"Death by Disease" by Ann F. Ramenofsky in "Archaeology" (March/April 1992, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 47-49) While European explorers were colonizing American territories, infectious diseases such as measles, influenza, smallpox, and malaria were colonizing native people. Because Native Americans lacked the biological defenses to ward off these microbial invaders, hundreds of thousands of them perished. Until recently, scholars trusted the written descriptions of disease outbreaks, treating archaeological data as secondary to the historical record. Consequently, they assumed that catastrophic population loss from disease began at the same time that epidemics were first widely reported. Documents from DeSoto's explorations (1538-1541), for example, contain only three ambiguous references to native illnesses. By the eighteenth century, however, descriptions of disease outbreaks among Native American groups are numerous and explicit. In 1698, St. Cosme, a Jesuit missionary traveling down the Mississippi River, recorded the devastating effects of smallpox among the Qawpaw: "We were deeply afflicted by finding this nation of the Arkansas, formerly so numerous, entirely destroyed by disease. Not a month has elapsed since they had rid themselves of smallpox, which has carried off most of them. In the villages are now nothing but graves ... and we estimated that not a hundred men were left. All of the children had died, and a great many women." St. Cosme's description leaves no doubt that smallpox was present in part of the Southeast by the eighteenth century. But do the rare and ambiguous descriptions of disease in the DeSoto chronicles mean infectious diseases had not affected Indians in the sixteenth century? No amount of excavation and survey will tell us what diseases were present at a given time and how many people died as a result of them. Infectious diseases are not preserved in archaeological soils and only rarely leave traces on skeletons. To determine whether infectious parasites were present before the eighteenth century requires basic knowledge of how disease works among "virgin soil" populations. Studies of catastrophes such as the fourteenth-century Black Plague in Europe, the 1918 influenza pandemic, or the recent measles epidemic among the Yanamamo Indians of the Orinoco provide insights into how diseases might have spread in sixteenth-century America. All that was required to produce an epidemic was one mildly sick European who happened to come into contact with one healthy American Indian. Am epidemic can sweep through a community very quickly, leaving in its wake deaths that may exceed 30 percent of the population. Archaeologists can count the size or number of hearths, houses, or towns before, during, and after the sixteenth century. Such an approach tells us generally whether populations increased or decreased during the sixteenth century. The timing of these changes can be compared with documentary evidence to evaluate whether or not the eighteenth-century descriptions of disease mark the beginning of the epidemics. In the Lower Mississippi Valley (between Memphis, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi) there were at least 50 towns between 1450 and 1550. By 1600, that number had dropped to ten--a decline of 80 percent in only 50 years. Marvin Smith, an archaeologist working in the interior Southeast (Georgia, the Carolinas, and Alabama), has shown a similar decline in villages during the same time span. Timothy Perttula, working in the Caddoan area of East Texas and Arkansas, has shown that mound construction and complex burial styles ceased between 1550 and 1600. Because the timing of population decline in the Southeast is consistent and rapid, the spread of European diseases is the only reasonable explanation. No other mechanism could have had such an effect. The outbreak of smallpox St. Cosme observed among the Qawpaw was not the first epidemic in the Mississippi Valley. The experience may have been a new one to St. Cosme; it was not new to the Indians. Even though archaeological records do not preserve microbial invaders, disease introduction is a problem that can be addressed using traditional archaeological measures. We may never know whether the DeSoto expedition or some other contact was the source of disease; we may never know how many disease outbreaks occurred between 1550 and 1600; we do know that Native Americans were dying of infectious diseases before anyone began keeping accurate records. In the sixteenth century, there were few Europeans in North America, and they believed that contagious diseases originated from "humoral imbalances" of the body. By 1700, however, the microscope had been invented, the theory of disease causation had changed, and many more Europeans were present. The large number and accuracy of eighteenth-century descriptions of diseases among American Indians simply reflects these changes. The eighteenth-century documents are, nonetheless, a rich resource for understanding cultural change that occurred with catastrophic population loss. Between 1698 and 1725, native populations living within the borders of French Louisiana experienced at least 13 epidemics, roughly one epidemic every two years. All epidemics resulted in some magnitude of native population loss, and the number of named groups in the colony dropped from 170 to 15, a 91 percent decline. In the wake of population loss from Old World diseases, new cultural patterns evolved. The Tunica and Acolapissa resettled southward, moving their villages closer to French settlements. The Choctaw and Natchez stayed in one location and attempted to rebuild their numbers by absorbing smaller remnants into their societies. New groups, like the Seminole, evolved by fusing together previously separate cultures. Finally, as the European presence increased in the Southeast so did the demand for goods and services. In response, some Native Americans took up entrepreneurial roles. The Houma provided food for the French in New Orleans; other native peoples became river or horse-pack guides. American Indians are still part of the biological and cultural landscape of the Southeast, thanks in large measure to these successful adjustments. Despite the winnowing by disease, they accommodated those losses and survived. Reprint permission granted by the publisher.