Over the course of the sixteenth century, some 90% of indigenous people in the Americas died. Many deaths occurred right at the start of European colonial occupation, but most – the worst – occurred a generation or two later, after indigenous peoples had already been weakened by European conquest, violence and starvation. Waves of disease traveled across the Americas: smallpox, measles, Salmonella, malaria, yellow fever, cholera…. So many indigenous people of the Americas died in the sixteenth century – perhaps 55 to 60 million people - that their abandoned lands, fields and cities were reclaimed by weeds, trees and rain forest. This huge, continent-wide increase in vegetation, which grew and covered the areas where humans once lived, was big enough to cause a measurable change in the geochemistry of the earth’s atmosphere. Those of us living in the Americas today reside on the remains of mass death. The legacy of the Great Dying is still with us, and still not fully accounted for, today.

Readings:
Rodolfo Acuna-Soto et al., "Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico" Emerging Infectious Diseases April 2002, 8(4):360-362.
Åshild J. Vågene et al., "Salmonella enterica genomes from victims of a major sixteenth-century epidemic in Mexico," Nature Ecology & Evolution 2018, 2:520–528.
Alfred W. Crosby, "Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires," The Hispanic American Historical Review August 1967, 47(3):321-337.
David S. Jones, "Virgin Soils Revisited," The William and Mary Quarterly October 2003, 60(4):703-742.

Music credits:
Nettle, "Black Eyes" on On A Steady Diet of Hash, Bread, & Salt by Soundeyet (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soundeyet/On_A_Steady_Diet_of_Hash_Bread__Salt). Licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.