Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America: The Skeletal Evidence

A millennial perspective on health is best obtained from skeletal remains, which depict not only childhood morbidity conditions but also processes of degeneration that accompany aging and strenuous physical effort. Compiled into an index of health, data from twenty-three localities collected as part of a large collaborative project on the Western Hemisphere reveal diverse health conditions and a long-term decline that was associated with movement into less healthy ecological environments. The results have implications for understanding environmental determinants of health, the pattern of European conquest, pre-contact population size, human adaptation to climate change, and discovering prime movers of very long-term economic growth.