
Chief Andrew Isaac Health Center, Fairbanks, Alaska
Today is the summer solstice, which is an event I usually mark with a blog post about archaeoastronomy. Today I’m going to do something a little different, though. Since the coronavirus pandemic has been dominating and reshaping life around the world for months now, with no end in sight, I’ve been reading up on past epidemics and their impacts on the populations and societies of the Western Hemisphere, and today I’m launching a series of blog posts discussing these issues. I don’t have a clear sense yet of how long this series will go on or what the frequency of posting will be, but it will likely be pretty extensive. The literature on this subject is huge and fascinating, and I’m still working my way through it.
To keep some control over the scope of this series, I’m setting some basic guidelines in advance for what it will include. The main focus will be on the Western Hemisphere and the impacts of diseases introduced by Europeans on Native American societies, although this may branch out a bit into other geographical areas (e.g., Oceania and Africa) that offer interesting parallels and/or counterpoints to the American experience, and I will also look to some extent at the impact of epidemics on European settler societies as well, and in some cases also at possible epidemic diseases that were transmitted in the opposite direction, the most famous example of which is syphilis. The temporal scope will start with 1492, though with some attention to the epidemiological and demographic landscapes before that that shaped the progress of events afterward, and end before the worldwide flu pandemic of 1918. The literature on the 1918 flu is vast and interesting in its own right, but it’s just too much to incorporate into what is already a very ambitious project.
One of the major issues in this field, which has shaped a lot of the scholarly discussion especially over the past 50 or 60 years, is the question of the total Native American population of the Western Hemisphere before European contact in 1492. Estimates of population have varied immensely over time, with enormous implications for how scholars have understood the nature of Native societies, European colonization, and many other important issues. I’ll go into much more detail about the various estimates and the controversy over them in subsequent posts.

Norton Sound Regional Hospital, Nome, Alaska
I’m calling this series “Virgin Soil, Widowed Land.” Both of those phrases have come up in the scholarly debate over epidemics and demography, and I find it interesting that they both use the same (rather distasteful, to be honest) metaphor in very different ways. “Virgin soil” epidemics are those that impact populations with little or no preexisting immunity to the disease in question, so they cause intensive impacts well beyond those on populations with more immunity. The current COVID-19 epidemic is of this type, since the coronavirus in question is new and no one in the world had immunity to it when it emerged. Similarly, New World populations lacked immunity to most Old World diseases, which therefore had catastrophic impacts on them. (Just how catastrophic and what the exact impacts were is very controversial, of course.)
The “virgin soil” concept refers to the populations that an epidemic impacts, but it intersects with a separate use of the virginity metaphor with a longer history in the study of European colonialism: the “virgin land.” In this concept, the Native people of the Americas were few in number and made limited, superficial use of the land, so the land was essentially unused and available for the taking by European colonists. There is a lot of implicit racism and white-supremacist thinking in this concept, but that’s a lot of the historiography of European colonialism for you. Once some scholars started looking more closely at some of the evidence for pre-Columbian population and the impacts of epidemic disease in the wake of initial contact, the virgin land concept came to seem less and less plausible even descriptively, and in some circles it began to be replaced with the idea of a “widowed land,” in which the land may have been largely empty in many places when European colonists arrived, but this was in large part due to the earlier impacts of virgin soil epidemics spurred by initial European contact.
This makes European colonization look a lot worse in some ways, though it arguably still lets the colonists off the hook too much. One objection to the emphasis on epidemic disease as a factor in Native depopulation is that it seems to imply that depopulation was both inevitable after contact and in some sense not really the colonists’ fault since they didn’t know they were carrying deadly disease with them. As I’ll discuss in future posts, there may be something to this but many researchers have pointed to other more direct impacts from deliberate actions of the Europeans, who definitely attacked, enslaved, and violently displaced Native groups from many areas in ways that probably caused substantial mortality on their own in addition to amplifying the effects of disease.
Anyway, there’s much more to say about these issues both in general, big-picture terms and at the level of individual microhistorical case studies. This may seem a little far afield from my focus on Chaco Canyon, which long predates European contact and the impact of these epidemics, but I see it as all part of the same big story, and it certainly is topical and potentially of interest in our current pandemic-dominated world. I can’t necessarily say there are specific lessons we can take for the COVID-19 pandemic from studying previous ones, but I think it’s always better to understand the past better to inform decisionmaking in the present.

San Juan Regional Medical Center, Farmington, New Mexico
Ok, I’m in. I look forward to your series even if I am a little leery of always regarding peoples as being acted upon with no agency of their own. Happy solstice and thanks for always being interesting.
Thanks! And yeah, the lack of agency implied by disease-centric approaches is another problem with this discourse. More later.
Great to see you’re back and with a compelling new project. Not sure that disease centric necessarily implies a lack of agency: it appears in the actions of vectors (inadvertent or deliberate as you suggest) and the responses of the infected ( sick, surviving—individual and collective) as we ourselves see with COVID -19. An analogy: more powerful and destructive hurricanes as a consequence of human fueled climate change certainly have agency embedded for a Key West homeowner.
I think agency is only as powerful as the information available to those applying it.
If a foreign group shares a deadly infection with a native group but doesn’t share the inoculation technique is agency to blame for the devastation in native numbers? Or isn’t it removal of agency to only provide a ‘cure’ with lengthy and implicit strings attached?
The double edged sword of leveraged reliance or high risk of death is one used so predominantly in human history whether it be in family structures, commerce or government that it’s broadly accepted as best course.
We think too highly of our collected selves when we equate the ubiquity of our practices with their morality.
Giving people the freedom to act within the considerations of a societies guidelines or set out on their own is not the same as forcing inconsiderate (of data or outlook) mandates or shoving them of the cliff you have created outside their doors.
Independence and autonomy is developed in people over time. Learned helplessness, whether true or false, can be engrained in days. Survivors of abuse, kidnap victims, children of narcisstic family dynamics, people raised in isolated religious oppression or cults, despite our vernacular familiarity with the term Stockholm syndrome, all these groups receive doubtful admonitions about their lack of agency in escaping their abuse.
It takes far less time and effort to convince a man he can’t walk than it does to teach a child how to crawl, walk, and, then run. But, once they do there’s no stopping them. And maybe that’s what those in power fear. Not the lack of agency but, the unbridled application of it.