It’s lots of fun to keep us all excited, isn’t it?
This should be interesting, since Henige has the slight flaw of never giving an actual number he will accept in his book or in subsequent papers. He just reiterates that the assumptions are wrong and so are the extrapolations from them.
Which may certainly be true. But if true, it’s just as true for the Low Counters.
Nothing like a good Friday Night Fight over data, though. 
This statement proves that you’re a geek ;).
I agree. There’s some larger point he’s working toward. I suspect he wants the “death from disease” numbers to be low because that implies the drop in population was an accidental side effect of the European arriving in the New World. I think rather he wants to advance the idea that what happened to the Native Americans was deliberate genocide through murder, forced interbreeding, and cultural suppression.
This all starts back here.
If we wait a bit we can have a good Good Friday night fight.
How does that happen? Let’s take your 20 million number. Let’s say it’s an even split North/South. That means that the population density of North America is 1 person for every .95 square miles. A village of 100 people is now literally a couple hundred miles away from their neighbor at best. It takes over a week to visit between them.
How is it even remotely possible to deplete any food source at that scale?
All of the above (except maybe the forced interbreeding). At least in the territory of the US, it went like: disease wipes out large % of native population -> subsequent European settlement results in near genocide and cultural suppression of those that survived.
Yes, but I think that he’s suggesting the Indians killed by disease were relatively few, making the deliberate genocide all the more extreme. And also that the English were particularly ruthless in this regard, which accounts for the low Native American populations in North America relative to Central and South America. I suspect this is a prelude to a larger political critique of the English-speaking parts of the Americas vis-a-vis the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking parts.
I think you are probably right. It is like a bad historical novel being written on an installment plan.
Yes. I originally had that in my post, too, but deleted it.
That’s readily explained by Mexico, Central America, and South America having far higher populations to start with. The occasional urban populations in what is now the U.S. never even come remotely close to matching the Aztecs, the Mayans, or the Incans in either numbers, productivity, or longevity.
I’m certainly not making a case for the English, or the Spanish, or the Portuguese, or even the French (who were probably the best) being kind in their dealings with the Indians, but there are perfectly good reasons why the highly concentrated, urbanized, and civilized natives fared better following European contact.
Please, don’t expect that for me. The Portuguese were a lot blodier than the Spaniards. And, indeed, with respect to theirs impact on Indians, French and Spaniards are in a different cathegory than British and Portuguese.
But that is another topic. My only point here is that the work of the “experts” is lousy, to say the least. Here are some of the estimations:
http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poblaci%C3%B3n_de_Am%C3%A9rica_precolombina&printable=yes
I believe in the calculations of Angel Rosenblat, who is an outstanding expert, and also in the calculations of Kroeber and Steward. These experts weren’t influences with the modern bacterian fashion to increase the numbers to fit the theory.
Here are theirs figures of Kroeber, Rosenblat and Steward, respectively.
USA
Canada : 900.000, 1.000.000, 1.000.000
Mexico: 3.200.000, 4.500.000, 4.500.000
Central America: 100.000, 800.000, 740.000
Caribbean: 200.000, 300.000, 220.000
Andes: 3.000.000, 4.750.000, 6.130.000
South American lowlands: 1.000.000, 2.030.000, 2.900.000
**Total Americas: 8.400.000, 13.380.000, 15.490.000
**
Well, you’re no fun.
We already knew that you were a Low Counter or minimalist. Everybody agreed that a range of population estimates existed, from low to high. Posting that you agreed with the Low Counters was a foregone conclusion, not an argument in itself. The question we’ve all been asking is why you discount the evidence for a series of epidemics.
Giving a link to a Wikipedia article, whether in Spanish or English, that discusses the entire range is not even a cite, however. (There seems to be no equivalent article in English. Others can electronically translate it or go to Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, which is nothing by comparison.) It’s odd that you would link to an article that takes the dispute very seriously, as good scientific argument of the best kind, when you seem to believe that anything that doesn’t take your stance is pseudoscience.
Just to provide something to the discussion, however, see this rebuttal to Rosenblat that wonders why he also discounts or ignores what appears to be reasonable evidence for a major smallpox epidemic in 1620. It is written by the same Robert McCaa I cited earlier.
The rest of the article is devoted to what he sees as evidence for the epidemic.
You cannot make accusations of number-crunching and then support authors who ignore “the best documented case of a virgin soil epidemic” without explaining why and how they make their case.
I’m going to stop here. I thought it would be hard for you to make a case, but I thought that you would at least try. Repeating over and over that you agree with the minimalists is not a case. It’s not an argument. It’s where you started. We haven’t gotten anywhere.
I never discounted the evidence of epidemics. Why I have been arguing all along is about the impact of those epidemics. A falling from 6 to 4 millions people in the population of Mexico is something tragic, but that I can accept. It is about the same impact that the Black Death in Europe during the 14th century. But if some “expert” claim the decline is from 100 millions to 5, or something like that, I won’t buy it.
Besides, everybody knows those exagerated numbers were developed by the liberal, marihuana generation… So, no wonder.
You haven’t actually offered a reason to accept your personal preference for one expert over another “expert.” Neither have you established a standard for distinguishing experts from “experts,” other than your personal preference for their conclusions.
Seems like the only experts you think are lousy are the ones you don’t agree with.
Actually, nobody knows this. You’re embarrassing yourself. Cook got his Ph.D. in 1925. He was writing major papers on the population of Mexico in the 1940s. Borah was the young one. He was born in 1912. The work of Cook and Borah that started the maximalist movement was produced by the early 1960s. It had to be. Cook retired in 1966.
Actually, I think he’s given a clear answer, and it’s reasonable if you don’t know much about epidemics. My rephrase of the OP:
[Channelling pinguin]
How could a disease like smallpox with a 30% mortality rate in Europe have a 90% mortality rate in the Americas? I mean, that’s just so crazy, it’s got to be wrong. And if that’s wrong, maybe everything they say about the pre-Columbian population and its decline is wrong too. I think it’s all wrong.[/Channelling pinguin]
I took medical anthropology in college, and it was all explained clearly, logically, and reasonably. I wouldn’t be able to explain it here, but trust me, pinguin, there is a lot of solid science behind that fact, and it IS true that a disease that killed off 30% of Europeans could kill 90% of an unexposed population.
OK. The task to know the population of all the Americas is huge, but at least I can check the figures against the population of my own country at contact.