TY  - JOUR
AU  - Steckel,Richard H.
TI  - The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10299
PY  - 2004
Y2  - February 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10299
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10299.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Richard H. Steckel
Department of Economics
Ohio State University
410 Arps Hall, 1945 North High Street
Columbus, OH  43210-1172
Tel: 614/292-5008
Fax: 614/292-3906
E-Mail: steckel.1@osu.edu
AB  - Lack of evidence has been the major obstacle to understanding trends and differences in human welfare over the millennia. This paper explains and applies methods that are obscure to most academics and essentially unknown to the general public. A millennial perspective is best obtained from skeletal remains, which depict not only childhood health conditions but also processes of degeneration that accompany aging and strenuous physical effort. Compiled into an index of health, data from 23 localities as part of a large collaborative project on the Western Hemisphere reveal diverse health conditions for the pre-Columbian population. For reasons not yet understood populations moved over time into less healthy ecological environments. The analysis has implications for understanding environmental determinants of health, the pattern of European conquest, pre-contact population size, investigating human adaptation to climate change, and discovering prime movers of very long-term economic growth.
ER  -