“Insult” is not the same as “offend.” You have thoroughly demonstrated your ignorance of many subjects in this thread, such as lethality of introduced diseases to Native American populations, the nature of archaeological sites of settlements and cities, and what constitutes evidence.
I can help you with your own contradiction.
You have two basic premises that are in conflict. You say we can’t know for sure what the population was. Then you say the population was between 8 and 15 million.
Which is it?
Henige was smart enough not to publish a figure. The 20-year-old figure you’ve rested your case on have been shown to be a severe underestimate. Even scientists who argue for the lowest current estimates are far higher than 15 million: 30 million at the barest minimum.
He responded to your absurd and irrelevant claim that there are probably no longhouses around since they were wood. Your statement demonstrates ignorance.
Ignorance because no one has claimed that anyone is counting standing longhouses.
Of course the longhouses are all gone. That, however, does not preclude historians and archaeologists from researching the numbers of longhouses mentioned in French and English, (and Iroquois) notes. It does not preclude archaeologists from exploring the sites of major towns and discovering where the longhouses stood and their sizes and number.
For you to make an irrelevant crack about the wood rotting displays ignorance.
If you do not want to be accused of failing to know something, stop displaying your lack of knowledge.
I have seen you are more “educated” in the topic either, sir.
If you call me ignorant, just show your figures, cites, and the archeological discovery that show me wrong. And don’t prettend you have more academic rank than myself. I am afraid, you don’t know to whom you are talking about.
I didn’t say I KNOW what the population of the Americas was, Sir. I said I BELIEVED, the figure was small. But a Believing, it is not the same that knowing :smack:
Well, 30 millions maybe correct. But where is the evidence?
I already put on the table a simpler question: How many Iroquois there were at contact. Somebody said there were 100.000, and I easily could find references to 15.000 people as well. So, who is correct then?
In short, don’t call me ignorant, but admit everybody is ignorant in the figures…
I know no longhouse survived :rolleyes:. The environmental conditions has to be very special for wood to survive 500 years without corruption.
Now, that is taking by yourself as a proof of ignorance, it is naive on your side. (So bad mods don’t allow me to insult you. I bite my lips already, but anyways)
And how many longhouses are those described on the records, if you please let me know.
False.
You oppinion doesn’t reflect reality.
I am arguing against the High Counter sect. A virtual religion that have dried the minds of many “scientists”.
Just to show an example:
Some believe 80% of the population disappeared in thirty years
Somebody said the population could estimated by counting the longhouses :rolleyes:
What longhouses? I asked.
With respect to the “major” towns, that would be a very interesting thing to know, given the fact that temporary houses don’t get preserve well at all. In Mayan cities, for instance, hardly a wooden or adobe structure remains. This is particularly true in rainy and hard weather.
Do you honestly expect us to believe you have read that book? What is it about that book that makes you believe it was written with “religious conviction” instead of rigorous research? Do you own a copy of that book? Have you read a copy of that book at a library? I honestly doubt it, but please, demonstrate that you’ve actually read it.
Citing things to support an argument such as the one you’re making isn’t just googling to find that some of the phrases match and then linking it. A quick Google search is fine if you state that the GDP of the United States is 13 trillion and someone asks for a cite, that’s fair enough that you might google it, link to a government web page and be done.
When you’re pointing to a book as evidence of a “religious conviction that has rotted the minds of science” you need to do a lot better than just link to the book and say “Some believe 80% of the population disappeared in thirty years.”
Wow, so this book is actually an encyclopedia. Do you know what that means? It means it is a collection of many short articles designed to give a general overview of something. In this case it is to give a wide overview of plague and infectious diseases throughout history.
Maybe you could reference the specific article that you have a problem with, because in fact Edward Kohn is just the compiler of these articles and not the individual who wrote them. Since your Google Books link doesn’t work for me and goes to a page I’m not able to view, and since you’ve read the article of course (as I know you must have if you’re arguing about it being junk science) you can quickly tell me who the author was.
Edited to Add: On further review it’s even funnier than that. These articles are so short and basic that to use the entire encyclopedia as a cite to prove some point is one of the most ludicrous things I’ve ever seen. I will back off asking for author name since it doesn’t appear it is an encyclopedia with more in-depth articles such as I might have expected.
I will quote you, so perhaps you remember what you said.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
You are basically arguing against one of the biggest strawmen in the history of the forum. There is no major scientific movement that claims they are setting down absolute facts about the population of pre-contact America
[/QUOTE]
As I shown you, those comments are everywhere, even in encyclopedias.
And are false. Simply because nobody knows the figure of the population at contact.
Now, if you don’t know the actual number, it is impossible to calculate the percentage of decline of a population.
So do you think that it is wrong to even make an estimate? If you actually read anything at all you will note that people who make these estimates tend to call them estimates, and they also note in rigorous detail what has caused them to make those estimates, they let us know their assumptions and their methods.
Why? So we can question them and challenge them. Like I said before, and which you failed to understand, no one knows the exact population of the United States, or the exact population of the city they are living in. It is not possible, that doesn’t mean that making estimates makes the estimators frauds or liars. If you can demonstrate that there is something fraudulent or deliberately deceptive about their estimates, then have at it.
Otherwise, all we have is someone who doesn’t understand the concept of making informed estimations. No one has ever said there was a census at contact, and until you demonstrate evidence of it you have no reason to continue posting in this thread.
I will also reiterate that even the encylcopedia you linked to was not even a cite, because the portion you used as evidence is not available in Google books.
And even still you have yet to put forth any real evidence that undermines the claims.
I mean, I could just say:
The population of the Americas at contact was 5 billion, and since you’re totally unwilling to actually provide a citation to undermine that and establish a counter claim, we can just assume that such a ludicrous claim stands up to the best scrutiny pinguin has to offer.
Essentially every citation you’ve given us is:
Vague - Meaning you say it says one thing, but the citation is not given in a way that we can cross check it easily so that we can actually match what you’re saying it says to what it actually says.
Incomplete - Generally if you’re going to use a citation to support your argument you actually clearly associate a factual assertion you are making with the citation you are using the support it. In an academic setting this citation would, if it was a long paper or book, page numbers from which you are citing. Citing an entire Encyclopedia and not telling us which article you are taking exception with, and then linking to a page on Google books which cannot be displayed is a prime example of an incomplete cite.
In a different language - Oddly the only complete citations I have seen from you have been the personal chronicle of de Vaca, which you initially tried to present only in Spanish. We found English translations easily and showed that it actually contradicts your claims in many ways you have yet to acknowledge or meaningfully rebut. The only examples I’ve seen where you have given us good, easy to navigate to, easy to access cites have been 100% in Spanish (such as the PDF you linked earlier.) Since you knew before you registered your name here that this was an English language board, I can only suspect you are doing this because you hope no one here (even the bilingual individuals) will go through the trouble of meaningfully vetting your Spanish language cites. Since you haven’t generated any cites that don’t have one of the three major problems I’ve listed in English, I can only conclude the reason your only complete cites are coming in Spanish is because you are unable to actually find anything supporting your contentions in the entire English speaking world–which is the world of scientific publications and academic papers.
I see no reason to repeat it again, but I will because it doesn’t cost me anything to do it: You have made a primary claim that there is a major religious movement of scientists who are committed to making false claims about the number of native Americans pre-contact.
You do not get to ask us for a bunch of cites to prove your argument wrong, in a debate when you make a claim you are the one who has to back it up. You make insulting posts, you randomly pick out words from people’s arguments and never address them fully, and you spew out cites that very often it looks like you have not read and do not understand (because sometimes they even contradict you directly.)
Additionally, you say any person who makes specific claims about percentage of dead, total number of Native Americans or et cetera is a liar/nutcase because those things are “unknowable.” However, the three scholars you have used as one of your few technical supports for your claims all did exactly that: made such estimations. Are Rosenblat and et al. also frauds? Since they are also making claims about things that are unknowable?
But why would you ask that question except in ignorance and illogic? The longhouses are identified by the post hole foundations that remain for centuries.
Why do you, (illogically, and in apparent ignorance), presume that the houses are temporary in nature? Houses in the tropics probably last fewer years than those in the temperate zones, but all are usually built to last for the life of a family. When the upper portions of the house fall into ruin, the foundations typically last. Mayan houses appear to have been built of beds of sascab, so they might also provide archaeologists with the numbers and sizes of houses in a community.
You see, one of the problem here really seems to be a lack of understanding of the archaeology and how it works. A potential ally of yours in this debate is Dean Snow, who has done extensive archaeological work reconstructing pre-contact populations of Mohawks through his Mohawk Valley Project papers published in the late 1980’s through the 1990’s. Based on his work he estimates a 1634 population ( pre-the first recorded smallpox epidemic in Iroquois country ) of Mohawks at 7,700, with a total Iroquois nation of ~22,000 out of 95,000 northern Iroquoian people. He seems to have revised down heavily from his original proposed numbers in 1980 and based on his research he seems to have come to the conclusion that a pre-contact epidemic sweeping through North America is unlikely and that the “low counter” estimates are more likely to be accurate for NA.
I have a problem with him extrapolating so widely from his Mohawk research, but that argument aside, from what I can glean he generally seems to support your preferred numbers in NA, or something closer to them anyway. He does however support massive die off from disease post-contact, which it would appear was fairly well documented among the Iroquois.
But you would dismiss his extensive research, which overall would tend to favor you, based on an unwillingness to accept archaeological reconstructions of past settlement? That just doesn’t seem logical to me, especially as you haven’t really argued why his is a bad technique, other than the argument that wood structures are impermanent. Wood is impermanent, but settlements leave all sorts of clues that if aren’t exactly permanent, tend to be very, very long-lived.
What’s the point of me linking to journal articles and conference proceedings if you aren’t on JSTOR or at a decent university library to read them? You do realise a Google Books search isn’t going to cut it, right? They only let you read, like, 20% of the book.
But I notice you haven’t addressed my other, far more important point: what is your expertise in evaluating archaeological articles, anyway? These are *not *articles written for the layperson. If you don’t have a minimum of training, you’re not really in a position to evaluate what are data and what is “number crunching”, are you?
For instance, if you had the least bit of archaeological knowledge, even such knowledge as Wikipedia could gain you, you’d know that you didn’t actually *need *a single surviving scrap of wood (even though wood gets preserved all the fucking time) to determine the dimensions and layout of a longhouse. So yes, your point was plainly, fully, utterly ignorant of archaeology.
Yes, but you refuse to accept any explanation that involves diseases. This is like asking someone how the tides work but forbidding them from bringing up the moon.
I also don’t get why you think there weren’t any wars between Native Americans and Britain/France/The USA. Hell, even the Republic of Texas managed to pick a fight with the Native Americans and they only lasted as a country for a decade. Granted you’re not an American and it’s not something most Americans like to talk about in any case (cause we did some fairly terrible things as a nation) but if you’re really interested in this sort of thing I’d think you’d have looked it up.
Collectively they’re sometimes called the American Indian Wars but they’re really dozens of seperate wars and massacres spread out over nearly 300 years. One of the biggest stains on our history is the Trail of Tears where the USA forcibly relocated about 46,000 people so we could take their land. We would have marched more of them along but the Seminoles won the Seminole Wars. After the Third Seminole War we kind of gave up trying to kick them out of Florida.
Instead you get increasingly bizzare theories like half of North America being unpopulated or communities so small and so distant that they should have all been cross-eyed flipper mutants from continual inbreeding.
I care for the actual truth. I am tired of the endless string of fantasies and fantastic theories that prevent people from knowing the real past of the Americas.
I want to know what really happened at contact, how it really was. How much crime but also how much friendship and love, existed among invaders and invaded.
I am not European or Indian supremacist at all. It can’t be, because I descend from both peoples.
It is not fraudulent, of course. Except if the excess of entusiasm make people to believe the figures are based in strong evidence, rather than in deductions.
For instance, saying that a population declined “80%” in the Hispaniola is dishonest. Particularly, when recent studies have shown local populations still keep a large percentage of Amerindian genetics on them.
What the hell - I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll take another stab at this.
This “sect”, or “virtual religion”? IT DOES NOT EXIST, outside of your own mind. You have shown absolutely no reason to believe that these scientists are incorrect, deluded, making stuff up, or anything else.
You have successfully demonstrated that many scientists have estimated population levels to be higher than you apparently believe to be the case. Bravo. Well done, sir.
What you have utterly failed to do - and read this part very carefully, please - is to give any substantive reason or evidence that shows WHY you believe these numbers to be wrong. Perhaps an example would be helpful:
Good argument: “I believe Professor X’s numbers, published in paper Y in journal Z, to be overinflated, because Book A, written by Dr. B, who has 43 years of experience in statistics, shows that failing to properly account for factor Q can lead to a bias in conclusions when using method P. Professor X appears to be using method P, as detailed in the methods section of his paper, but does not appear to have accounted for factor Q.”
Bad argument: “These numbers contradict my personal belief, and therefore they are wrong, and the researchers who published them are liars and have a secret agenda and are deliberately devoted to spreading misinformation!!”
And, by the way, the different lethality rates of various diseases in different populations is hardly a difficult problem. The diseases were endemic in European population, meaning that Europeans had lived with and adapted to those diseases for thousands of years. Resistance inevitably develops under those conditions. Native Americans were immunologically naive toward those particular diseases and thus had little to no natural resistance. As to why Europeans were able to infect Native Americans, and not the other way around, that’s an interesting question, and one which is addressed at length in the SDMB’s favorite book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond.
I look forward to your detailed explanation as to why he’s wrong, too.
Now, then. Anyone have any windmills that need tilted?