What’s the generally-accepted estimate for the population of North America, prior to, say, Columbus and the subsequent European immigration?
I have one statement that says 90 million, though it’s less than an unbiased source.
Here, Cecil indicates that estimates spanned from 1 million to 80 million… which is a pretty large range. I think I could have guessed that.
His phrasing in the article suggests the four-to-eighteen-milion range is probably closest, but that’s an inference.
Obviously we don’t have a census, and the peoples themselves typically didn’t bother to keep track, so I realize it will be little more than a guess. But what’s the most-accepted range?
A while back I did some work on this question, but that research is both proprietary and no longer in my possession. The following is from memory and absolutely should not accepted as anything other than advice for further research.
There is one particular name you should stay away from. In the 1920s-1930s, a historical anthropologist by the name of A.L. Kroeber attempted to estimate the North American population at contact in 1492, and came up with a figure of approximately 1.1 million. That figure has been held up by many as the definitive estimate ever since. Kroeber’s estimates were based on contemporary estimates over widely separate time periods, and I think he also did some reverse-extrapolation from later, still-declining population figures.
What Kroeber didn’t do, unless I’m sadly mistaken, was factor in the possibility that European diseases almost certainly preceded a particular population’s contact with Europeans. When disease breaks out, most people don’t sit around waiting to die. Instead they run like hell, infect others who also run like hell, and so on. A lot of Kroeber’s estimates are based upon accounts of Europeans finding vast swaths of sparsely occupied territory, which were almost certainly depopulated by European diseases before any Europeans got there.
I think that the bottom line is that there is no concrete, unassailable population estimate for any of the Americas, but 1.1 million for North America is almost certainly an incorrectly low figure.
The Atlantic article credits this estimate to James Mooney in 1910. I recall that Alfred Kroeber’s work was mainly in languages; he was also the “keeper” of Ishi, the last living Yahi. Oh yeah, and he was Ursula K. LeGuin’s dad.
My archaeologist colleagues here in Panama tend to agree with the high estimates. They speculate that only now is Panama, with about three million people, getting back to the population levels it had in 1500. Analysis of pollen deposited in lakes shows that much of the lowlands was deforested, even in areas we now think of as pristine, such as the Darien “wilderness.”
If you read the accounts, when Balboa crossed to the Pacific, he did not hack his way through the jungle, he rode on horseback through corn fields. Likewise the first explorers to descend the Amazon found the banks lined with villages - villages that were gone by the time the next ones came through a century later. Betty Meggers, cited in the Atlantic article, I think is widely viewed as a dinosaur because of her out-dated views on low pre-Columbian population density in the Amazon.
While not a direct answer to the question, it does seem to indicate that roughly twelve million is a relatively-widely-accepted-as-being-fairly-close number.
Also very interesting the methods used to estimate- moving from an assumed 95% mortality to an assumed 96% mortality magically generates another two and a half million estimated persons…
