american-holocaust

ON PRE-COLUMBIAN SETTLEMENT AND POPULATION 267Recognizing that all these estimates were founded upon a great deal ofspeculation and very little knowledge of local conditions, Kroeber suggestedthat work begin on detailed region-by-region analyses. The chargewas accepted, particularly by a group of scholars from various disciplinesat Kroeber's own University of California at Berkeley, most notably CarlSauer, Sherburne F. Cook, and Woodrow Borah. The result was a pathbreakingrevolution in historical demographic technique that in time becameknown as the "Berkeley School." Examining enormous amounts ofdata from a great variety of sources-ranging from church and governmentarchives listing tribute, baptismal, and marriage records, to the environmentalcarrying capacities of known cultivated lands and much more-­these researchers concentrated their efforts at first on California and centralMexico, extending their inquiries later to regions as diverse as NewEngland, the Yucatan, and the island of Hispaniola. 20The results of these efforts were the most detailed and methodologicallysophisticated population estimates ever conducted for the pre-EuropeanAmericas. And the figures they turned up were astonishing: 25,000,000people for central Mexico alone and 8,000,000 people for Hispaniola arejust two of the more striking re-calculations by members of the BerkeleySchool. By the early 1960s the accumulated body of such studies was sufficientto allow Woodrow Borah to assert that the pre-Columbian populationof the Americas was probably "upwards of one hundred million."Soon after, anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns published a famous watershedanalysis of all the major studies that had been conducted up to that time.His conclusion was that North and South America contained between90,000,000 and more than 112,000,000 people before the coming of theSpanish. 21 Comparative figures for selected other parts of the world at thissame time put the population of Europe at 60,000,000 to 70,000,000;Russia at 10,000,000 to 18,000,000; and Africa at 40,000,000 to72,000,000. 22Subsequently, since the mid-1960s, scores of scholars from around theworld have published new pre-Columbian population estimates of unprecedentedsophistication for nations, tribes, and regions from northernmostCanada to southern Chile--and for most other major habitation sites lyingin between. One after another they have confirmed the general principlethat the populations of individual locales were much higher in pre-Columbiantimes than heretofore suspected. Conservative-minded historical demographershave been reluctant to extrapolate from these findings to overallhemispheric projections, but even the more cautious among them generallynow concede that the total population of the Americas prior to 1492 wasin the neighborhood of 75,000,000 persons, about 10 percent of whomlived north of Mexico. Others-including Dobyns-have begun to suspectthat Dobyns's earlier maximum of more than 112,000,000 may have beentoo low and that a figure of about 145,000,000 would be a closer approximationof the true number for the hemisphere, with 18,000,000 or so the