the archaeological evidence. I should do a post about it sometime.
Would love to see that post! Thanks for your reply.
Great comment about the dog Cyndy. What about the Athabaskan movement south, I am sure they had dogs and were not just all on the move at one time. Like you said it would only take a few- don’t the explorers usually go before the migrations?