Last week a coworker of mine, a Chinook Indian, went on a lengthy rant. One part of it was that due to recoveries of artifacts in the Midwest due to prarie fires, scientists have determined there were 27 million Native Americans north of the Rio Grande at the time of Columbus’ voyage in 1492. He rightfully pointed out the conventional figure is about one million. Is the first claim based in fact? If so, how did the mostly hunter gatherer culture of Nat. Am. life support so many people? And where did they all go?
While the Plains supported Hunter-Gatherer cultures, other areas supported Farming Cultures in fixed villages. The natives of the Carribean were not Hunter-Gatherers either, they were settled, farming cultures.
Any number that someone might come up with is just a guess, but it was certainly more than one million.
Where did they all go? Successive waves of disease, famine, warfare and forced relocation which led to more disease, famine and warfare.
Lies My Teacher Told Me quotes a passage in JW Barber’s Interesting Events in the History of the United States, published in 1829, which states;
A few years before the arrival of the Plymouth settlers, a very mortal sickness raged with great violence among the Indians inhabiting the eastern parts of New England. “Whole towns were depopulated. The living were not able to bury the dead; and their bodies were found lying above ground many years later. The Massachusetts Indians were said to have been reduced from 30,000 to 300 fighting men. In 1633, the small pox swept off great numbers.”
is a link to Wikipedia on this issue. While Wiki can sometimes be off, their discussion rings true to me.
Since there are no figures which are reliable, the statement “20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, precise pre-Columbian population figures are impossible to obtain, and estimates are often produced by extrapolation from comparatively small bits of data.” sounds not hard to believe. So, you can assume 8 million or more.
The idea that it was 1 million seems out of line.
Trolling the web, I see estimates of 1.8 million to ten million in what’s now the US and Canada. Of course, if you count all native civilizations in the Americas including Alaska, I’ve heard estimates of thirty million, mostly in the South.
27 million from Mexico up seems a little overreaching, but I don’t think you’ll find any hard figures.
As for where they went, I can see South American Indian faces everywhere here in NY, although they’re classified as Latino. There’s a little less than two million Natives here in the US and about a million in Canada as of 2000.
I’ve just finished reading 1491 on this exact topic, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in this area. While it’s right that the numbers are necessarily speculative, there is little doubt that the Americas as a whole had quite a large population in 1491, certainly in the 10s of millions, and suffered losses in the region of 90-95% over the next 50 or so years, mostly from diseases that were new to them.
Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a popular book but detailed, has a lengthy discussion of the history of estimations of pre-Columbian Indian population.
The one million figure apparently comes from the first serious, scholarly estimate of 1.15 million in North America, made by Smithsonian ethnographer James Mooney in 1928. Alfred L. Kroeber, an even more distinguished anthropologist, cut that back to 900,000, with only 8.4 million in the whole hemisphere.
Sherbourne F. Cook, a physiologist, looked at disease devastation, and with historian Woodrow W. Borah, made a series of estimates from the 1950s to the 1970s that made Central Mexico the densely populated region on earth at the time with 25.2 million by itself.
Henry F. Dobyns built on their work to give an estimate of between 90 and 112 million in the Americas. I don’t see a figure just for North America.
Dobyns’ work has been criticized by many, primarily because it backtracks from estimates of known Indian populations and works backward with an estimate of what percent died from disease. Even a seemingly small difference in percentage, 95% deaths vs 98% deaths, caused huge variation in the end result. Nevertheless, the skeptics would still multiply Mooney by at least ten, and one, Rudulph Zambardino, puts the central Mexican population at 5 to 10 million.
However, there are records from the Spanish that most of the low counters decided to ignore, for reasons unexplained.
Bartolome de Las Casas wrote in 1542 that since Columbus 12 to 15 million had died of disease. In the 1560s he said 40 million had. In the 18th century Javier Clavijero estimated 30 million for Mexico pre-Columbus, remarkably close to Cook and Borah.
Numbers for what is now the U.S. are much more dificult to estimate, requiring extrapolation of excavations rather than contemporary reports.
That’s for the whole of the Americas, not just above the Rio Grande (as specified in the OP). The great majority of the major population centers in pre-Columbian America were south of the Rio Grande.
Denevan (The Native Population of the Americas 1492, U Wisc. Press) puts forward a figure of 3.8 million for North America and 17 million for Mexico but he also lists all the other estimates he coudl find, and none suggest 27 million for North Am, although one suggest 80 million for Central and South Am.
Very, very few native Americansd were HGs at the time of European contact. Even the great plains people were almost all river valley agriculturalists who traded with the tiny bands of Hgs who lived on the plains themselves.
Disease wiped them out. By the time Europeans moved into most of the US they found only the remains of the cultures that had existed. In many case speople reverted from agricultural city states back to subsistence agriculture and hunting. In the case of the Graet Plains peopels this was hastened by the introduction of the horse. All of the plains Indians cultures were descended from agricultural ancestors who abandoned that lifestyle for various reasons.
In the case of the midwestern cultures the only traces we have of them are the decayed and half buried city walls left on the floodplains, but these indicate cities with populations of 1-10 thousand. How common these cities are is hard to tell, but it has been suggested that the US midwest may have had a native American population higher than that of the bronze age fertile crescent, whic is prety spectacular of ture. We tend to think of the mide west and Great Plains as largely empty lands, but before European diseases they were seem to have been bustling civilizations with people hunting over large areas of prairi and woodland to provide meat for the cities in the river valleys.
Can he give a cite for this? I haven’t been able to find any reference to 27 million or any use of prairie fires to estimate pre-Columbian populations at all.
To extend on that, we are used to seeing cultural remains based on the use of hard metal (tin, bronze, iron) tools. The Americas never developed a Bronze or Iron Age per se, partially due the relative paucity of those metals in easy access and because of the lack of technology to process the ores into useable form. This, combined with a lack of working animals to provide muscle power, resulted in styles of architecture and technology that were less resilient than that found in Eurasia; however, even at the time of colonial settlement in North America (when much of the native population were suffering from Eurasian “childhood” pathogens against which they had not evolved resistence) the natives demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of agricultural science. As Blake notes, the romantic hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the natives encountered by Europeans was largely an atavism resulting from the collapse of Amerindian society not dissimliar to what would happen if modern industrial society were to collapse today.
27 million for North America is probably hyperbolic, but I’ve seen reasonable estimates from 1-8 million with the average falling somewhere between 3-6 million. Mexico and Central America, with its intensive maize cultivation, had higher densities, while South America clearly had sophisticated cultures which depended on high yielding potato, quinoa, and maize for sustenence.
Stranger
One thing your coworker probably did was confuse “north of the Rio Grande” with North America. Most people don’t realize that Mexico and Central America are actually part of North America. As others have noted, 27M seems too high for “north of the Rio Grande”, but might be more in line with North America.
Well, not really. The Plains Amerindians were long-time nomads, and the Eastern Indians were sometimes semi-nomads, moving a little with the seasons. It’s not made-up, it’s just that people think of all the westerns (movies) when they think of Amerindians.
However, it’s definitely true they had some fairly neat population centers, such as Angel Mounds (not far from where I grew up). It’s not clear how much “political” pull or regional power each one of those held, however, because they were long gone before white men showed up and in some cases before whites landed on the hemisphere. We’ll probably never know much about these cultures in their heyday.
This is possible and would be very ironic if so. Given an estimated population of 25.5 million in Central Mexico that leaves about… 1 million north of the Rio Grande, exactly what he was ranting against.
Well, the 1M number is almost certainly too low. That number comes from a time when we didn’t realize that diseases originating form Europe swept through N. America almost immediately after the Spanish invaded Mexico and Central America-- ie, long before there was significant European encroachment into N. America.
Yeah, it’s not likely to be true. But the irony was too wonderful to pass up.
You have to be very careful what you mean by that statement.
The “classic” Plains Indians encountered by Europeans such as the Sioux were not long term nomads in any sense of the word. They were very recent descendants of settled agriculturalists. These agriculturalist may have been seasonally nomadic but they may also have been permanent city dwellers. We just can’t know. What we do know is that they never lived on the Great Plains. They invaded the Great Plains only in very recent times due to the adoption of the horse and the decimation of their society by disease.
It is correct to say that the Indians living exclusively on the Great Plains were long-time nomads, but only a couple of very small bands of these people existed when Europeans made reached the area The Great Plains nomadic HGs had been destroyed by disease and cpmpetition with the herders such as the Sioux.
So the traditional Plains Indians were a very novel social innovation and were in many ways an atavistic reversion to a nomadic agriculturalist lifestyle. They had displaced the people who had lived on the Great Plains long term and were only a few hundred years older than the Europeans who in turn displaced them.
The funny thing is that “everyone” has this idea that Indians were hunter-gatherers, yet “everyone” also knows the story of how the Indians saved the Pilgrims by teaching them to grow maize. The idea of the iconic horseriding buffalo-hunting plains indian somehow doesn’t integrate with the iconic village-dwelling corn-growing pilgrim-saving indians.
And nobody seems to realize that the Pilgrims built their settlement on top of an Indian village that had been destroyed by disease, with only one survivor. If the Pilgrims had made their voyage 30 years earlier they would have found a farming village on every possible settlement site.
It’s funny, because the story of the Pilgrims contains so much of the history of the European settlement of North America in microcosm, and everyone knows the story, but they don’t understand the significance of the story.
That brings up another point. A lot of people seem to think that there was just one Indian culture. Of course, that’s not true. There were (and are) many Indian cultures, and they were very different from each other. Cultural homogeneity over a large area is a rare thing, and was even rarer then. If you were somewhere in Europe at that time, and travelled 1500 miles, you wouldn’t expect to find the same culture at the other end. It’s not surprising that the same thing was true of Indian North America. Expecting Plains Indian and Massachusetts Indian cultures to be the same is like expecting English and Russian culture to be the same.