With European missionaries came the crippling depopulation of Native Americans. But unlike what is commonly believed, the mass-scale decline due to disease started more than a century after they arrived.
A new study from Harvard researchers traced the devastation experienced by Native Americans in Southwest U.S. in what is now northern New Mexico, noting that native populations dropped from about 6,500 to fewer than 900 in just 60 years in 18 villages they analyzed.
Study lead author Matt Liebmann said that native people and Europeans had first contact in the Southwest in 1539 – but disease did not really took effect until after 1620.
"[B]ut we then see a very rapid depopulation from 1620 to 1680. (The death rate) was staggeringly high -- about 87 percent of the Native population died in that short period,” he explained in a statement, likening the figures to having nine out of 10 people die in a room.
To map almost 20 Native villages without spending years on a single site, the team used airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR), which uses lasers to get into dense forest cover and create a map of the region – with an accuracy down to the centimeter in certain cases.
The Native population in North America is at an estimated 2 million to 18 million during Christopher Columbus’ arrival. When the 19th century ended, it had dipped to about 530,000.
According to their study of archeological data, historical records, and tree-ring chronology, the Harvard team linked the depopulation to the rise of mission churches. The settlers were believed to bring with them infections such as measles, smallpox, bubonic plague, influenza, cholera, chicken pox, scarlet fever, and yellow fever.
Famine and violence also ensued from the newfound settlement.
The wipeout, the authors emphasized, also resulted in more forest fires occurring during that time.
“[As] people died off, the forests started re-growing and we start to see more forest fires,” Liebmann noted.
People needed timber for their roofs, cooking, and heating as they subsisted in these villages. In addition, they were clearing the land to farm, so trees did not really grow when the pueblos were inhabited.
Recent studies of the Early Anthropocene period typically pointed to 1610 as a time when global carbon dioxide levels dramatically dropped. The team, though, argued that the dip took place later.
While increased forest fires marked the time of the depopulation, the region eventually showed carbon sequestration from the regrowth of forests.
For Liebmann, it is crucial to cite that the Southwest was among the earliest points of contact between European colonists and Native Americans in what is the U.S. at present.
“[S]o it’s hard to argue for [the catastrophic depopulation] happening anywhere in the rest of North America at that early date."
The researchers detailed their findings last Jan. 25 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo: PublicResource.org | Flickr
