The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America

In his presidential address to the American Historical Association, John Coatsworth argued that study of change over time in physical or spiritual well-being is the central unifying concern of history. While one may quibble with the generalization, any reasonable time and motion study would find that historians devote most of their research efforts to gathering, organizing, interpreting and disseminating information on human welfare or the quality of life broadly defined. 1 Human welfare is conceptually complex and difficult to measure, even today. Accurate measurement of inflation is a case in point. If the consumer price index overstates the increase in the true cost of living by as little as one percentage point per year (as many economists have argued), then the cumulative addition to the national debt from overindexing the federal budget is more than $1 trillion in just 12 years. The error also substantially affects the measurement of poverty and of real median income in the quarter century after 1973. If this issue about a modest slice of physical well being cannot be resolved without argument, it is little wonder that debates are intense about the distant past, when written evidence is thin and surveys collected by government and private efforts are simply unavailable. 2 Under these conditions the less venturesome may throw up their hands and avoid research areas lacking familiar types of written information, but this approach is unsatisfactory as a general rule. Sometimes we should face the risks and make the effort to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries in search of new evidence, especially if it enlightens opinion on intriguing topics that are meager in customary sources. This paper makes such a journey, bringing substantial new evidence to bear on a literature characterized by an unusually high ratio of debate to factual information: physical well being in pre-Columbian America. The new data measure health as seen from the skeletal remains of over 4,000 individuals who lived in North, Central or South 1 America in the millennia before 1492. Because skeletons are an unfamiliar source to most social scientists, a methodology section allows the paper to be moderately self contained. A novel procedure for condensing diverse skeletal data into a single measure of health is also described. The results have implications for understanding of the environmental determinants of health, the pre-Columbian disease environment, plausible ranges of pre-contact population size, and the pattern of European conquest. Background Economists have …