Study Finds the Archaeological Record Stays Strangely Silent on the Smallpox Epidemics That Killed Millions

A paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology in August 2026 — 'Exploring Archaeological Evidence for Historic Smallpox Epidemics in the Americas,' led by historical bioarchaeologist Alex Garcia-Putnam (University of New Hampshire) with co-authors from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, NYU, Washington State, and the University of Kansas — surveys ethnohistoric and archaeological records across Peru, the Isthmus of Panama, Mexico, the Central Great Plains, and the Pacific Northwest and identifies a puzzling gap: despite colonial accounts of mass death from smallpox (introduced by Europeans and estimated to have killed 3–4 million people across the Americas), archaeologists have found almost no mass graves or altered burial practices that can be confidently attributed to smallpox epidemics. The authors propose this is not evidence of exaggeration but of erasure — communities devastated by mortality rates high enough to leave no one able to bury the dead, combined with poor bone preservation in tropical climates — and set out explicit skeletal and contextual criteria (following the rare confirmed case of two smallpox-infected infant burials dated to circa 1540 CE at a circum-contact cemetery in Huanchaco, on Peru's northern coast) for identifying smallpox victims in future excavations, alongside a call for ancient-DNA testing conducted with descendant-community consent.