A review of the literature regarding the origin of syphilis in the light of paleopathological diagnosis and interpretation strongly suggests a New World origin. Whereas the evidence for pre-Columbian treponematosis in the Old World is documentary and equivocal, abundant skeletal evidence indicates the presence of a nonvenereal form of treponemal infection in the Americas before Columbus.

BRENDA. BAKER is a Ph. D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass. o Ioo3, USA). Born in 1959, she received her BA from Northwestern University in 1981. She has done archaeological fieldwork in Illinois, Arizona, New England, and Egypt. Her research interests are nutrition and disease in prehistory and settlement patterns and demography, her current work involves analysis of bone collagen from human skeletal remains from the Wadi Halfa area of Sudanese Nubia. GEORGE. ARMELAG os is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts. He was born in 1936 and educated at the University of Michigan (BA, 1958) and the University of Colorado (MA, 1963, Ph. D., 1968). He taught at the University of Utah in 1965–67, before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, and at the University of Colorado in the summers of 1983–87. He has done extensive research with human skeletal remains on diet, dis-ease, and demography in prehistoric populations from Dickson Mounds, Illinois, and from the Wadi Halfa area of Nubia. His publications include, with Alan C. Swedlund, Demographic Anthropology [Dubuque: WC Brown, 1987), with Peter Farb, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 198o), and, with coeditor MN Cohen, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984).