by the second decade of the seventeenth century was a reduction of the
population by approximately 90 percent.
Sixteenth-Century Epidemics in the Andean Region
1524–1528 smallpox
1531–1533 measles
1546 typhus and perhaps pneumonic plague
1557–1559 influenza, measles, smallpox
1566–1569 smallpox
1582 smallpox, measles
1585–1591 smallpox, measles, typhus, mumps
1589 influenza in Potosí
1597 measles
Further Reading
Alchon, Suzanne Austin. New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2003.
Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
———. Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Cook, Noble David, and W. George Lovell. “Secret Judgments of God:” Old World Disease in Colonial
Spanish America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 30th
Anniversary Edition. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Livi-Bacci, Massimo. A Concise History of World Population. 4th ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Newson, Linda A. Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1995.
■NOBLE DAVID COOK
DIVINATION
Among the Incas and their Andean contemporaries, the habit of examining the
signs left in the world by the gods or consulting them in oracular sanctuaries,
resorting to a variety of soothsayers and divinatory techniques, was very
widespread. The Incas believed that the will of the deities had to be respected in
order to maintain a harmonious relationship: not understanding their wishes
could result in dreadful consequences for individuals and their communities. For
a highly complex, state-level society such as that of the Incas, which lacked a
body of written norms, divination guaranteed correct choices and behavior, while