cont.
... amenities or luxuries'.  Simple fact again.  Their health standards as compared to ours were abysmal.  Infant mortality probably approached 50%.  Most adults died with a jaw full of abscessed teeth and septicemia was at least a contributing factor to a large percentage of the morbidity and mortality stats.  At the Filoli dig, the archaeologist described one poor sod who had a dental abscess that had eaten up into his mandible and reached his eye socket - probably a proximal cause of his death, after a long period of chronic pain (if not agony).  So yep, a thoroughly _nasty_ life by our standards.

I have no doubt that if you and your family were forced to live under the conditions that those native Americans did, and experience what they did (as a matter of the scientific record), you would indeed regard yourselves as victims of _brutal_ oppression.

So, "Nasty, Mean, Brutish, and Short" does indeed truly sum up their situation.  Fact.  

Read the article, and learn.  :-/