In pre-agricultural societies, zoonotic disease disproportionately affected those who came into contact with animals and their products during hunting and gathering. In Neolithic and post-Neolithic European and Middle Eastern societies, conversely, a greater proportion of individuals came into close contact with concentrated animal pens and therefore became more liable to infection from diseases that followed their byproducts.As Polgar has shown, indeed, the domestication of animals has historically increased the spread of zoonotic diseases including anthrax, tuberculosis, and even types of influenza. Students and researchers should consider the paleo-archeological insights above as they try to understand why Native Americans were often so vehement in their immediate opposition to European agricultural models that concentrated cattle in farms and/or stored grain in newly constructed central warehouses. The development of those models, after all, accompanied the growth of massive disease outbreaks among Native Americans from the 1500s. The primary historical sources unearthed in the work of Anderson and Cronon, for example, would provide one point of reference: in New England, enclosed farms set up by seventeenth-century English settlers seemed to encourage the spread of infectious diseases, whether zoonotically or due to the increased concentrations of peoples.Bovine strains of tuberculosis arrived with European cattle, as did tuberculosis bacilli and influenza strains in Swine,raspberry cultivation pot as well as the trichina worm.Spanish settlers in California and the Southwest created ranches with similar effects, albeit in a slightly different colonial context.
Native Americans, according to one 1674 colonial report, perceived English cattle as “Unwholsom for their Bodies, filling them with sundry Diseases.” As Anderson has suggested in a discussion of human diseases that seemed to correlate with animal outbreaks, those Native Americans “who survived an initial bout of disease often emerged in a weakened state, vulnerable to subsequent ailments that would not necessarily have imperiled a healthy individual.”New England Native Americans caught up in King Philip’s War often “began their hostilities with plundering and destroying cattle,” according to one witness. Large-scale killings of domestic animals continued throughout the war, and Native American hostility to the animals – and their owners – extended to mutilation and torture of cows in particular.Assessing the imposition of domesticated agriculture by Europeans during early contact, Cherokee-American anthropologist and historian Russell Thornton has thus suggested that “the reasons for the relatively few infectious diseases in this [western] hemisphere [prior to European contact] surely include… the existence of fewer domesticated animals, from which many human diseases arise” – unlike those that later grew up due to grain storage and transit patterns which differed from hunter-gatherer lifestyles as well as their own pre-contact forms of land management and crop cultivation.As biological anthropologists have shown, some precontact Native American communities were likely familiar with the association between cultivated animal lots and disease, albeit in more isolated settings. Pueblo Native Americans had witnessed the spread of diseases in areas contaminated by turkey dung, most probably salmonella and Shigella.Turkeys had been domesticated in the northern Southwest, likely from populations of Merriam’s wild turkey. In most cases Pueblo communities demonstrated the capacity for mixed land use between animals and cultivated crops, without zoonotic diseases. But their example at least suggests that some communities may have been aware of the potential disease association, if conditions became less optimal.
To be sure, there remain significant risks in using a conceptual distinction between Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic agriculturalists to understand changing Native American health outcomes after European contact. The link between negative Native American responses to European domesticated farming and the problematic health patterns associated with Neolithic agriculture must not be emphasized too specifically, of course; not least because the latter occurred between 8,000 and 10,000 years prior to the Native American encounter with colonial-European agriculture. Yet it is at least possible to draw broad conceptual associations between the two studied periods. Just as in paleo-archaeological records detailing the rise of Neolithic grain production and animal husbandry, source material relating to the Native American-European encounter demonstrates the potential for zoonotic diseases to proliferate in regions that were required to adapt to more concentrated forms of land use . Rather than highlighting a simple biological exchange of disease, then, students could point to the specific interventions of European enclosure and domesticated cattle-raising, which made infectious maladies even more potent and widespread.They would consider the methodologies and conclusions of Armelagos, as well as those provided by other scholars of the move from Paleolithic ecology towards Neolithic agriculture. Having done so, they would be in a position to draw general inferences – and even conclusions – as they assess historical source material for the Native-American-European encounter and the growth of zoonotic diseases, over a relatively wide geographical basis and a relatively broad space of time. The purported difference between Native American hunter-gatherers and European pastoralists becomes rather more problematic if it is used to de-emphasize the role of indigenous agriculture and formal crop cultivation prior to European contact. In order to avoid such a crude assertion, students would do well to assess our developing understanding of the “Hopewell tradition”, which describes the various aspects of the Native American cultures that developed along rivers in the northeastern and Midwestern United States from 200 BCE to 500 CE.
In these regions, tropical domesticate species of gourds, such as Cucurbita pepo, were introduced from Mesoamerica, well before the 2000 to 1000B.C period that scholars once linked to the first domestication of North American plants in the region. Scholars have recognized Curcurbita at the subspecies level and have thus made the convincing suggestion that the Hopewell cultures of North America created a second independent center of domestication for the species, just as they did with other plant species: Pumpkins, marrows, and other gourds were first domesticated in Mesoamerica, while acorn squashes, scallop squashes, fordhooks, crooknecks,low round pots and a variety of gourd species were then cultivated in North America. The domestication of indigenous eastern North American seed plants can thus be categorized in four species: Cucurbita pepo, Helianthus annuus, Iva annua, and Chenopodium berlandieri.During the summer and fall periods, for example, pseudo grain seed-like chenopods became an important starch source for some Native Americans from modern-day Arkansas to eastern Kentucky, at latitudes from northern Alabama to central Ohio, from ca. 1800 B.C. until ca. A.D. 900 or later. Evidence suggests that hunter-gathering practices in these regions were supplemented by the domestication of those and similar chenopods .Thus it is increasingly clear that many North American societies modified parts of their ecological environments even prior to the proliferation of maize production. The latter responded to demographic distress on the one hand, but also may have contributed to certain declining health outcomes, on the other hand . The four indigenous species that were cultivated prior to and even after the introduction of maize, conversely, were likely the product of a much larger context of “stable long-term adaptations and broadscale niche construction efforts that were carried out in the absence of any carrying-capacity challenges or seriously compressed and compromised resource catchment areas.” Their cultivation, alongside other “crops” such as berries and tubers, had required, among other things: differential culling of trees, expanding natural strands of floodplain seed plants, artificial fires, and establishing “orchards” of fruit and berry-producing species.Similar patterns of cultivation could also be detected in other regions, such as California and the American Southwest, as well as the wild rice regions of the central Great Lakes . In 1541, in what is modern-day eastern Texas and western Louisiana, Spanish colonizers such as Hernando de Soto noted that communities of Karanka was cultivated corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco.From around A.D. 900 in the riverine “horticultural villages” on the Great Plains, along the Missouri and its tributary rivers flowing into the lower Mississippi, beans, squash, melon, corn, and sunflowers were cultivated by Caddoan speaking Native American communities. Each village also maintained hunting territories where animals were stalked from the late-summer onwards. Thus, here and elsewhere, it is inaccurate to highlight a dichotomy between indigenous horticulture and hunter-gatherer patterns prior to the period of first European contact.Precontact horticultural communities often “retained hunting and gathering practices as regular supplements and insurance against occasional shortages.”After European contact, to be sure, many North American horticulturalists tried to revert to “full time hunting and gathering” as a means for sustenance; even while some in New England, among the Cherokee of the South, and the Navajo of the Southwest, remained as pastoralists.Greater reliance on hunting and gathering after contact represented an indigenous response to the curtailment of horticulture, or its problematic limitation and enclosure, by new European forms of crop rotation and animal husbandry. That response, however, set up a chain of circumstances that resulted in the permanent loss of autonomous access to hunted meats and indigenously cultivated plants by the second half of the nineteenth century. From the late-sixteenth century, Spanish, French, and English settlers in coastal North America tended to overlook the possibility for symbiosis between hunter-gatherer and horticultural methods of sustenance, which often oscillated in relative importance according to the season.
Instead, Europeans noted the Native-American reaction to their presence – a reversion to hunting and gathering and revulsion for their own domesticated agriculture – and erroneously assumed that they solely engaged in nomadic hunting patterns. This attitude “contributed to the notion that removal of eastern nations to Midwestern reservations would solve problems of conflict between expanding Euro-American populations and the Indians’ loss of hunting lands.” Among English colonizers in the eastern seaboard, the view that Native Americans refrained from land cultivation was indeed key in defining the territory as res nullious – empty of privately managed land and thus legitimate for colonial settlement. A similar assessment took place among Spanish colonizers in present-day California and the Southwest, albeit on a different scale.As they moved towards an increasingly central migration trajectory in the face of European colonization, various indigenous communities from the East, the Great Lakes, and the West often adopted European firearms and horses to hunt in new nomadic patterns. Shoshone tribes from the central and northern Mountain West adopted Spanish horses and introduced them to other indigenous communities in the Great Plains. Algonquians such as the Blackfeet, Gros Ventres, and Araphos, as well as some Cree and Ojibwa tribes, “abandoned forest hunting and gathering to become mounted nomadic hunters on the Great Plains” – thereby interacting with other tribes who had adopted Spanish horses as a means to hunt for new food sources. A northern Athapaskan group, the Sarsis, as well as some Comanches, similarly adopted horse nomadism. By the later-eighteenth century, previously horticultural Cheyenne communities entered the Plains, coming to rely on hunted buffalo and bison. Siouan and Caddoan horticulturalists along the streams and rivers of the eastern Great Plains sometimes also switched to horse-nomadic hunting-gathering practices after their traditional forms of plant cultivation and hunting were threatened by the interaction between European settlement and Native American warfare. Pawnee Indians, as well as some Hidatsas on the upper Missouri, moved towards horse-mounted nomadism. Through the eighteenth century, Siouan-speaking tribes gravitated from horticulture towards bison hunting, shifting west and leaving the bottomlands of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. In most of these cases, as Snow has pointed out, “people were not just responding to the attraction of nomadic hunting. There were by this time [around 1700] also strong direct and indirect pressures from the east, brought on by European settlement and expansion.” Initially, health profiles seemed to increase among various new Plains Native American communities. As Heckel has argued, using data from births between the 1830s and 1870s on the Great Plains, their new proximity to bison and other animals likely benefited the association between greater height and nutritional density. Yet as these communities adopted new forms of hunting, competition with European settlers in the region coupled with over efficiency so as to diminish their access to the area’s sources of animal protein and fat. By the later part of the nineteenth century, therefore, many Native Americans found themselves unable to rely on traditional nutritional interactions between horticultural and hunter-gathering products. Worse, they soon began to lose access to micro-nutrients and macro-nutrients from fast diminishing populations of bison. Relative to other European settlers, indeed, their height advantage diminished somewhat.The narrative above raises further implications for students and researchers, beyond the issue of zoonotic disease and concentrated settlements: if hunting and gathering as well as indigenous forms of crop cultivation were disrupted by the imposition of European agriculture in North America from the late-1500s, how else can we measure the historical symptoms and effects of declining health following the change to the Native American ecological landscape?