This is the first systematic analysis of Tatham Mound, one of the most important archaeological sites in Central Gulf Coast Florida. Because it documents the earliest years of contact between the resident Native Americans of the area and European colonists, Tatham Mound has provided archaeologists and bioarchaeologists with a wealth of direct and indirect evidence from the early contact period--a rare occurrence in American archaeology. Hutchinson examines the skeletal remains of more than 350 burials, a few skeletons bearing evidence of trauma from European weapons, as well as the European...

-Fascinating yet sobering, this volume highlights the important role that social and political causes of poverty and poor living conditions, beyond the presence of infectious pathogens themselves, play in disease epidemics and high mortality.---Megan A. Perry, editor of Bioarchaeology and Behavior: The People of the Ancient Near East
-Hutchinson effectively argues that disease is not an event but a process and then wonderfully illustrates how the interaction of culture and illness shaped the history of the eastern seaboard from the sixteenth through the nineteenth...