Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador is the first book to describe demographic change throughout Ecuador during the early colonial period. It is also the first to examine in detail the impact of Inca conquest and demographic changes on the area in the early sixteenth century, a period for which there is a paucity of reliable records.Linda A. Newson identifies variations in demographic trends by examining the differing impacts of disease, pre-existing cultures, Inca rule, and Spanish administration and economic activities on the three regions of Ecuador - the highlands, coast, and eastern lowlands.

The size and distribution of native populations today reflect five hundred years of demographic and cultural change. The first century of Spanish rule was the most formative. During that period, Old World diseases reduced Indian populations to levels from which few have recovered fully. Further, Spanish colonizers ill-treated and overworked Indians and exploited their lands and resources. Intense Spanish settlement and commericial forms of production, for example, had disastrous consequences for native peoples.

That some Indian societies were better able to survive than others, Newson stresses, can be explained largely in terms of differences in the size and character of native populations at the time of Spanish conquest and in the resources to be found in the areas they inhabited.

Newson's research is supported by her extensive use of archival sources in Spain and Ecuador as well as Jesuit and Franciscan sources in Rome. The book includes eighteen maps and thirty-two tables.