Parasite Pathoecology of Chacoan Great Houses: The Healthiest and Wormiest Ancestral Puebloans

Two fields of paleopathological investigation originated in the Southwest. Archaeoparasitology is the study ancient parasite infection (Reinhard 1990). It includes comparisons between time periods of single societies as well as the comparison of parasitism between different, contemporaneous cultures. For example, Fry (1980) compared Fremont and Anasazi parasitism. Fry (1984) compared Archaic hunter-gatherer parasitism and Ancestral Pueblo parasitism. All of these studies fall into the definition of Archaeoparasitology. Pathoecology is the reconstruction of the relationships between behavior, environment, and disease organisms in the development of ill-health (Martinson et al. 2003; Reinhard and Buikstra 2003, Reinhard et al. 2003, Santoro et al. 2003). This field developed from the need for fine-grained analysis of prehistoric ecological and behavioral conditions to assess the factors that affected disease