This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
Recent, interesting article on indigenous population crash and rebound after contact in lowland South America by Hamilton and colleagues 2014 in Nature.
TLDR of the article: The authors looked at the demographic response to contact in 238 indigenous Brazilian populations. There was substantial mortality events (disease, slavery, violence) in each of the surviving populations during contact, and immediately afterwards. After that terrible initial contact, most populations had a positive growth rate within a decade of contact and are expected to continue recovering, given no future externalities.
Why do we care? Humans can demographically respond, and respond quickly, to high mortality events. Catastrophic mortality events after contact are not death sentences for indigenous populations, provided other sources of external stress are limited.
I got a google alert yesterday for a new paper in my area, it's about the time Ferdinando Tenducci (one of the wilder castrati) got sued for debt in England and went to prison. Funny little paper! I'm auto-logged-in as I'm at work, so I'm not sure if it's open-access or not.