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| 1991 Information Please Almanac | Livi-Bacci Concise History of World Population, 2nd, 1997 | Colin McEvedy Atlas of World Population History 1978 | United Nations 1999 | |
| BCE 400 | 153 | |||
| CE 1 | 252 | 170 | 300 | |
| 200 | 257 | 190 | ||
| 400 | 190 | |||
| 600 | 208 | 200 | ||
| 800 | 220 | |||
| 1000 | 253 | 265 | 310 | |
| 1200 | 400 | 360 | ||
| 1400 | 442 | 360 | ||
| 1500 | 461 | 425 | 500 | |
| 1600 | 578 | 545 | 600 | |
| 1650 | 470 | 545 | ||
| 1700 | 680 | 610 | ||
| 1750 | 694 | 771 | 720 | 791 |
| 1800 | 954 | 900 | 980 | |
| 1850 | 1091 | 1241 | 1200 | 1260 |
| 1900 | 1571 | 1634 | 1625 | 1650 |
| 1950 | 2513 | 2520 | 2500 | 2520 |
| 1990 | 5321 | 5270 | ||
| 2000 | 6236 | 6060 |
The problem, of course, is that by the time that the Europeans got
around to
counting the Indians, there were a lot fewer to count
I've graphed the estimates chronlogically to show that the passage
of time
and the gathering of more information is still not leading toward a
consensus. Over the past 75 years, estimates have bounced around wildly
and ended up right
back where they started -- around 40 million.
I've also graphed the population of Europe in 1500 because this is
magic
number to which many of the estimates aspire. Native American history
is
traditionally treated as marginal -- a handful of primitive kingdoms
that were
easily overwhelmed by the most dynamic civilization on Earth -- but if
it could
somehow be proven that the Americas had even more people than Europe,
then
history would be turned upside down. The European conquest could be
treated as
the tail wagging the dog, like the Barbarian invasions of Rome, a small
fringe
of savages decending on the civilized world, wiping out or enslaving
the bulk of
humanity.
The advocates of large numbers, however, are often their own worst
enemies. On page 33 of American Holocaust, David Stannard
declares, "[P]robably
about 25,000,000 people, or about seven times the number living in all
of
England, were residing in and around the great Valley of Mexico at the
time of
Columbus's arrival in the New World".
Now, I've been to England, and I can vouch that the English have
left their
mark on the land. You can't throw a brick in England without hitting
some relic
of the earlier inhabitants -- castles, cathedrals, Roman walls and
roads,
Stonehenge, etc. -- not to mention books, tools, coins, weapons and all
the
little pieces of the past that turn up anytime someone plows a field or
cleans
their attic.
Now go back and read what Stannard has written. I'm sure that the
point
that he's trying to make is that since there were seven times
as many
Mexicans as English, truly the Mexicans were seven times more civilized
than the
English, so if anyone deserved to be called "savages", it's the
English. Unfortunately, the point that nags at me is﹃If there were
seven
times as many people in Mexico, shouldn't there be seven times as many
relics in
Mexico?﹄Yes, I've read the archaeological reports that discuss
irrigation
systems, and I've seen the big, colorful picture books showing
jungle-encrusted
ruins of ancient pyramids, but the fact is that seven times the
population of
England should have left behind a lot more stuff than
that.
I find the estimates for Virginia even more awkward because I live
here. Stannard estimates the population of Powhatan's Confederation at
100,000, yet
there's not a single site in the Virginia Tidewater that remotely hints
at the
complex infrastructure necessary to support even half this number.
There's not
one ruin of any permanent building. Artifacts of any kind are rare --
barely
even a single burial mound worth pilfering. And it's not like there's
some
forgotten ghost town deep in the desert or jungle waiting to be
discovered. This
is Virginia. It's been settled, plowed and excavated for 400 years.
I also find it difficult to believe that the Europeans obliterated
all
traces of the earlier inhabitants. After all, I've been to Germany too.
I've
seen that bombed-out cities still have a substantial presence of the
past, and I
doubt that the conquistadores could be more destructive than a flock of
B-17s. [n.3]
In any case, the median of all the estimates charted above is 40
million. It's the type of number that half the experts would consider
impossibly big, and
the other half would consider impossibly low, so it's probably exactly
right.
And then, within a century of the European Contact, the hemispheric
population plunged to a fairly well-proven residue of less than 10
million. How
many of these deaths count as indictable atrocities?
