1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [54]
As a result, Dobyns said, all colonial population estimates were too low. Many of them, put together just after epidemics, would have represented population nadirs, not approximations of precontact numbers. From a few incidents in which before and after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died. To estimate native numbers before Columbus, one thus had to multiply census figures from those times by a factor of twenty or more. The results obtained by this procedure were, by historical standards, stunningly high.
Historians had long wondered how many Indians lived in the Americas before contact. “Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census at Hispaniola in 1496,” Denevan, the Beni geographer, has written, “it remains one of the great inquiries of history.” Early researchers’ figures were, to put it mildly, informally ascertained. “Most of them weren’t even ballpark calculations,” Denevan told me. “No ballpark was involved.” Only in 1928 did the first careful estimate of the indigenous population appear. James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution, combed through colonial writings and government documents to conclude that in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Alfred L. Kroeber, the renowned Berkeley anthropologist, built upon Mooney’s work in the 1930s. Kroeber cut back the tally still further, to 900,000—a population density of less than one person for every six square miles. Just 8.4 million Indians, Kroeber suggested, had lived in the entire hemisphere.
Recognizing that his continent-wide estimate did not account for regional variation, Kroeber encouraged future scholars to seek out and analyze “sharply localized documentary evidence.” As he knew, some of his Berkeley colleagues were already making those analyses. Geographer Carl Sauer published the first modern estimate of northwest Mexico’s pre-Columbian population in 1935. Meanwhile, physiologist Sherburne F. Cook investigated the consequences of disease in the same area. Cook joined forces with Woodrow W. Borah, a Berkeley historian, in the mid-1950s. In a series of publications that stretched to the 1970s, the two men combed through colonial financial, census, and land records. Their results made Kroeber uneasy. When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India.
“Historians and anthropologists did not, however, seem to be paying much attention” to Cook and Borah, Dobyns wrote. Years later, his work, coupled with that of Denevan, Crosby, and William H. McNeill, finally made them take notice. Based on their work and his own, Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
According to a 1999 estimate from the United Nations, the earth’s population in the beginning of the sixteenth century was about 500 million. If Dobyns was right, disease claimed the lives of 80 to 100 million Indians by the first third of the seventeenth century. All these numbers are at best rough approximations, but their implications are clear: the epidemics killed about one out of every five people on earth. According to W. George Lovell, a geographer at Queen’s University