ABSTRACT

A wealth of data exists for the American Southwest on diet, health, settlement, and other aspects of life in the precolonial and colonial periods. TheWestern Hemisphere project provided a way to begin to synthesize these data on a regional and comparative scale. The health index, as the average of the quality-adjusted life-years lived by a group (that is, the combined effects of morbidity and mortality), demonstrates that individuals in the Southwest carried a morbidity burden higher than most of the other areas discussed in this volume. Mortality is high and morbidity is ubiquitous. The combination of these two related processes resulted in a health index score of 16.5/26.4 or 62.5%. The mean age at death of approximately 24 years suggests that Southwest groups were on the lower end of the mortality spectrum. Comparison of comparable data sets provides a dimension of analysis in the Southwest not previously possible, and as such, presents important additional information for the interpretation of health in the American Southwest.

INTRODUCTION

In pre–Columbian times, the Greater Southwest was a biogeographically, culturally, and politically complex area incorporating Arizona, New Mexico, and southern Utah and Colorado in the United States, as well as all the states of northern Mexico, including Chihuahua, Sonora, and Durango. It was then, and continues to be, a cultural, political, and economically diverse area where contact, trade, and boundary maintenance and dispute define local and regional interactions.

The Southwest is also a place where semiarid desert landscapes abound. Water is at a premium, and arable land is a limited resource.