american-holocaust

NOTES 297Gerald R. Clark, "A Late Plains Archaic Burial from Iron Jaw Creek, SoutheasternMontana," Plains Anthropologist, 28 (1983), 191-98; and George W. Gill, "AdditionalComment and Illustration Relating to the Iron Jaw Skeleton," Plains Anthropologist,28 (1983), 335-36.105. The only evidence at all suggestive that this picture of exceptionally goodhealth might be flawed derives from paleodemographic analyses based on osteologicalstudies of pre-Columbian Indian skeletons that have found a short life expectancyin certain locales-about the same life expectancy as that historically recordedfor eighteenth-century Europeans. Analyses of this sort are fraught withdifficulties, however, and they are at their weakest in determining age at deathwherethere is a strong methodological bias toward underestimation. Although notwell known outside the discipline, this has been recognized within the field as aserious problem for almost 20 years. See Kenneth M. Weiss, Demographic Modelsfor Anthropology (Society for American Archaeology Memoir Number 27, 1973),p. 59; and the devastating critique of the field on this and other points in Jean­Pierre Bocquet-Appel and Claude Masset, "Farewell to Paleodemography," journalof Human Evolution, 11 (1982), 321-33. Even the most ardent defenders of thefield, subsequent to the critique by Bocquet-Appel and Masset, have conceded thatthe age estimates for older individuals studied by these techniques are invariablyfar too low. See, for example, Jane E. Buikstra and Lyle W. Koningsberg, "Paleodemography:Critiques and Controversies," American Anthropologist, 87 (1985),316-33.Chapter Three1. Andrew B. Appleby, "The Disappearance of Plague: A Continuing Puzzle,"The Economic History Review, Second Series, 33 (1980), 161-62.2. R.P.R. Mols, "Population in Europe, 1500-1700," in C.M. Cipolla, ed.,The Fontana Economic History of Europe (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 49.3. J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (New York: St. Martin's Press,1964), p. 306.4. David R. Weir, "Markets and Mortality in France, 1600-1789," in JohnWalter and Roger Schofield, eds., Famine, Disease, and the Social Order in EarlyModern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 229.5. Quoted in Fernand Braude!, The Medite"anean and the MediterraneanWorld in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), Volume One,p. 519.6. Micheline Baulant, "Le prix des grains a Paris," Annates, 3 (1968), 538.The relationship between famine and disease, while profound, is not quite so simpleas this comment suggests. For an example of more nuanced analysis of theinteraction between nutritional deficiency and infection in European history, seeJohn D. Post, "The Mortality Crises of the Early 1770s and European DemographicTrends," journal of Interdisciplinary History, 21 (1990), 29-62.7. See, for example, material in Angus MacKay, "Pogroms in Fifteenth CenturyCastille," Past and Present, 55 (1972), 33-67.8. For one example of a historical effort to sort out deaths from disease anddeaths from famine that demonstrates just how difficult a task it is, see Andrew B.