Description: Hutchinson explores early colonial settlements and compares those that thrived with those that failed, investigating how disease did or did not affect the Native population nearby. Following the path of infection and disease, Hutchinson demonstrates that as America grew from backwoods to cities, populations in every century were affected in many ways by disease, each one impacting different impoverished classes.- -
Brief description: Dale L. Hutchinson is professor and associate chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Foraging, Farming, and Coastal Biocultural Adaptation in Late Prehistoric North Carolina and Bioarchaeology of the Florida Gulf Coast: Adaptation, Conflict, and Change.
Review Quotes: "A smorgasbord of history, anthropology, economics, ecology, geography, and art history."--Choice "A skillfully crafted social history of disease that fully comprehends the factors leading to epidemics and will challenge the way historians and historical archaeologists think about the consequences of conflict and contact in colonial America."--Historical Archaeology "Reveals how crucial context is in the production of variable health outcomes in human populations. . . . An excellent example of the holistic nature of anthropology and how it produces a richer understanding of phenomena than is possible if we attend only to each individual contributing factor in isolation."--American Antiquity "Hutchinson dismantles narratives of disease that portray early America as a place in which all were equally susceptible to pathogens. He argues instead for the importance of context--social, political, economic, and ecological--in properly understanding the nature of disease."--H-Net Reviews "Hutchinson does more than demonstrate how colonists contributed to the transmission of disease; he demonstrates the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world."--North Carolina Historical Review