Historical and archaeological perspectives on childhood mortality and morbidity in a henequen hacienda in Yucatán at the turn of the 20th century

ABSTRACT

Workers and their families in haciendas in the Yucatán, Mexico, at the turn of the twentieth century experienced very poor living conditions, characterized by diseases and high infant mortality. The death records for the hacienda San Pedro Cholul stored at the Yucatán State Archive, reports mortality data for people living in the hacienda between 1871 and 1900, including cause of death. Infant mortality for children under two years of age reached 54.5%, while it was 70.2% for children under five years of age. Gastrointestinal disorders, fever, and ‘alferecía’ characterized infant mortality in children aged one year, while diarrhoea and fever mostly affected infants after that age. Male infant mortality predominated over that of females in children less than five years of age but the trend reversed after that age. About one quarter of people died during measles, smallpox and whooping cough epidemics. Harsh living conditions are also suggested from the bottles retrieved during archaeological excavations of the hacienda. Many of these would have contained medical treatments against dysentery, intestinal parasites and malnutrition, and were intended also for infants and children. This combined historical and archaeological investigation provides insights in relation to the morbidity and mortality of the people who both lived at and worked for the henequen haciendas. It also reveals how they tried to counteract the numerous and varied ailments they suffered during their everyday lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Mortality
• living conditions
• medical treatments
• henequen haciendas
• Yucatán
• late nineteenth/early twentieth century

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Hugo Medina Suarez for kindly providing the archival material used in this paper. Margaret Shrimpton Masson (Autonomous University of Yucatán) kindly translated the original version of this paper into English. The archaeological research was funded by CONACyT grant number 258270 to H. Hernández Alvarez. We are thankful to the journal’s editor and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments that helped us improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Andrea Cucina, Bioarchaeologist and Physical Anthropologist, received his PhD in Palaeopathology from the Catholic University, School of Medicine, Rome, Italy, in 1998. Since 2003 he is Professor-Researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán and Member of the National Researchers System (SNI II), CONACyT, México. His research interests include (among others) dental anthropology, population affinities, oral health and living conditions mainly, though not exclusively, in the Maya region. He is currently leading a research project on population movement in Meso- and Central America in Prehispanic times. Since 2012 he is one of the editors of HOMO, Journal of Comparative Human Biology.

Héctor Hernández Álvarez, Archaeologist, holds a Ph.D. in Mesoamerican Studies from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He received an M.A. in Anthropological Sciences from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in 2005. He is a Professor-Researcher at the Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán and a Member of the National Researchers System (SNI I), CONACyT, México. His research interests include Maya household archaeology, gender studies, ethnoarchaeology and Yucatán’s historical archaeology. He currently directs Project San Pedro Cholul: geoarchaeology, history and industrialization of a Yucatec henequen hacienda at the beginning of the twentieth century.

ORCID

Andrea Cucina http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7280-5591

Héctor Hernández Álvarez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7473-6382