I has always wonder how come so many “scientists” speak about the impact of diseases in the Americas, and the millions of people that died like flies…
When there is NO CENSUS, and NO RELIABLE FIGURE, of the population of the Americas at contact time.
All is a matter of guessing and childish number crushing.
If somebody has some SOLID figures, backed by hard evidence, and not only trowing dices, let me know. But I know this is not a very serious field of “research”.
You don’t need precise census figures to know what happened. The exact same phenomenon happened in places like Hawaii, without an official census. And nobody disputes that many Europeans succumbed to the Black Death, regardless of the numbers. The lack of hard numbers doesn’t justify being skeptical of the events altogether.
It is very different to say that 20% or even 30% of the natives died in one generation, recovering afterwards, that to claim with such security, and no evidence, that only 1 in 10 Natives survived the invasion. I think, that kind of claims, without proofs, are simply pseudoscience.
pinguin, I think the figures are more reliable in some places than others. E.g. figures for the Caribbean are widely thought to be exaggerated lies cooked up by people like Las Casas. But figures for the Inca Empire may be more accurate. Both Incas and subsequent Spanish colonial officials of Viceroyalty of Peru would have a vested interested to count at the very least the mita-liable males.
In Mexico the Spanish would similarly be able to count the encomienda-liable males post factum, but I don’t know how archaeologists go about estimating the population of Aztec empire. They must have some ways of doing that, it must be more of a question of, what’s the expected plus minus error.
For an opposite, almost modern in its level of documentation case, consider 17th century Brazilian slaving wars against the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay. Jesuits were running a well documented Communist-type state there, so they are thought to have reported accurate casualties. But that’s just a small episode, and from another era.
Could you give us a cite from a reputable scientist making such a claim? It would be a lot easier to evaluate in context.
It seems that the GQ question here is:
What might be the best estimates of the population of the Americas at the time of the European contact, and how were these figures arrived at?
It would be very childish indeed to crush numbers.
crunching!! Don’t forget that my mother language is not this one! carajo!
You need to step back a bit and realize that there is no true conspiracy in giving death estimates in the Americas due to European contact. Researchers argue about the exact numbers among themselves and many have professional interests in getting it right. Academic science isn’t about coming up with an exact right number, writing it down, and moving on. It is about refining data and theories based on the best evidence at hand.
You don’t need to know the exact population of the Americas or any place else to have a good picture of what happened. We don’t even know the exact number of people in New York City right now down to the thousands. What you are missing is that science is not simple counting based on perfect data. There are tools and models you can use quite well with less than perfect data. In this case, it would be looking at rapid population decreases in native populations around the time of European arrival. Scientists can figure that out based on representative archaeological samples and extrapolate that to larger areas and regions. You then combine that with historical accounts from Europeans that the native populations were suffering from to determine the likely causes. Those are just two of the tools you can use.
pinguin, you really need to brush up on the scientific techniques used in these things starting with good popular overviews done by National Geographic and others and then learn some more about the way the scientific method works. It sounds like you just claimed that you can’t ever you can’t ever know anything about things that you can’t see and count with your own eyes which some people really believe unfortunately but it simply isn’t true. There is a massive body of work that goes into this and it doesn’t mean that conflicting estimates mean that any explanation is still as good as any other.
Of course there are serious scientists worried about the invention of figures. Like this David Henige.
Here is his book: Numbers from Nowhere.
I am not sure I agree with Shagnasty’s categorical “no conspiracy” statement. While constituencies that rhetorically brandish the Amerindian death numbers are generally weaker and more low key than ones that specialize on Holocaust numbers or Atlantic slave trade numbers, they do exist. Some of their representatives may be ones writing the less-than-perfectly-unbiased scholarly works on the topic. And, unlike with the Holocaust which was decently documented and gets so much mindshare that each side in the debate watches the other one ready to pounce on inconsistencies, those disasters of old are fuzzy enough that it can easily devolve into a “what’s a couple millions of alleged deaths among friends” situation.
In the U.S., at least, intermarriage between Europeans and Indians existed in colonial times, and also in post-Colonial times.
There is a scene in the movie Pocahontas which is quite revealing: Indians, dressed as Europeans lived side by side of Europeans. Something not so strange when you realize the real circumstances of colonization.
Yes, afterwards, a large movement of population came from Europe and change the genetical make up of the U.S., but still today 6% of the population has Amerindian heritage. And I am not talking of my fellow Hispanics living of the U.S., but about “anglo” Americans.
Why this disgregation on intermarriage? Because it was one of the main causes of the “extinction” of Native Americans.
A couple of million people could be fair game among different scientific accounts but pinguin seems to be taking a stance more similar to the Holocaust Deniers rather than the ones that think the count is a bit too high. That is what I was addressing.
He flatly says:
'But I know this is not a very serious field of “research”. ’
In that case, I demand my money back from that Bones, Bodies, and Disease class I took in college from a scholar in the New World mummy field. All of his colleagues must be crackpots too even if they do have ‘remains’ and ‘archeology field surveys’. I am starting to wonder if everything claimed before I was born was made up.
Scenes in movies don’t reveal anything except what some dude in Hollywood thought would make a good movie.
There can’t be both? Many Native Americans died of European introduced diseases but no one said that all of them did. I don’t know how much you know about current U.S. culture but many of us ‘anglos’ know perfectly well that we have Native American heritage, myself included. It trends to be a point of pride that people look for when they do genealogy research especially since some entitlement programs allow people to claim to be Native American with 1/8 or even much less Native American blood.
The problem is that history and the calculations of modern scientists don’t match.
Most of the surface of the Americas at pre-contact times was settled by hunter-gatherers, which, certainly, didn’t have a large density of population, particularly in the Americas, which is quite a miserable land if you don’t work it hard.
Now, those estimations that the Andes, for instance, had 30 million people are really baloney. I know the places and the archaelogical sites, at least in my country, and those numbers are ridiculous.
You are saying two different things but there is some hope. If you refine your question down from something like ‘Native American numbers are all a hoax’ to ‘What is the current best estimate of peak Native American populations in the Andes?’ you will get a much better response.
The first question will make you sound like a loon. The second question will give you the best evidence that anyone knows and also agree with you to some extent. Some population estimates for Native American populations really are way too high and most people in the field and even on this board know that and can help clarify where some estimates are wrong and others more correct. The good studies are there and the existence of fanciful numbers in some doesn’t invalidate all of them.
What number would be reasonable, then? It seems that the alternative hypotheses are:
Given the variety of estimates out there, it would almost have to be choice #3. Since there are a variety of estimates, clearly some (most) are wrong. The question, as others have said, is what the estimates are for.
European contact either
Given what we know of European contagious diseases, many of the zoomorphic and requiring a certain population density to keep going, the hypothesis that European diseases had a significant impact on the indigenous population makes a lot of sense. Moreover, there is archaeological and historical evidence to support it. The burden of proof is on people who claim there was no decline in indigenous population: how else do you explain the evidence?
As to whether claims of the decline are exaggerated, I have no doubt that many of them are. The question is how many—“all” would require an unlikely conspiracy theory—and by how much. That is what the author of the book you cited is trying to answer.
Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a work of popular history, so it must be taken with caution.
However, he has an entire section titled Numbers from Nowhere which recounts the battle between those scholars who have argued for lower population figures pre-contact and those newer scholars who claim much higher numbers. The book is well-sourced and contains an extensive bibliography.
His conclusion is never quite spelled out. Reading between the lines, he seems to come down for a middle ground, giving compelling reasons to doubt the older scholarship which kept shrinking the population estimates by nearly 80% over the first part of the last century, but not quite buying into the highest numbers tossed around.
It’s important to note, however, that the high end, the ones that result in the 97% drop, place that drop over a full century. There is a graph of the research by S. F. Cook and W. W. Borah of the decline of their Aztecs, taken from a variety of contemporary sources.
The graph begins in 1518 with a population of 25 million. Three separate smallpox epidemics dropped the population to about 5 million in 1545. Then came cocoliziti (identified here as Hemorrhagic Fever) and the plague (or a set of diseases the Spanish writers lumped together as the plague) followed by more Hemorrhagic Fever, influenza and measles, another Hemorrhagic Fever, another smallpox, and more measles. That left 700,000 in 1623. That’s ten separate killing epidemics in just over a century. A pattern like that could indeed kill off virtually the entire population through the disruption of food growing and gathering, transportation, marriage and breeding, and general trauma.
Also important to note that such a pattern is not deliberate on the part of the Spanish, but an unintended consequence of their long-term immunity to such diseases, being the descendents of survivors of them.
For a cross-check from a wholly different perspective I looked at A Concise History of World Population, by Massimo Livi-Bacci, an Italian population scientist.
He also doubts the highest numbers and cites Cook and Borah, but he mentions others like R. McCaa who stress the number and the variety of the epidemics that probably literally decimated the population in the hundred years after conquest.
If you stop thinking of the population loss as a one-time event and turn it into an ongoing process that lasted generations, then the case for the numbers is made much stronger. Take the starting population down to 7 million, a mid-level figure, still gives a 90% reduction for the Aztecs. Other populations like the Caribbean Islands were certainly equally hurt. It’s hard to find populations which weren’t.
Disagreement among scientists is not unusual, even when heated. It doesn’t devalue all the work. The lack of precision is certainly frustrating, but it helps that scientists from a number of separate disciplines are attacking the problem and narrowing its boundaries. That makes the conspiracy theory claims easier to dismiss as well.
They weren’t just hunter-gatherers in the Andes and Mesoamerican areas; they had large-scale agriculture going on in those areas. The populations of those areas (whatever they may have been) were undoubtedly greater than the populations of Tierra del Fuego or North Dakota.