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Localized climate change contributed to ancient depopulation

Timothy Kohler
Timothy Kohler

Washington State University researchers have detailed the role of localized climate change in one of the great mysteries of North American archaeology: the depopulation of southwest Colorado by ancestral Pueblo people in the late 1200s.

In the process, they address one of the mysteries of modern-day climate change: How will humans react?

Writing in Nature Communications, WSU archaeologist Tim Kohler and post-doctoral researcher Kyle Bocinsky use tree-ring data, the growth requirements of traditional maize crops and a suite of computer programs to make a finely scaled map of ideal Southwest growing regions for the past 2,000 years.

Their data paint a narrative of some 40,000 people leaving the Mesa Verde area of southwest Colorado as drought plagued the niche in which they grew maize, their main food source. Meanwhile, the Pajarito Plateau of the northern Rio Grande saw a large population spike.

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Fight against Ebola now needs a social front

Barry Hewlett
Barry Hewlett

If medics in space suits inspire dread, then imagine the fear stoked by the arrival of foreigners with guns.

The Acholi people called it gemo—a bad spirit that arrived suddenly, like an ill wind—and they had strict protocols to deal with the deadly sickness that followed. Patients were quarantined at home and cared for by a gemo survivor. Two poles of elephant grass were erected outside, as a warning to other villagers to stay away. Dancing, arguing and sex were forbidden, rotten meat was to be scrupulously avoided and those recovering had to remain isolated for a lunar month. Those who succumbed were buried at the edge of the village.

It took the skills of a trailblazing anthropologist, WSU Professor Barry Hewlett, to discover that the Acholi, an ethnic group in northern Uganda, had their own rather effective method of dealing with Ebola. He inveigled his way into a World Health Organisation team tackling an Ebola outbreak in 2000, furnishing the first, in-depth anthropological analysis of how communities regard this killer in their midst. Ebola may be classed as an emerging disease, but the Acholi, he found, may well have been battling it for a century.

Recently, Professor Hewlett revealed his dismay at how the current outbreaks in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone were being handled by the international fraternity, whose urgent, well-meaning containment efforts were leaving scant room for the beliefs, customs and sensitivities of locals.

Read more about how WSU anthropologists are helping in the fight to control Ebola:

Gulf News

The Columbian

Anthropologists aid in the Ebola epidemic

Barry Hewlett
Barry Hewlett

Barry Hewlett, a medical anthropologist at WSU Vancouver, says that efforts to contain outbreaks such as Ebola must be “culturally sensitive and appropriate…otherwise people are running away from actual care that is intended to help them.”

Hewlett was invited to join a World Health Organization Ebola team during the 2000 outbreak in Uganda. His experiences there prove the vital role that anthropologists play in disease outbreak efforts.

In a report on his experiences in Uganda, Hewlett noted that healthcare workers in the field were having a difficult time convincing the local people to bring their sick family members to clinics and isolation wards.

Read more at the Borgen Project blog

Hewlett wrote Ebola, Culture and Politics: The Anthropology of an Emerging Disease, a compulsory reading for medical anthropologists. In an interview with the Belgian MO* Magazine, Hewlett contends that medical teams are repeating the same mistakes all over again. With the death toll passing 700, this is the deadliest Ebola outbreak up to now.

Read ‘Mistakes in fighting Ebola repeated all over again, says pioneer’ in Mondiaal Nieuws

Other sources:

IRIN News

The Globe and Mail

SOS Children’s Villages

SciELO Public Health

Most violent era in America was before Europeans arrived

Timothy Kohler
Timothy Kohler

There’s a mythology about the native Americans—that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature. It’s easy to create narratives when there is no written record.

But archeology keeps its own history and a new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions killed in wars and genocides,  was not the most violent. On a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians.

Writing in the journal American Antiquity, WSU archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.

Learn more about this myth-busting research at Science 2.0 and WSU News

Ancient baby boom offers lessons in over-population

Timothy Kohler
Timothy Kohler

WSU scientists have sketched out one of the greatest baby booms in North American history, a centuries-long “growth blip” among southwestern Native Americans between 500 and 1300 A.D.

It was a time when the early features of civilization—including farming and food storage—had matured to a level where birth rates likely “exceeded the highest in the world today,” the researchers report in this week’s issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Then a crash followed, offering a warning sign to the modern world about the dangers of overpopulation, says Tim Kohler, professor of anthropology.

“We can learn lessons from these people,” says Kohler, who co-authored the paper with WSU researcher Kelsey Reese.

Read more about this timely research