The land area of the state of New York alone is about 54,500 square miles. Assuming a population density of 4 people per square mile (about the population density of Mongolia, by the way, which is not known to be nearly as hospitable), that’s a population of at least 200,000. Even at a population density of 1 person per square mile, that’s over 50,000 people in New York state alone. Include major portions of New England, Pennsylvania, and Canada, and you again have much more than 200,000. So, the estimate of 100-150 thousand is significantly an underestimate unless the population density approaches that of the Sahara desert.
Could the land sustain that many people? Absolutely. As I noted above, “American’s Breadbasket”. Also, Jacques Cartier noted a population of thousands in what is now modern day Montreal and found another sizable village at present day Quebec City.
But again, this is a digression and not a particularly good one. Your sources, beyond some name throwing, please.
“Could” the population of the Americas be as low as you claim at contact?
“Could” the population of the Americas have been composed entirely of extraterrestrials until the year 1491, when the aliens carefully placed natives in all the right places and planted or removed all appropriate physical evidence before leaving for space?
“Could” the population actually been a reasonable one for the climate and fertility of the land?
You can play these games all day - and have, over the course of 300+ posts, taking 130+ posts to give your first (and as yet weak) attempt at a citation.
So again, where are your sources for an unusually low population density? Do you have any actual evidence? You have made a claim - kindly back it up and stop making these digressions.
You are the guy that claimed 100.000 Iroquois. Prove it, if you can. Show us evidence. Not just “calculations” based in assumptions!
Besides, you got convinced how weak is your line of reasoning. You are basing your estimations in how many people could an environment support, eventually, rather than in facts. Besides, as you said clearly, it is not enough to see the city to know how many people lives in there, isn’t? Well, you are just seen the city.
That’s the Census at contact myth. There wasn’t any census at all!!
Fact: There wasn’t a census at contact, and nobody knows the actual figures.
A clue: why the Spaniards didn’t conquer North America but they preffered to control Latin America? If you think about it, you will find the answer you are looking for.
You don’t accept the conventional wisdom on the pre-Columbian population of the Americas. Fine. But you also haven’t shown any calculation or specific sources.
You refer to a book that doesn’t say what you say it does and a wikipedia source with some authors.
So far, you are the only one claiming an actual census. Everybody else is claiming reasonable population densities for the Americas, not some ultra low population densities barely found in desert environments with nomadic hunter gatherers.
Taking a page from your tactics book: consider the known population of the Inuit and other far northern Indian peoples in Canada up through the 19th century and the effect of smallpox and other diseases upon contact.
Even into the 20th century, a significant number (>50%) of Inuit in the Northwest part of Canda suffered from Tuberculosis (“The circumpolar Inuit: health of a population in transition” - Peter Bjerregaard, T. Kue Young). Not all died, of course, but significant disease deaths among native populations were recorded into the 20th century.
One word: gold.
Another word: silver
They found gold and silver in Latin America and none in North America (Hernando de Soto explored most of my childhood stomping ground of the American South in the 16th century). Gold was not found in any significant quantities in California or Alaska until the 19th century. Colorado was too far inland to have been sufficiently explored until then, too.
What does that have to do with population? They weren’t looking for slaves.
You obviously have very little knowledge of North American history. I currently reside in Houston, part of which was originally settled as a Spanish mission, as are several hundred other towns in the state of Texas (whose very name is derived from the word the Spaniards used for the Caddo Indians - Tejas).
The Spaniards did, in fact, “conquer” or at least colonize significant portions of the American southwest from Texas to California (all technically part of North America). The Spaniards were most interested initially in gold and silver, two resources not readily found in the explored portions of North America. No economic interest = no colonization. Even California was settled mainly as a bulwark against incursion by Russian settlement from the north.
Hernando de Soto led an expedition across much of the American south, in preparation for colonization. They found no gold (but did encounter and note several tribes of Indians), so they decided not to colonize.
Perhaps you haven’t heard of the “Six Flags over Texas”. The Spanish flag is one of those six sovereign flags to have flown over Texas.
But again, a digression (and a very poor one).
Where are your sources? And why bring up these irrelevancies. Justify your work. It’s not that hard, and it’s something everybody else has done.
Note that my 100 000+ population figure is for the Iroquois Federation sensu strictu, pre-Contact, not the Iroquois language speakers as a whole, or anything else more inclusive.
You know, there would be much less of this circular discussion if when you had a point to make you just flat out said it instead of repeatedly coyly hinting at it. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t find it engaging to be asked to guess what you’re thinking over and over.
Yeah 300 posts later, we’re still at the exact starting point. Seems to me Pinguin’s idea of a debate is him making an assertion like his OP. Basically “census at contact is a myth” (apparently not understanding you dont need to have an historically made census to estimate the size of a population). No cites, no proofs. And then, close the thread.
I dont know from which forum he might have gotten the idea that this was how a debate was achieved, but it sounds his idea of one is more akin to what people commonly call “a blog” (with commentaries open…for censorship, I imagine).
This thread could be two pages long, it only grew to so many pages because the OP confused “In my not-humble-at-all opinion” and “Great Debates”. If he had posted in the former, it would probably have been ignored by all as soon as it was posted.
There is no census at contact myth. Your entire premise is a strawman. No serious observer has ever argued that there was a “census at contact” or anything like it. You have repeated this line in almost every post of yours as if it’s some kind of prophetic revelation. It has no meaning, no relevance, and no weight as an argument. It means nothing. Zero. Every time you repeat it, it makes you look more and more foolish.
Furthermore, chanting “census at contact myth” doesn’t give you some kind of license to substitute your-own-sphincter-origin wild guesses, intuition, and pet theories. Even assuming that using the “census at contact myth” incantation had magically allowed you to discredit the conclusions of the people you disagree with, you have made no credible case to replace them with the figures that you have become enamored of.
The population of Rapa Nui today? The population of Patagonia considered in isolation? The fact that the commuter trains you ride are crowded? The heavily fictionalized account of a traveler who made his way haphazardly across the continent and himself recorded almost nothing in terms of observing population density? Using these as your sources make your conclusion less reliable than anything a scholarly study might come up with.
Your argument amounts to nothing more than “Because there was no recorded census, my personal intuition and prejudices are more reliable than anything a serious study can come up with.”
And that ignores the fact that not once – not once – have you ever identified any scholarly analysis of pre-Columbian population that you actually disagree with, not to mention make reasonable objections to. It’s all just strawmen and windmills with you.
It is obvious that pinguin either knows nothing about, or else completely discounts, the methods of modern archaeology when it comes to estimating population size from actual physical evidence, from burials to housing remains to middens to all the other hard evidence that is used to come up with numbers. He’d much rather rely on one dead Spaniard than Science.
Yes, but “scientists” acts as if it was a census at contact.
How those schollars could claim an exact figure, like say that the population declined a “95%”, when nobody knows what it was the actual number? Why they aren’t more honest and say population declined by an unknown margin? “5%”, “20%”, “80%” or who knows?
Gold was very minor compared to silver, and silver only existed in Bolivia and Mexico. The Spanish Empire was a lot larger than that.
If you look at the map of the Americas you will notice something clear. The Spanish settled were the larger Indigenous populations lived.
And yes, they weren’t looking for slaves but were looking for servs, where to implant theirs Medioeval institutions like the Hacienda.
So, if there weren’t people, or not enough people, they didn’t settle. That’s why they never attempted to settle the Amazon, Patagonia or the coldest regions of North America.
If you want to ignore history, that’s your own business. Don’t make it ours.
De Soto was bestowed a fortune by King Charles from his capture of a significant amount of gold/silver from the conquest of the Incans in Peru. When you find a little gold, you tend to assume there’s more to be had, and indeed they stuck around. He found none in the modern day US (mostly beads and Indian tribes) and his party opted against colonization.
HIV, not AIDS. HIV is neither airborne (transmitted via bodily fluids) and not immediately fatal. There’s no widespread resistance to HIV anywhere in the world, but there are areas of Africa experiencing 80+% infection rates. It’s only the widespread use of anti-virals that have kept the population of many areas of sub-Saharan Africa from plummeting. Even so, there are already entire regions that have experienced localized collapses in population. This is a positive example for you? It shows precisely how a new disease can wipe out a population, especially when there isn’t enough familiarity or time to treat a new disease.
Ebola is NOT airborne. It spreads through bodily fluids. That’s why outbreaks are observed primarily in areas with a lack of facilities and poor general hygiene. Infected individuals pose a limited risk if even mild precautions are taken.
Smallpox IS airborne. You can be infected merely by being in the presence of infected people.
Malaria? Really? All signs point to the fact that it did wipe out huge chunks of population. They came back. The prevalence of sickle cell trait in malaria prone regions is one of the big medical finds in history. Malaria has been around for thousands of years, and humans have developed immunity. It really is likely it killed off a significant fraction of infected people - only to have the survivors pass their natural immunities onto their children. After thousands of years, it’s no surprise the population has rebounded.
At least become familiar with diseases if you want to comment on them.