SAVAGE GARDEN :

Bones Reveal Some Truth in 'Noble Savage Myth' (Jack Lucentini, April 15, 2002, The Washington Post)

A romantic-sounding notion dating back more than 200 years has it that people in prehistory, such as Native Americans, lived in peace and harmony.

Then "civilization" showed up, sowing violence and discord. Some see this claim as naive. It even has a derisive nickname, the "noble savage myth."

But new research seems to suggest the "myth" contains at least some truth. Researchers examined thousands of Native American skeletons and found that those from after Christopher Columbus landed in the New World showed a rate of traumatic injuries more than 50 percent higher than those from before the Europeans arrived. [...]

Walker and colleagues examined the skeletons of 3,375 pre-Columbian and 1,165 post-Columbian Native Americans, from archaeological sites throughout North and Central America.

The North Americans came mostly from the coasts and the Great Lakes region, Walker said.

Pre-Columbian skeletons showed an 11 percent incidence of traumatic injuries, he said, compared with almost 17 percent for the post-Columbians.

Walker said his findings surprised him. "I wasn't really expecting it," he said. Yet it undeniably suggests violence, he added. Most of the increase consisted of head injuries in young males, "which conforms pretty closely to the pattern you see today in homicides."

The researchers defined "traumatic injury" as anything leaving a mark on the skeleton, such as a skull fracture, a healed broken arm, or an embedded arrow point or bullet.

Walker said that although part of the increased injury rate doubtless stems from violence by whites themselves, it probably reflects mostly native-on-native violence. "In a lot of cases, such as in California, there weren't that many Europeans around -- just a few priests, and thousands of Indians," he said.

Is it just me, or does that 11% pre-European rate seem pretty high for a people you're claiming were essentially peaceful? And if we Europeans were as violent towards the natives as we're told we were, wouldn't that increase possibly be almost entirely from whites killing natives rather than just some corruption of their Edenic existence? And, most importantly, what would a baseline rate for traumatic injury be? How does that 11% rate compare to American society today or white society at the time? Posted by Orrin Judd at April 23, 2002 3:17 PM