It’s hard to find a positive contribution from Covid-19, isn’t it? I’ll suggest one. It has re-situated our appreciation for the importance of disease in past populations. That is one of many interesting lessons from the Forum in the January 2021 issue of American Antiquity.

In this article Lynn Gamble, Editor of American Antiquity, and her entire Editorial Board give us a short course on how past diseases have affected social and population dynamics. Not only that, though, since a great deal of that story is widely known. More provocatively they also suggest that disease has sometimes been used as a weapon to maintain or create disparities in wealth or power.

They also explore interlocking facets of mobility and disease. Ironically, mobility can be used to support resilience in conditions of low population densities, but it can also act as a disease vector. Spanish missionaries sought to control Indigenous mobility, and consequently, mobility can sometimes be seen an act of agency in opposition to state control.

In short, diseases offer opportunities for creating or perpetuating structural violence of many sorts, and disease dynamics are deeply interwoven into dynamics of mobility, settlement, and inequality. I have no doubt that the same rapidly evolving science that has given us aDNA and knowledge of the human microbiome will soon allow us to study disease in (pre)history more systematically.

Sometimes it’s claimed that trends in archaeological explanation are “nothing but” reflections of contemporary social concerns. Climate? Inequality? Disease? Whatever, we’ve got an archaeology for that.

That view though radically cheapens the core job of archaeologists, which is to investigate the degree of support provided by the archaeological record for hypotheses of any sort. I’m reminded of Karl Popper’s view that it doesn’t matter where our ideas come from, so long as they can be plausibly refuted (or not) by recourse to primary evidence. In our case, that’s the dispassionate facts of the archaeological record.

So we may not appreciate the novel coronavirus of 2019 for its current effects. But if it reminds us of the potency of disease in human affairs—especially before the advent of modern medicine—perhaps it will have made better archaeologists of us.

Tim Kohler is Regents Professor of Anthropology at WSU.

The article Finding Archaeological Relevance during a Pandemic and What Comes After is free to access until the end of February 2021.

Photo credit: Mark Gray, courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation.