The Voynich Manuscript: will we ever be able to read this book?

A 15th-century manuscript is written in a language that has baffled every expert. Is it just a brilliant hoax, or will someone eventually decipher its meaning, asks Michael Day



Somewhere deep inside the bowels of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – the Ivy League institution's own cemetery of lost books – lies a tome that experts have studied for centuries, but which has yet to be understood by a single soul.

The book has no known author or official title; Yale librarians simply refer to it as manuscript MS 408. But thanks to its peculiar language, symbols and diagrams – often strangely familiar, but insistently elusive in meaning – it has intrigued and frustrated anthropologists, linguists and mathematicians for centuries: even the elite cryptologists at the US National Security Agency drew a blank, after they spent years trying to decode it in the 1950s. And the time that some researchers have dedicated to the problem seems all the more remarkable given the possibility that, for all the complexity and consistency of the script it contains, it could simply be an elaborate hoax.

Written in an as yet undecipherable language, with unknown letters or "glyphs" arranged into a form of seemingly consistent but unintelligible syntax, the book is commonly referred to as the Voynich manuscript, after the Polish-American bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. Its history, however, begins long before.

Although the earliest suggested owner is Rudolf II, the 16th-century emperor of Bohemia, the first that we know of for sure is Georg Baresch, a 17th-century alchemist from Prague, who was so perplexed by the book that he sent it to Jesuit scholars in the hope that they might translate it.

They failed, but they did pass it on to the Roman Jesuit University, from where it was whisked away to Frascati, near Rome, in 1870 to keep it safe from Vittorio Emanuele's marauding soldiers. It was bought by Voynich, and then donated to Yale in 1969.

Recently, however, experts have arrived at what – in Voynich terms, at least – must count as a significant breakthrough: while we still don't understand a word, at least we know how old it is. Carbon-dating by scientists at the University of Arizona has allowed them to declare that the manuscript was prepared from animal skin in the early 1400s – making it roughly 100 years older than previously thought.

The tests were done after Yale finally allowed the scientists to snip off tiny pieces from four different pages, selected at random. "The results seem to show quite clearly that the parchment for the book is from the early 1400s, between 1404 and 1438," says Dr Greg Hodgins, who works in the physics and anthropology departments at the University of Arizona. "And the fact that all four sections were dated to the same time appears to discount suggestions that the manuscript was added to over a period of many years or centuries."

These results only show when the parchment for the book was obtained, not when it was written. However, previous ink analysis done by the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago suggests that it was placed on the parchment while it was relatively fresh.

"By coming up with such a narrow time frame, we've effectively eliminated most of the theories about who wrote it," says Dr Hodgins. "The carbon-dating result also allows us to focus on what kind of scientific knowledge and encryption was around in this period."

Professor Gonzalo Rubio, a specialist in ancient languages at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that the carbon-dating result is significant. "This shows us that it's not a forgery," he says. "It wasn't written by Voynich himself, as some people suspected. It's a genuine artifact from the early 15th century." It also, he points out, eliminates the popular theory that the book was created by the noted 13th-century polymath Roger Bacon.

Most theories about the book's meaning are inevitably informed by its illustrations, says Prof Rubio. These pictures, drawn in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red ink, are – like the script used in the manuscript's 240 remaining pages – unique. Yet while the words cannot be read, the illustrations provide a clue about the nature of the book. They suggest that the book was a scientific text, mostly an illustrated herbal manual with some additional sections on astronomy, biology and pharmaceuticals. The script itself is widely believed to be about alchemy, the medieval science with metaphysical and magical overtones, whose practitioners sought ways to turn base metals into gold.

But what of the language it is written in? Some of the glyphs resemble Latin letters, suggesting a Voynich "alphabet" of around 20-30 different characters. These are arranged into word-like blocks up to 10 letters long, with a total word count of around 35,000. However, some scores of pages are thought to be missing.

Many researchers have speculated that the strange alphabet was used to hide information that might have been heretical, suggesting that it was produced by transforming a European language through a cipher. But simple ciphers of the type used in the 15th century would almost certainly have been cracked by now.

Other theories argue that the text's meaning is concealed in tiny markings on the individual characters themselves, or that it contains a naturally occurring, non-European language that has been rewritten with an invented alphabet. In 2003, Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist at Keele University, claimed to have created a bogus language similar to Voynichese by using a "grille" to place invented letters on a page at random. But doubts about the claims have since arisen. "I don't really think he proved or disproved anything," says Dr Hodgins.

One of the theories that has gained ground in recent years, says Prof Rubio, is that the manuscript employs steganography to conceal its contents. This means that some or even most of the text is nonsense, and that only parts or even individual characters form part of the language. If this method was indeed employed, in addition to a cipher, then translating the contents might be exceedingly difficult.

Put on the spot, Dr Hodgins says: "It's either a secret alchemical text, with the pictures telling a story – or, as some have suggested, it was created, or invented, to enable its author to profit from it by selling it as a precious manuscript."

Prof Rubio is more sceptical, noting that despite sharing key structural similarities with known languages such as English and Latin, there is at least one troubling aspect about the book's structure. "For me, there's something strange about the text," he says. "The things we know as 'grammatical markers' – things that occur commonly at the beginning or end of words, such as 's' or 'd' in our language, and that are used to express grammar, never appear in the middle of 'words' in the Voynich manuscript. That's unheard of for any Indo-European, Hungarian or Finnish language.

"I would venture that the manuscript was a prank, something made for fun or even done to send up alchemy texts around in the period. But the thing is so unique, it's hard to know: there's nothing to compare it with."

He also denies the theory that if there were language present in the book, it would have been decoded by the experts. "The NSA cryptologists were working in the 1950s," he points out. "Computers have moved on since then." But he says that establishing once and for all whether there really is anything to be understood would require an up-to-date and dedicated team of linguists and computer scientists working together.

"I don't think that's going to happen," he concludes, "because experts might spend 30 or 40 years of their lives on this and still not come up with an answer. And I don't think people will be prepared to do this."

In short, it looks like the mysteries surrounding the planet's strangest manuscript are set to remain for a good while to come.

Also check out these sites for more information on the manuscript.

http://www.voynich.nu/

http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssuePreview&ARTICLEID_CHAR=1551B52A-2B35-221B-63328862179F126B

http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich.pdf

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/voynich/wff.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

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References:

Day, Michael. 2011. "The Voynich Manuscript: will we ever be able to read this book?" The Telegraph. Posted: May 24, 2011. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8532458/The-Voynich-Manuscript-will-we-ever-be-able-to-read-this-book.html

Population genetics reveals shared ancestries

More than just a tool for predicting health, modern genetics is upending long-held assumptions about who we are. A new study by Harvard researchers casts new light on the intermingling and migration of European, Middle Eastern and African and populations since ancient times.

In a paper titled "The History of African Gene Flow into Southern Europeans, Levantines and Jews," published in PLoS Genetics, HMS Associate Professor of Genetics David Reich and his colleagues investigated the proportion of sub-Saharan African ancestry present in various populations in West Eurasia, defined as the geographic area spanning modern Europe and the Middle East. While previous studies have established that such shared ancestry exists, they have not indicated to what degree or how far back the mixing of populations can be traced.

Analyzing publicly available genetic data from 40 populations comprising North Africans, Middle Easterners and Central Asians were doctoral student Priya Moorjani and Alkes Price, an assistant professor in the Program in Molecular and Genetic Epidemiology within the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Moorjani traced genetic ancestry using a method called rolloff. This platform, developed in the Reich lab, compares the size and composition of stretches of DNA between two human populations as a means of estimating when they mixed. The smaller and more broken up the DNA segments, the older the date of mixture.

Moorjani used the technique to examine the genomes of modern West Eurasian populations to find signatures of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. She did this by looking for chromosomal segments in West Eurasian DNA that closely matched those of Sub-Saharan Africans. By plotting the distribution of these segments and estimating their rate of genetic decay, Reich's lab was able to determine the proportion of African genetic ancestry still present, and to infer approximately when the West Eurasian and Sub-Saharan African populations mixed.

"The genetic decay happens very slowly," Moorjani explained, "so today, thousands of years later, there is enough evidence for us to estimate the date of population mixture."

While the researchers detected no African genetic signatures in Northern European populations, they found a distinct presence of African ancestry in Southern European, Middle Eastern and Jewish populations. Modern southern European groups can attribute about 1 to 3 percent of their genetic signature to African ancestry, with the intermingling of populations dating back 55 generations, on average—that is, to roughly 1,600 years ago. Middle Eastern groups have inherited about 4 to 15 percent, with the mixing of populations dating back roughly 32 generations. A diverse array of Jewish populations can date their Sub-Saharan African ancestry back roughly 72 generations, on average, accounting for 3 to 5 percent of their genetic makeup today.

According to Reich, these findings address a long-standing debate over African multicultural influences in Europe. The dates of population mixtures are consistent with documented historical events. For example, the mixing of African and southern European populations coincides with events during the Roman Empire and Arab migrations that followed. The older-mixture dates among African and Jewish populations are consistent with events in biblical times, such as the Jewish diaspora that occurred in 8th to 6th century BC.

"Our study doesn't prove that the African ancestry is associated with migrations associated with events in the Bible documented by archeologists," Reich says, "but it's interesting to speculate."

Reich was surprised to see any level of shared ancestry between the Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jewish groups. "I've never been convinced they were actually related to each other," Reich says, but he now concludes that his lab's findings have significant cultural and genetic implications. "Population boundaries that many people think are impermeable are, in fact, not that way."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Population genetics reveals shared ancestries". EurekAlert. Posted: May 24, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-05/hms-pgr052411.php

Revealed the keys that give rise to hierarchism in society

Sociologist Harkaitz Zubiri rejects that social status depends exclusively on individual merits, according to his Ph.D. defended in the University of Basque Country

In the words of sociologist Harkaitz Zubiri, it is currently accepted that social hierarchy is constructed of individual merits, but the reality is quite different. He thus rejects meritocracy. There is no equality in opportunities, nor neutrality in the rules of the game, nor objectivity in the parameters of evaluation, nor of justice; but paths carved out by persons under the effect of a context full of ups and downs. This is what Mr Zubiri argues in his PhD thesis, presented at the University of Basque Country and entitled, Ibilbide akademiko-profesionalak prekarizazio estratifikatuaren garaian. Meritokrazia auzitan (Academic-professional careers in times of stratified precariousness. Meritocracy questioned).

Mr Zubiri studied the mechanisms causing social discrimination. To this end, he carried out in-depth interviews with members of the public of about thirty years old from the Basque province of Gipuzkoa, placing emphasis on their academic-professional trajectories (APT). Concretely, he analysed four social organisations: the educational system, the family, the individual and employment. According to the researcher, these are four key factors for studying the APT of each person. Negotiations, the degree of conflict (either coherence or confrontation) and the relationships of power that exist, either within these four organisations or between them, condition these APT, as well as, consequently, the social status of each individual.

Education, the family, the individual

The PhD thesis shows that the educational system copies the social hierarchy. The overall number of potential students is heterogeneous, but the system homogenises and stratifies them. Thus, the school functions with efficacy for those who adapt to it, but discriminates against the rest. The researcher talks of social Darwinism. Moreover, the interviewees themselves give legitimacy to this discrimination: if an individual has difficulties in some sphere, he or she considers that they themselves are responsible for this. Thus, there exists great tolerance with respect to the competence-ergo-destiny discourse defended by the meritocracy.

The second key studied is the family, which has a big influence because, amongst other things, it chooses the school and takes on the role of the transference of knowledge and aspirations. Mr Zubiri states that the family can produce the future. For example, the progenitors tend to transmit to their children their social position as reference, and so the perception of being predestined can have more influence on the individual than academic results. However, the researcher stresses that this transmission is not always successful: the fact that the family has a strategy in concrete does not guarantee that it is capable of transmitting all the elements thereof to their descendents.

As regards the individual, the thesis holds that the key lies in the interpretation. As the researcher makes clear, the previously cited factors and a number of others, condition the individual, but does not precisely determine it; and he believes it important to make this distinction. There is active interpretation work going on by the individual in the processes that goes from the position arising from the conditions to the one that is finally taken and, thus, is where the opportunity to create is provided.

The culture of precariousness

As regards employment, the last key, Mr Zubiri explains that all those sharing the age group with the interviewees are prey to precariousness. In fact, beyond precariousness in employment, he makes mention of a culture of precariousness. He explains that precariousness is a generalised and stratified phenomenon; not only does it affect employment, but it has also extended to the family, to education and to other spheres.

The researcher explained that it is meritocracy that hides, precisely, behind the culture of precariousness. According to meritocracy, diversity or the difference between individuals becomes discrimination in the process of construction of APTs; as an excuse for hierarchising society. A large group of persons, full of singularities, are unified and stratified to create a social space and, thus, take possession of the whole richness produced by these persons. The culture of precariousness is a product of this.

So, how does each individual take up position within this social space? Mr Zubiri underlined the importance of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital, as well as of gender and the language. But he reiterates that the key could be in the work of the active interpretation of each individual; a work of interpretation that is undertaken in the context marked out by the four, previously mentioned social organisations.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Revealed the keys that give rise to hierarchism in society". EurekAlert. Posted: May 23, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-05/ef-rtk052311.php

Early Bronze Age battle site found on German river bank

Fractured human remains found on a German river bank could provide the first compelling evidence of a major Bronze Age battle.

Archaeological excavations of the Tollense Valley in northern Germany unearthed fractured skulls, wooden clubs and horse remains dating from around 1200 BC.

The injuries to the skulls suggest face-to-face combat in a battle perhaps fought between warring tribes, say the researchers.

The paper, published in the journal Antiquity, is based primarily on an investigation begun in 2008 of the Tollense Valley site, which involved both ground excavations and surveys of the riverbed by divers.

They found remains of around 100 human bodies, of which eight had lesions to their bones. Most of the bodies, but not all, appeared to be young men.

The injuries included skull damage caused by massive blows or arrowheads, and some of the injuries appear to have been fatal.

One humerus (upper arm) bone contained an arrow head embedded more than 22mm into the bone, while a thigh bone fracture suggests a fall from a horse (horse bones were also found at the site).

The archaeologists also found remains of two wooden clubs, one the shape of a baseball bat and made of ash, the second the shape of a croquet mallet and made of sloe wood.

Dr Harald Lubke of the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology in Germany said the evidence pointed to a major battle site, perhaps the earliest found to date.

"At the the beginning of the Neolithic, we have finds like Talheim in Germany, where we have evidence of violence, but it doesn't look like this situation in the Tollense Valley where we have many humans there in the riverbed," he told the BBC.

"We have a lot of violence from blunt weapons without any healing traces, and we have also evidence of sharp weapons. There are a lot of signs that this happened immediately before the victims died and the bodies are not buried in the normal way."

The archaeologists found no pottery, ornaments or paved surfaces which might be suggestive of formal graves or burial rituals.

Many of the bones appear to have been transported some distance by the river, although some finds appear to be in their original position.

The researchers suggest the bodies may have been dumped in the river before being washed away and deposited on a sandbar. Alternatively, the dead could have been killed on the spot in "the swampy valley environment", the paper concludes.

Dr Lubke believes the real conflict may have been fought out further up the river, and that the bodies so far found represent just a fraction of the carnage wrought by the battle.

"This is only a sample, what we have found up until now - the modern river bed only cuts across part of the river bed of that time. There are likely to be many more remains.

"It's absolutely necessary to find the place where the bodies came into the water and that will explain if it really was a battle or something else, such as an offering, but we believe that a fight is the best explanation at the moment."

Evidence was also found among the human remains of a millet diet, which is not typical of Northern Germany at the time, which the researchers say may betray the presence of invaders.

While bronze pins of a Silesian design could suggest contact with the Silesian region 400km to the south-east, they say.

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References:

Bowdler, Neil. 2011. "Early Bronze Age battle site found on German river bank". BBC News. Posted: May 22, 2011. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13469861

Scientists Fight University of California to Study Rare Ancient Skeletons

Two ancient skeletons uncovered in 1976 on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, during construction at the home of a University of California chancellor, may be among the most valuable for genetic analysis in the continental United States. Dated between 9,000 and 9,600 years old, the exceptionally preserved bones could potentially produce the oldest complete human genome from the continent.

But only if scientists aren’t barred from studying them.

Source: The La Jolla skeletons. (Jan Austin/Santa Monica Community College).

Attempts to unlock the skeletons’ genetic secrets are stalled in a dispute pitting UC scientists against their own administration. Five of the scientists wrote with alarm in a letter published May 20 in the journal Science that UC administrators aren’t allowing studies on the skeletons, which were discovered on property owned by UC San Diego in La Jolla, California.

Before samples can be extracted for genetic analysis, the scientists fear administrators will give the bones to politically powerful local Native Americans who could permanently block study.

“To give them away without study, would be like throwing the genetic crown jewels of the peopling of the Americas in the ocean,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who is among about a half dozen researchers who have unsuccessfully sought in recent months to sample or study the bones. “It would be a major loss for all, including Native Americans.”

A few studies were done years ago on the skeletons before UC withdrew access to them, but recent technological advances would allow scientists to do much more, including a digital skull calibration and possibly a full genome sequence.

“The potential loss of the La Jolla skeletons would have a profoundly negative impact on our knowledge of the peopling of the Americas,” wrote the authors of the letter, led by Margaret Schoeninger, an anthropologist at UCSD.

Science letter co-author Tim White, a prominent paleoanthropologist at UC Berkeley, told Wired.com, “Administrators are doing everything they can to ignore the scientific value of the specimens. They are trying to illegally repatriate them to a lobbyist for a dozen San Diego County tribes.”

UC officials are seeking to provide the skeletons to the Kumeyaay Nation east of San Diego under a complex process guided by the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). But critical scientists say NAGPRA requirements aren’t being followed properly, setting the stage for a potential legal battle over the bones.

“This is Kennewick Man II,” White said, referring to the long federal court battle in 2004 when scientists won the right to study bones found in Washington.

In a May 11 letter, Mark Yudof, president of the 10-campus UC system, authorized UCSD chancellor Marye Anne Fox to dispose of the bones — after clarifications are made to a report done under NAGPRA requirements, and other tribes that may be interested in the bones are consulted.

Steve Benegas, the repatriation spokesman for the Kumeyaay nation’s 12 tribes, said they are entitled to the bones and to decide about future analysis. Some Native Americans believe scientific research amounts to desecration of remains, and Benegas said he personally is against studies.

“The university has handled this poorly over the years,” he said. “We have no trust in them. They have treated the remains of our ancestors without respect.”

One of the previous analyses done years ago showed the bones have connective tissue and amino acids that are used in cell function. This means it is very likely ancient DNA can be extracted. And two skeletons buried together offers a rare opportunity to compare their genomes to see if they were related.

Genetic reports on human remains this old on the continent are very limited. In 2007, researchers published about 7 percent of the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome of bones found in a cave in southeast Alaska that are about the same age as the La Jolla skeletons. But the full genome of that individual hasn’t been sequenced and published, and DNA from bones found in wet caves can be more difficult to extract and analyze.

“The La Jolla skeletons are very special,” said Brian Kemp of Washington State University. Kemp was part of a team that retrieved samples from the Alaska bones before they were repatriated in 2007 to local tribes in an exchange seen as model of cooperation among scientists and Native Americans.

Anthropologist Robert Bettinger of UC Davis, another co-author of the Science letter, says he and others would like a similar arrangement for the La Jolla skeletons.

Scientists say UC is overlooking two key points. First, there has been no official determination the bones are actually from ancestors of modern Native Americans. Though many tribes believe their history goes further back, scientists can only confidently trace the ancestry of Native Americans to about 7,000 years ago.

Second, scientific evidence shows skeletons around this age are not always related to those who now live near burial sites. For example, last year Willerslev sequenced the genome of a 5,000-year-old man in Greenland and found he was descended from Siberian ancestors, not today’s Greenland tribes.

“It is unscientific to provide them to local people,” said Willerslev.

Since the NAGPRA rules were first issued in 1990, thousands of bones have been repatriated, almost all of which were shown to be culturally affiliated to the tribes that received them. But last year, federal officials issued new NAGPRA rules that make it easier to return bones and funerary objects that are not culturally affiliated to tribes.

Scientists and museums have been considering a legal challenge to the new rule, fearing the loss of many valuable specimens. The La Jolla skeletons could end up as the case by which that rule is challenged.

UCSD scientists determined the La Jolla skeletons are not culturally affiliated to any tribe. In fact, isotopic analysis done 30 years ago in Schoeninger’s lab (and published in 2009) showed the bones reflected a diet of seafood and marine mammals, not terrestrial foods such as nuts and wild fruits like the early Kumeyaay ate.

Schoeninger suspects UC’s efforts to give the bones to the tribe stem from a plan to renovate the chancellor’s house, and she says that Benegas, the tribe spokesman, told her as much.

UCSD officials want to rebuild the home, also known as University House, because it has become uninhabitable due to structural problems. They have received pledges totaling at least $6 million for the project from wealthy donors. Earth moving for the renovation is expected to uncover more ancient bones, which could cause costly delays if the tribes make a political or legal issue out of it.

By providing the two skeletons to the Kumeyaay, Schoeninger believes UCSD officials are hoping that refurbishing the home will go smoothly.

When asked about this theory, Benegas chuckled as he told Wired, “We wouldn’t be talking if they weren’t trying to rebuild the chancellor’s house.”

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References:

Dalton, Rex. 2011. "Scientists Fight University of California to Study Rare Ancient Skeletons". Wired. Posted: May 20, 2011. Available online: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ucsd-skeleton-fight/

Amazonian tribe has no calendar and no concept of time

It is the perfect community if you are always late or like to lie about your age – British scientists have discovered a remote tribe that has no concept of time or dates.

The Amondawa people who live deep in the Amazonian rainforests of Brazil have no watches or calendars and live their lives to the patterns of day and night and the rainy and dry seasons.

They also have no age – and mark the transition from childhood to adulthood to old age by changing their name.

The team of researchers, led by University of Portsmouth, said that it is the first time they have been able to prove time is not a deeply entrenched universal human concept, as previously thought.

Professor Chris Sinha said: 'We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted or talked about in the abstract.

"This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are "people outside time", but they live in a world governed by events rather than the passing of time."

Only discovered in 1986, the Amondawa, about 150 strong, continue their traditional way of life, hunting, fishing and farming.

They also have their own language which have a number system but it only goes up to four.

Prof Sinha and his team, including a linguist and anthropologist, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like "next week" or "last year".

There were no words for such concepts, only divisions of day and night and rainy and dry seasons.

They also found nobody in the community had an age.

Instead, they change their names to reflect their life-stage and position within their society.

A little child will give up their name to a newborn sibling and take on a new one.

Prof Sinha said: "We have so many metaphors for time and its passing – we think of time as a 'thing' – we say 'the weekend is nearly gone', 'she's coming up to her exams', 'I haven't got the time', and so on, and we think such statements are objective, but they aren't.

"We've created these metaphors and they have become the way we think. The Amondawa don't talk like this and don't think like this, unless they learn another language.

"For these fortunate people time isn't money, they aren't racing against the clock to complete anything, and nobody is discussing next week or next year; they don't even have words for 'week', 'month' or 'year'.

"You could say they enjoy a certain freedom."

The findings were reported in the journal Language And Cognition.
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References:

Alleyne, Richard. 2011. "Amazonian tribe has no calendar and no concept of time". The Tribune. Posted: Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8526287/Amazonian-tribe-has-no-calendar-and-no-concept-of-time.html

440-Year-Old Document Sheds New Light on Native Population Decline Under Spanish Colonial Rule

Analysis of a 440-year-old document reveals new details about native population decline in the heartland of the Inca Empire following Spanish conquest in the 16th century.

According to the analysis, the native Andean population in the Yucay Valley of Peru showed a remarkable ability to bounce back in the short term from the disease, warfare, and famine that accompanied the initial Spanish invasion. However, it was the repetition of such disasters generation after generation, along with overly rigid colonial administration, that dramatically reduced the population over the long term.

The research, by R. Alan Covey (Southern Methodist University), Geoff Childs (Washington University in St. Louis), and Rebecca Kippen (University of Melbourne), is published in the June issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

The analysis is based on an unusually detailed survey of the native population taken by the valley's parish priest in 1569 and copied by a royal official during a 1571 visit. Most surviving Spanish documents recording native population from this time included only a few age and sex categories, but this one counted individual men, women, and children in more than 800 households. As such, it provides researchers with a rare snapshot of a rural native population under colonial rule, and sheds light on the demographic pressures they faced.

Several aspects of the census data are indicative of the hardships the native population faced, Covey and his team report. First, there were many more women than men aged 45 to 64, likely due to the most intense fighting of the first years of the colonial period, which occurred 20 years earlier. Second, there were noticeable declines in the male population in the 25-29 age cohort, some of which appear to be linked to high mortality rates for men forced to work in coca plantations. Third, there was a particularly small cohort of both boys and girls aged 10 to 14. Young children are especially susceptible to famine and epidemic disease, so the small cohort likely indicates that low fertility and high mortality were prevalent around the time these children were born.

Despite the obvious hardships, the census also shows that the population had begun to bounce back. The cohorts aged 0-4 and 5-9 were surprisingly large.

"This is a key finding," Covey said. "The identification of recovery fertility is something that previous researchers have suggested but had not been able to identify with hard evidence. It challenges the long-held assumption that indigenous populations in the Americas experienced universal and consistent processes of decline after contact with Europeans."

In fact, the data suggest that from 1568 to 1570 the women in the population were producing more than enough daughters to replace themselves. "If mortality and fertility conditions remained constant over time, then this population would have grown," the researchers write.

Unfortunately, a cascade of events beginning in 1580s proved too much to overcome.

In the latter part of the decade, new waves of epidemic disease swept across the region. It was also around this time that the small 10-14 cohort documented in the census reached its peak child-bearing years. Even if the fertility rate of the women in that cohort had remained high, its small size meant that those women would produce fewer children than their immediate predecessors. Epidemics hitting at the same time would have decreased fertility for this group and increased mortality among the young, magnifying what already would have been a significant demographic dip.

Then around 1614, when the children born in the 1580s were at their peak fertility ages, another wave of disease hit, likely producing another magnified dip.

Population levels in the region declined by about 40 percent over the course of a generation, from the 1570s to around 1600. Similar declines were seen across the Americas around this time, but varied according to local social and ecological conditions, Covey says.

The Spanish colonial administrators were generally unwilling to adjust their tax and labor demands along with these changes in demographics. And they probably were unaware of the changes until they affected working-age men, because women and children received limited attention in most early colonial population surveys.

"At times, macrodemographic cycles would have placed significant burdens on indigenous communities, which in turn probably contributed to conditions (poverty, malnutrition) favoring the spread of epidemic disease and enhancing its morbidity…" the researchers conclude.

"While indigenous populations showed considerable resilience in the face of imperial transformation, we hypothesize that the boom-and-bust cycles created by pandemics and exacerbated by insensitive administration drove the long-term trend of population decline observed in the Yucay Valley and probably in other parts of the Cusco region."
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References:

Science Daily. 2011. "440-Year-Old Document Sheds New Light on Native Population Decline Under Spanish Colonial Rule". Science Daily. Posted: May 20, 2011. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110519091637.htm

Journal Reference:

R. Alan Covey, Geoff Childs, and Rebecca Kippen. Dynamics of Indigenous Demographic Fluctuations: Lessons from Sixteenth-Century Cusco, Peru. Current Anthropology, 52:3 (June 2011)