Introduction
Cross-disciplinary research has been evolving as a major approach to study the development of human culture in a global and regional context, with a central topic of complex health (physical, mental, social and cultural). In the twentieth century, the historiography’s message was that European diseases were catastrophic for Native Americans from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (e.g. Boyd 1999). This paradigm still continues to be followed by some authors (e.g., Kelton 2007), with new insights and arguments.
In contrast, a critical multidirectional approach began to dominate in early twenty-first century, to reveal a more complex and multilayered picture of evolution of the Native American population, in the context of European migrants. More attention is given to arguments based on solid facts, and on increasing of the diachronic and cross-cultural knowledge, not only of Native Americans, but also of the society as a dynamically changing culture, and on the...
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Nikolova, L.P. (2014). Disease Introduction to America: Cultures in Crisis. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_2040
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