"The New World's Post-Apocalyptic Landscape"

por Doctor Science

I'm gathering up a bunch of threads that came up in the Methos on September 11 post and answering them here.
The question, "Were New World populations significantly reduced by Old World diseases introduced after 1492?" is currently considered settled by historians, and the answer is "Yes". If this startles you, it *is* a paradigm shift from what you probably grew up learning -- but it's a really solid shift with a huge weight of evidence behind it. The best popular account is 1491, by Charles Mann; I'm on the library waiting list for 1493 and will be sure to review it here when I've read it.
 
From the 1993 review article by Henry F. Dobyns, Disease Transfer at Contact:

Ninety percent of the population of civilized Mesoamerica and Andean America perished by 1568. Civilized highlanders constituted the vast majority of America's precontact population. Consequently, their sixteenth century epidemiology determined the magnitude of "the worst demographic disaster ... in the history of the world."

Successive waves of virgin soil epidemics from the large number of diseases common in the Old World are thought to have been especially traumatic for people who didn't have centuries of cultural experience with epidemic diseases in general. Languages wouldn't have disappeared (mostly), because *everyone* knows the language; basic food-gathering or agricultural techniques would also not be lost, because almost everybody knew how to grow or gather food.
What would have been lost is almost everything you'd call *culture*: stories, specialized skills, the more elaborate handcrafts, artistic techniques. It was a far more horrific shock than the Black Plague had been in Europe, and that was plenty bad.
The disease that gets the lion's share of blame is usually smallpox. This is for two reasons, IMHO.
First, smallpox definitely had a major effect in the densely-populated Aztec and Inka regions. This picture from the Florentine codex[1] was probably made by Native artists within a decade or so of Cortez' conquest, and undoubtedly shows smallpox:

But second, smallpox also was an extremely serious disease in Europe throughout the early Modern period, including in the royal houses. For instance, William III of England was born after his father's death from smallpox; his wife Mary II died of smallpox in 1694, without having any children. Meanwhile, in France:

This portrait shows, right to left:

• Louis the Petit Dauphin, died of measles in 1712 along with his wife and eldest son
• Louis XIV, who had smallpox in 1647 and survived to die in 1715
• Louis the Grand Dauphin, died of smallpox in 1711
• The future Louis XV, who only survived the measles epidemic that killed his parents and elder brother because
• the woman on the left of the picture, his governess Madame de Ventadour, locked the royal doctors out of the room

I doubt, though, that smallpox was necessarily the pre-eminent epidemic in the American apocalypse. Smallpox has an incubation period of a couple of weeks, and it spreads (almost always) from person to person. This means that you need a lot of people fairly close together for smallpox to keep going, because the virus has to find a new host every month.
Away from the built-up areas, epidemics of other diseases would be more important: malaria, typhus, and other insect-transmitted diseases, or water-borne illnesses such as typhoid or dysentery. It was recently suggested that the epidemic that wiped out Squanto's people might have been leptospirosis, a bacterial infection humans get from water contaminated by rodents -- such as the rats arriving on European ships. Or it might have been bacterial or viral hepatitis, or dysentery, or something else.

Big Head Mask, created by Xario Domingos Tapirapé of the Tapirapé people, Mato Grosso, Brazil.

To give you a picture of the cultural effects, here's what happened along the Amazon River. In 1541 the Conquistador Francisco de Orellana started down a river in the mountains of eastern Peru, exploring toward the ocean. Gaspar de Carvajal was along as a priest and chronicler. As they traveled down toward what was later named the Amazon River, Orellana's expedition passed innumerable Indian communities on cultivated riverside land.

Near the mouth of the Tapajós, about four hundred miles from the sea, Orellana's ragtag force came across the biggest Indian settlement yet--its homes and gardens lined the riverbank for more than a hundred miles. "Inland from the river, at a distance of one or two leagues ... there could be seen some very large cities." A floating reception force of more than four thousand Indians--two hundred war canoes, each carrying twenty or thirty people--greeted the Spanish. Hundreds or thousands more stood atop the bluffs on the south bank, waving palm leaves in synchrony to create a kind of football wave that Carvajal clearly found peculiar and unnerving.

This picture is very hard to reconcile with the image of the Amazon rainforest as primeval, indeed "virgin", sparsely inhabited by roving bands of barely-clothed natives with a timeless foraging lifestyle.

Amazonas, near Manaus, Brazil.

In the last 20 years it's become clear that Carvajal was not, in fact, just making stuff up. In particular, Michael Heckenberger and his colleagues have found that apparently trackless forest once held geometrically-planned villages and even cities. They farmed acres of man-made soil, "terra preta", built up with charcoal, pottery, and compost.
But it was all gone within the few decades after Orellana's expedition; my guess is that malaria, brought by African slaves, was even more responsible than smallpox or influenza. With 90% of the population gone, the survivors had neither the manpower, the organization, nor the will to keep working on the terra preta, to lay out their orderly villages, to survey their roads. The civilization collapsed and the jungle took it all back.
In other words, the Amazon rain forest isn't primeval at all, it's a post-apocalyptic landscape. Chris Clarke has recently pointed out that the US Wilderness Act and its official interpretation stress "natural condition," "opportunities for solitude", and "primitive recreation" in its definition of protection-worthy land, but not whether the landscape is ecologically valuable.

One can argue over whether Native techniques fostered biodiversity in general. One cannot honestly argue, however, over whether they existed. The evidence is incontrovertible. As Kat Anderson's book Tending The Wild documents thoroughly, for instance, California's "wild" landscapes were in fact the result of intensive human management. Few seriously dispute this these days: the facts are simply ignored. Native manipulation of the landscape is not counted as a "human impact" for purposes of determining Wilderness status whether the topic is individual visually prominent artifacts such as grinding rocks or artistic sites, or a broader landscape type that still bears the marks of intensive management — as an example, the "open-parklike forests" lauded by Nineteenth Century explorers that were the result of regular burning by local Native people. Indeed, the very concept of "primeval character and influence" essentially rewrites the environmental history of the landscape to exclude those human beings that may well have created that character of the landscape.

And for much of the New World, the apparent "natural" state of the landscape was post-apocalyptic: a human-modified environment where 90% of the humans had recently died.

A "pristine" forest in Brazil was cleared for cattle grazing, to reveal these ancient earthworks. Despite its appearance only a few years ago, this was not the forest primeval.

[1] I was surprised to see that Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan friar who wrote Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (of which the Florentine Codex is a copy), has never been sainted or even beatified. I'm surprised because his work to study and record the Nahuatl culture and to bring Nahuatl people into the Catholic Church was both enormously beneficial to the Church, and also truly heroic on an intellectual and spiritual plane. No-one deserves more to be the Patron Saint of anthropology.