The indisputable facts are that the first Europeans that came to fertile areas like New England and the Gulf Coast stated - time and time again - that “Indian” villages were so thickly placed that there was literally nowhere for Europeans to settle.
50 or so years later, when the repetitive plagues of hepatitis A, smallpox, measles and so on had had their way Europeans were able to build their towns on the vacant remains of the villages. There are numerous accounts of mounds of remains, literally piles of bones .
Quite what the OP is disputing in these accounts is unclear, aside from claiming that because there were no formal censuses then any counts were unreliable and so must be wrong in the direction (s)he favours. I guess I have to clearly make the point that, even given this, any estimates are as likely to be wrong in one direction as the other. What motive did these Europeans have for falsely claiming a dense population in 1600 but a sparse one in 1650, aside from it reflecting reality?
Large-scale agriculture is right. They had cities to support. Some reckonings put two-thirds of the population of the whole Americas into the realms of Tawantinsuyu and Mexica.
Of course those weren’t the only areas with cities. There were fortified cities throughout the Mississippi valley, Panama and the Amazon as well.
I don’t think Pinguin quite gets how densely populated the Americas were. Even the Amazon was much more densely populated than it is even today. The first explorers in the Amazon interior reported large towns with less than one days walk between, and accounts from the locals of cities of tens of thousands. There were areas of forest, but they were described as “islands” and smaller than the area of farmland. 100 years later the area was largely deserted,with just scattered villages in clearing within the forest. It wasn’t until satellite images revealed the remains of extent of the networks of roads and canals throughout the Amazon that the accounts were fully believed.
It seems that the only areas of the Americas that weren’t under agriculture were those regions of the Great Plains too remote from rivers, some of the deserts and those areas that are to cold. Given the extent of agriculture in the Amazon, which remains largely non-agricultural to this day, it is conceivable that more of the Americas were under Indian agriculture than is currently under agriculture.
Which begs the question, what precisely Pinguin thinks happened to all those people. They certainly weren’t killed through force since there were never enough Europeans in the Amazon or Great Plains region to kill that many people. So what does he think happened to them? Did they all move back to Atlantis? Did the 20 Europeans kill tens of thousands of Indians?
The entire eastern seaboard of the future U.S. was also full of agricultural communities, working some of the best land in the world. Hunter-gatherer cultures were mainly restricted to east of the Mississippi (for some reason, the west coast peoples never developed agriculture).
The English never developed it either. But both they and west coast Indians engaged in agriculture which they borrowed from their neighbours. Agriculture, including irrigation, was practiced throughout the Colorado valley, California, Nevada, Idaho and into the Pacific Northwest of Canada.
This has in recent years been an active area of research – not “childish” number crunching. And, in the absence of enough hard data, inevitably there’s been some guessing, but not uninformed guessing.
originally the issue was a profound cultural one – did Europeans come in and successfully exploit practically empty lands, or did they devastate and displace a large native population? Couched in those terms, you can see how the question gets one’s dander up. older histories seem to assume an almost-empty “virgin continent”. This could lead you to think that maybe the Europeans were at no fault in using land that nobody else was using, and that not so many Indians got killed or displaced. It’s a touchy issue.
One person who argued the Indians’ side was Francis Jennings, whose the Invasion of America: Insians, colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest in 1976 set the tone. You couldn’t miss his point in The Founders of America: How Indians Discovered the Land, Pioneered it, and Created Great Classical Civilizations, How they were Plunged into a Dark Age by Invasions, and How they are Reviving His entire thesis is in the title.
Regardless of your philosophy, there are hard facts along with this – Indian tribes were devastated by Plagues, most of them not intentional. read the story of Massasoit for a heart-breaking one – the only reason the Pilgrims were able to settle so easily in Plymouth was that a plague had wiped out many tribes in New England. Nor is this recent revisionist history – it was well-known at the time in Europe.
a number of historians have taken up this re-interpretation, but many of them are seen as “lefty” – Howard Zinn, James Loewen – so that debates about the population of the Americas before Columbus acquire a political bias that they really shouldn’t have.
The problem with those stats, particularly in the former Spanish Empire, is the way you count Indigenous people. A person that become Christian, that moved to a city or an Hacienda, that forgot the tongue, or that intermarry, didn’t count as Indian anymore. You must know that the population of Latin America as a whole is around 40% indigenous, and if you know we are 600 millions already, and that only 70 millions are count as “Indians”, there you have the answer where the missing population went.
That’s modern baloney.
Do you know how many people leaved at its peak in Easter Island? Perhaps 10.000 as a limit, before the population collapsed. And with such a small population they managed to make a huge impact in buildings and in destroying a whole environment.
The problem today are modern pseudoscientist that pick satellite images to prove theirs fantasies.
Just see how arbitrary are the definitions. What is a “large town”? For a 21th century person, a large town has 100.000 people or perhaps a million. In prehistory a large town had 20 houses and 100 people.
Nobody has said the Amazon was empty, but the continuous exageration of figures nobody knows, not only is ridiculous, it is lack of professional ethics.
Of course the continent was not empty, but blaming the bacteria the disapearing of Indigenous people is really pathetic. Particularly because bacteria seem to be more active in North America, rather than in the Southern regions of the hemisphere.
Even more, the rate of survival of Indigenous peoples in Canada, in proportion to the whole population, is a log higher than in the United States. What was going on there? Why bacteria attacked indigenous people in the U.S. with a lot more strength than elsewhere? What a biological mystery.
Nobody said it was *just *bacteria. Smallpox is a virus.
It seems obvious that larger communities with more extensive contact with their neighbors would be much more exposed to the spread of disease than smaller, more isolated tribes such as those in Canada or the Amazon. But then, that’s just me.
Remeber that there is a broad range of degree of certainty between WAG and precise census count, too. A competent archaeologist or anthropologist can make a fairly accurate assessment of population density, and hence, given a figuire for area, estimated population, based on what he is able to find out. To give an example from pinguin’s own Chile, imagine a plague tomorrow which totally depopulates the country. 500 years from now an archaeologist reviews the area. He would be able to establish, solely from the relics left in place, that what is now Valparaiso was the site of a fairly large city, while Chiloe was more coastal-rural, with small towns and farms predominating.
When this sort of thing is scaled up to continental scale, the numbers become much broader in range. Saying that Nevada is a low-density state is true, but doesn’t take into account the high-density Vegas-Henderson area. Accuracy becomes more a question of orders of magnitude. So whether a given area had 28,000 or 35,000 people can easily be debated – but not 1,000 or 250,000; they are excluded by what is and is not present in the relics.
Baloney, huh? Where are you getting “In prehistory a large town had 20 houses and 100 people.” Can you give us a cite for that? Who thinks that constitutes a “large town”?
In the broadest terms, humans are just like any other apex predator - barring competition, their population grows until it reaches the maximum level their environment can support. If you know how efficient their agriculture was, and if you know the potential yield of their land, then making a rough estimate of their population levels isn’t all that hard.
Another interesting fact is that, throughout the Americas, areas of dense population tended to be reasonably fragile - subject, for various reasons, to abrupt collapses even before the Euros, with their diseases and guns, showed up.
Examples include the collapse of Teotihuacan, the collapse of the lowland Maya, and the collapse of Cahokia.
“Dark ages” are hardly unknown in the old world of course, but for reasons as yet unknown but probably having to do with the relative fragility of the environment when worked with the lower tech commanded by native Americans, they seem to have been far more serious in the Americas, resulting in large scale, deep and long lasting demographic disaster.
I don’t believe that was true of colonial Mexico largely because you could look at an Indian or even a Mestizo and know he or she was not a criollo or a peninsulare. You had the following classifications of people in colonial Mexico.
Peninsulares: These are people who were born in Spain and later came to Mexico. Referred to disparagingly as gachupines.
Criollos: These people were born in Mexico but were indistinguishable physically from the peninsulares. Not a different racial category but a lower social level.
Mestizos: These were people of mixed heritage, Spanish and Indian.
Indians: Even when converted to Christianity these people were treated as wards of the crown and the church.
Source: The Course of Mexican History 8th edition (2007)
Those colonial classifications are ridiculous. Everybody knew at the time that many criollos were mestizos. Some of the richest families of the region were founded by mixed marriages.
I have a book about wills in Colonial Santiago (Chile) at the late 15th century. It is amazing that many of the richest widows were Indigenous or mixed.
In the U.S. you have Pocahontas and Sacagawea. In here that was not the exception but the rule.
Absolutely correct. Agriculture in the Americas was fragile, and the civilizations, Mayas included, suffered several ecological disasters.
Now, most of the peoples in the praries, the Amazon and Patagonia were hunter gatherers, so the density in those regions was quite low.
Pinguin’s use of the term “hunter-gatherer” reminds me of my suspiction that among laypeople, there is generally a misunderstanding about what the term “hunter-gatherer” means. There seems to be several categories of assumptions:
That absent the influence of the great classical civilizations, most people in the world were “hunter-gatherers.” Leaving aside whether this is statistically true, this notion often leads to the false assumption that any “native” population being displaced by “civilized” settlers were hunter-gatherers.
That all relatively small population communities are hunter-gatherers. There are many points along the continuum from pure nomadic hunter-gathering to pure settled agriculture. Indeed, nomadic herding is one of those stages. Nomadic herders aren’t settled agriculturalists, but they’re also not hunter-gatherers. They are food producers, just like agriculturalists are.
That hunter-gatherers are somehow incapable of complex society, that they are incapable of producing complex philosophy or literature (or at least an oral tradition). There are Indians who have argued to me that Indian civilization cannot have originated with nomadic Aryans because they were unsophisticated hunter-gatherers. Well, first of all, they were cattleherders, not hunter-gatherers; second, there’s no reason to believe that they were essentially nomadic; third, there’s no reason to believe that even nomadic hunter-gatherers couldn’t be capable of producing a rich oral traidtion.
What exactly do you base your conclusions on? Do you have any expertise in the fields of archaeology or demographics?