The estimated native populations at the time of Columbus in aggregate and local densities are vitally important as indicators of the overall impact of Europe on America. If there were 50 million or more aboriginal peoples in the Americas in 1492, as some ethnographers, geographers, demographers, and historians now suggest, what happened to them? Regardless of when and where contact occurred, all native communites, large and small suffered loss.
[...]
Until recently, estimates of the pre-Columbian populatin of the Americas were low. For example, Alfred Kroeber in the 1930s placed the total native population of the Americas in 1492 at 8.4 million. That number has more to do with apologetics than with rigorous scientific analysis or statistical common sense. His estimate for North America north of Mexico was 900,000. In other words, the half million Native Americans reported in the 1940 census suggested to Kroeber a decline of 50 per cent over the preceding 450 years. In itself, those numbers posed serious questions about the European impact on native populations. Perhaps lower birthrates and susceptibility to disease, a lower life expectancy, and racial mixing, assimilation, and under reproting could explain the outcome. But as the fields of ethnography, anthropology, and historical demography grew more sophisticated, estimates of the 1592 population rose dramatically to the point where figures of 50 million to as many as 112 million were being suggested for the Americas as a whole. By the 1990s, a pre-Columbian population estimate of about 50 million was beginning to seem acceptable to scholars. Estimates for the area north of Mexico now run from about a million to 4.4 million natives. The latter figure is more generally accepted, although the debate on numbers continues. The frequently revised and wide range of estimates should caution us about their imprecision. Still, the higher numbers now accepted add controversy when considered with the 1940 ntive populatin of a half million. Now, the United States and its predecessor, the British American colonies, are implicated in reducing from >i>four to eight times<i> as much of the native population as Kroeber's lighter figures had suggested.
-- Eric Nellis,
An Empire of Regions: A Brief History of Colonial British America (University of Toronto Press, 2010)
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Apollonius
