1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [58]
Worse, the figures have enormous margins of error. Rudolph Zambardino, a statistician at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, in England, has pointed out that the lack of direct data forces researchers into salvos of extrapolation. To approximate the population of sixteenth-century Mexico, for example, historians have only the official counts of casados (householders) in certain areas. To calculate the total population, they must adjust that number by the estimated average number of people in each home, the estimated number of homes not headed by a casado (and thus not counted), the estimated number of casados missed by the census takers, and so on. Each one of these factors has a margin of error. Unfortunately, as Zambardino noted, “the errors multiply each other and can escalate rapidly to an unacceptable magnitude.” If researchers presented their estimates with the proper error bounds, he said, they would see that the spread is far too large to constitute “a meaningful quantitative estimate.”
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, scientists say. Other episodes of mass fatality are abundantly documented: the Black Death in Europe, the post-collectivization famine in the Soviet Union, even the traffic in African slaves. Much less data support the notion that Old World bacteria and viruses turned the New World into an abattoir.*10 Such evidence as can be found lies scribbled in the margins of European accounts—it is, as Crosby admitted, “no better than impressionistic.”
“Most of the arguments for the very large numbers have been theoretical,” Ubelaker told me. “But when you try to marry the theoretical arguments to the data that are available on individual groups in different regions, it’s hard to find support for those numbers.” Archaeologists, he said, keep searching for the settlements in which those millions of people supposedly lived. “As more and more excavation is done, one would expect to see more evidence for [dense populations] than has thus far emerged.” Dean R. Snow, of Pennsylvania State, repeatedly examined precontact sites in eastern New York and found “no support for the notion that ubiquitous pandemics swept the region.” In the skeptics’ view, Dobyns, and other High Counters (as proponents of large pre-Columbian numbers have been called) are like people who discover an empty bank account and claim from its very emptiness that it once contained millions of dollars. Historians who project large Indian populations, Low Counter critics say, are committing the intellectual sin of arguing from silence.
Given these convincing rebuttals, why have the majority of researchers nonetheless become High Counters? In arguing that Indians died at anomalously high rates from European diseases, are researchers claiming that they were somehow uniquely vulnerable? Why hypothesize the existence of vast, super-deadly pandemics that seem unlike anything else in the historical record? The speed and scale of the projected losses “boggle the mind,” observed Colin G. Calloway, a historian at Dartmouth—one reason, he suggested, that researchers were so long reluctant to accept them. Indeed, how can one understand losses of such unparalleled scope? And if the European entrance into the Americas five centuries ago was responsible for them,