“Heavy Shadows and Black Night”: Disease and Depopulation in Colonial Spanish America

Abstract

A substantive body of scholarship now recognizes that Native American populations declined precipitously in size following European conquest and colonization. The precise magnitude of demographic collapse continues to spark heated debate, but consensus is emerging where dissent prevailed before. That consensus attributes Indian depopulation in large part to the introduction of Old World disease. Many factors besides imported sickness caused aboriginal demise, but disease proved the most destructive agent of a fatal complex. This paper examines the role disease played in depopulating the Spanish Indies, from first contact to the early seventeenth century. Analysis focuses on five distinct geographical settings: Hispaniola, central Mexico, northwestern Mexico, Guatemala south of the Petén rainforest, and the central Andes. For each of these settings, literature is reviewed that illuminates problems of data, chronology, impact, and identification that have charged discussion of the issues for some time. An attempt is made to situate regional findings in hemispheric context and to appraise the status of the disease factor in quincentennial consciousness.

Fire-free land use in pre-1492 Amazonian savannas

“…were rapid, thorough, and widespread throughout the Americas (38,39) and, according to some estimates (3,40), may have resulted in the loss of as much as 80-95% of the agricultural population across the neotropics. The labor-intensive raised-field agricultural systems (41) must have been particularly impacted by this substantial reduction of the labor force, resulting in their abandonment.…”

History and restoration of the longleaf pine-grassland ecosystem: Implications for species at risk

“…When the explorer DeSoto marched his army of 600+ men across the South in 1539-1542, he found villages of Native Americans already decimated by disease. Mortality rates as high as 90-95% have been attributed to smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, hepatitis, and other diseases that spread rapidly in the Americas in the century after Columbus (Dobyns, 1983;Smith, 1987;Lovell, 1992). The Mississippian Culture collapsed by 1600 A.D. as a result of European intrusion and diseases.…”

Vegetated Field Margins in Mexico: Their History, Structure and Function, and Management

“…A population estimated by some to exceed 20 million at the time of contact in 1518, had been reduced to a scant one million a century later (Lovell, 1992;McCaa, 2000). Under conditions of rapid indigenous depopulation, the Spaniards reapportioned land and labor and reconstituted agriculture through the introduction of European technologies and biota (Whitmore and Turner, 1992).…”