Sustenance and Its Consequences

This chapter explores the multiplicities and entanglements of health and disease at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo. Interpreting patterns of pathology for past groups depends on how multiple conceptual frameworks emphasize some issues while hiding others. At Arroyo Hondo, sustenance frames how food practices, diet, and human physiology were entangled with spaces, things, other species, and beliefs. De-centering the body emphasizes its trans-corporeal relationships as a holobiont. How disease states emerged at this fourteenth century Ancestral Puebloan village reflect the entangled pathogenicity of micronutrient deficiencies, infections, parasites, and mycotoxins. I also discuss how notions of disease ecologies and pathological lives articulate disease states as immersed experiences.