How many were in America before Columbus, and what were they like?

[yellowtail3]

Been reading a very interesting book on the subject, 1491, by Charles Mann. Include me in the 'high counters' - Mann's extraordinary book makes me wish I'd pursued more anthropology instead of getting sidetracked into history.

Excellent article by same author, published in The Atlantic shortly before the book. I remember reading it back then - I used to subscribe - and it piqued my interest. Read it, I guarantee you'll be glad you did:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/2445/

...a whole continent, pretty much de-populated by disease. I think it the worst catastrophe in history.

[briarpatch]

Good read. Thanks

[yellowtail3]

It is quite a story. At the end of his book, Mann puts forth the argument that American ideas of liberty and freedom have more to do with American Indians' views of same (that's where Locke & Rousseau got the ideas) than anything coming out of Europe. I think he may have a point (the linked article doesn't contain that argument, but it's in the book).

See reviews: http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059

some teasers:

Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.)

Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where."

Yeah, I think I'd have preferred to be an Injun...

The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson's history of Indian America, puts the comparison bluntly: "the western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more populous than Europe." Much of it was freer, too. Europeans, accustomed to the serfdom that thrived from Naples to the Baltic Sea, were puzzled and alarmed by the democratic spirit and respect for human rights in many Indian societies, especially those in North America. In theory, the sachems of New England Indian groups were absolute monarchs. In practice, the colonial leader Roger Williams wrote, "they will not conclude of ought ... unto which the people are averse."

Pre-1492 America wasn't a disease-free paradise, Dobyns says, although in his "exuberance as a writer," he told me recently, he once made that claim. Indians had ailments of their own, notably parasites, tuberculosis, and anemia. The daily grind was wearing; life-spans in America were only as long as or a little longer than those in Europe, if the evidence of indigenous graveyards is to be believed. Nor was it a political utopia—the Inca, for instance, invented refinements to totalitarian rule that would have intrigued Stalin. Inveterate practitioners of what the historian Francis Jennings described as "state terrorism practiced horrifically on a huge scale," the Inca ruled so cruelly that one can speculate that their surviving subjects might actually have been better off under Spanish rule.

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the trumped-up murder charges against him—or that's what my grandfather told me, anyway.

As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed "little intelligence in comparison to themselves." Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the "Savages" were disgusted by handkerchiefs: "They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground." The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?
Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment...

[Sourdough]

Very Interesting.  For decades I have wondered what happened to the Anastazi.  A very advanced group living in the Southwest.  History tells of their being, but not what happened to them.  They are the source of stories and oral history of the Native Americans living in the area, yet none claim to be decendents of the Anastazi.  They just vanished.  Could they have been wiped out by whiteman's disease before whiteman arrived?   

[yellowtail3]

..yet none claim to be decendents of the Anastazi.  They just vanished.  Could they have been wiped out by whiteman's disease before whiteman arrived?

Probably. While Anastazi aren't addressed directly, Mann indicates that might have been the case in the Southeast... thanks to Soto & those damned pigs...

According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia who spent fifteen years reconstructing the path of the expedition, Soto crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Memphis. It was a nervous passage: the Spaniards were watched by several thousand Indian warriors. Utterly without fear, Soto brushed past the Indian force into what is now eastern Arkansas, through thickly settled land—"very well peopled with large towns," one of his men later recalled, "two or three of which were to be seen from one town." Eventually the Spaniards approached a cluster of small cities, each protected by earthen walls, sizeable moats, and deadeye archers. In his usual fashion, Soto brazenly marched in, stole food, and marched out. After Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century.

Early in 1682 whites appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. One of them was Réné-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. The French passed through the area where Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted—La Salle didn't see an Indian village for 200 miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle's time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. Soto "had a privileged glimpse" of an Indian world, Hudson says. "The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled.

The question is, how did this happen?"The question is even more complex than it may seem. Disaster of this magnitude suggests epidemic disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of the contagion was very likely not Soto's army but its ambulatory meat locker: his 300 pigs. Soto's force itself was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his 600 soldiers long before they reached the Mississippi. But the same would not have held true for the pigs, which multiplied rapidly and were able to transmit their diseases to wildlife in the surrounding forest. When human beings and domesticated animals live close together, they trade microbes with abandon. Over time mutation spawns new diseases: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine rinderpest becomes measles. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals—they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck. In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk-drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. Swine alone can disseminate anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can transmit diseases to deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto's pigs would have had to wander off to infect the forest. Indeed, the calamity wrought by Soto apparently extended across the whole Southeast. The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization, centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto's army left, notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto's and La Salle's visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000—not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters," says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out."

[mcbammer]

Humans   of   somekind   were   here  ,  Im   always   finding   arrowheads &  pottery  pieces  on  my    families   farm.

[Victor3]

 That's a truely fascinating read (so much so that I read it through twice).
 
 We've always heard, "What could have happened to the Incas, Myans, etc. that caused them to vanish so quickly after building such advanced civilization over what appear to have been centuries?" Pathogens seem to be the logical answer.
 
 One thing though... There's plenty of clear evidence (Pyramids, cities, petroglyphs relating scientific principles, etc.) left by Central/South American people groups indicating very advanced societies that must have held large (but as of yet unknown numbers) populations to build/maintain. However, we've found little evidence to indicate that groups in North America were near as advanced as their neighbors to the South.
 
 If people did indeed originally walk over to North America somewhere near Sarah Palin's house and subsequently migrated Southward over centuries/millennia, one might assume that evidence for advanced people groups in large numbers should have been discovered in the Northerly latitudes by now.
 
 Although I find the "High Counter" arguments compelling, the theoretical nature of - and the little hard data available to support them - still leaves me wondering if they are correct...
 
 "I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni," says Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution. "Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking." Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that "you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want," he says. "It's really easy to kid yourself."
 
"Most of the arguments for the very large numbers have been theoretical," Ubelaker says in defense of low counters. "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 says, keep searching for the settlements in which those millions of people supposedly lived, with little success. "As more and more excavation is done, one would expect to see more evidence for dense populations than has thus far emerged." Dean Snow, the Pennsylvania State anthropologist, examined Colonial-era Mohawk Iroquois sites and found "no support for the notion that ubiquitous pandemics swept the region." In his view, asserting that the continent was filled with people who left no trace is like looking at an empty bank account and claiming that it must once have held millions of dollars.
 
"It's an absolutely unanswerable question on which tens of thousands of words have been spent to no purpose," Henige says. In 1976 he sat in on a seminar by William Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer. An "epiphanic moment" occurred when he read shortly afterward that scholars had "uncovered" the existence of eight million people in Hispaniola. Can you just invent millions of people? he wondered. "We can make of the historical record that there was depopulation and movement of people from internecine warfare and diseases," he says. "But as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to something like that—applying large figures like ninety-five percent—we're saying things we shouldn't say. The number implies a level of knowledge that's impossible."

One thing's for sure... We can "believe" whatever we want. We still only "know" a tiny fraction of what's actually happend during the course of human history.
 
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Palenque.html
 

[ironglow]

  There are some interesting perspectives often involved in many of these anthropological studies.  Clearly, there was something  remarkable going on in pre-Columbian, Central America.  I doubt we could ever say definitively, that many of the conjectures offered are incontravertable.  We each have a certain amount of preconceived notions concerning such subjects and anthropologists are as human as the next person.
  As monumental as the Aztec and Incan societies appear to have been, they also seem to have some glaring ironies or contradictions.  For example, there is no evidence they ever developed the common wheel.  It  would seem almost incomprehensible that an obviously clever culture would overlook such a simple device.
   It is undeniable that a very large population first dissapated, then were decimated.  By most accounts, it appears certain groups broke away from the central cities and built smaller (hidden?) cities in mountain fastness (e.g. Machu Picchu). Can we say with any great certitude exactly what cause the downfall of that civilization ? I think it unlikely, since there are so many possibilities; disease, Spanish depredations, upset of agriculture such as crop disease, interrupted  irrigation systems and overuse of soil.  There were some brutal practices by both royalty and the priesthood which could have led to internal or at least intertribal warfare.  The most popular hypothesis concerning Easter Island's original population, suggest this as the reason for it's disappearance.
  So often we find conclusions are based on a web of suppositions whereby if one point is disproven, the whole contention collapses.  I'm not saying this is true here, but so often entire book are based upon and written around the author's "wishful thinking".  Anthropology is not my forte, so anyone's opinion is as valuable..it's just my $.02.
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 From YT;
  " At the end of his book, Mann puts forth the argument that American ideas of liberty and freedom have more to do with American Indians' views of same (that's where Locke & Rousseau got the ideas) than anything coming out of Europe. I think he may have a point (the linked article doesn't contain that argument, but it's in the book)."
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
  This opinion by Mann, does enter into my course of studies and I respectfully disagree with him.  Frankly, that conclusion does smack of wishful thinking.  Yes, some Amerind cultures had a form of Democracy, notably the Iroquois confederacy located primarily in what is now NY State.  However, that culture was a matriarchial democracy, and thus doesn't hold water when compared to out constitutional form of government, which was more of a paternal republican form of government.
  More likely, our constitutional freedoms were engendered by the "great awakening", which commenced about 1720 and continued through the late 1800s. 
    Our freedoms did come from Europe, but in a manner which in some ways paralleled the Central American model. Europe long languished under an oppressive royalty and priesthood, much like the Central American situation.  There were renegade groups (heretics?) hiding in the mountain fastnesses, driven there by the dominant church and their accepted "royalty".
  With the advent of the printed Bible and soon thereafter the reformation, idea of the dignity of every man and the stirrings of liberty for all was reignited.
  Soon came Wycliffe, the Lollards etc., soon leading to the Seperatists (Pilgrims), our original New England colonists.  These Christians took Jesus' admonition as recorded by John, very seriously:
 
  " And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free"  (John 8:32)
 
      Shortly after European arrival, the wars started with local tribes..Pequot war, King Philip's war, continuing through the French & Indian war and the war of the revolution, where most tribes sided with our foe.  With this background and the savage depredations throughout the colonies, it is highly unlikely the framers would have borrowed much from the Indians.
  It is far more likely (IMO) that John & Sam Adams, Paul Revere etc would have taken their lead from the freedoms exhibited by the various, self-governed New England towns, while men such as Jefferson, Patrick Henry and the rest may have taken their lead from the virginia House of Burgesses.  A sterling example was Roger Williams' Rhode Island colony, which offered as complete a freedom as ever had been seen. Further evidence comes from the fact that the federal model follows the New England town model of republicanism as opposed to the pure democracy of the indian tribes.
   No, our forefathers had a plethora of models upon which to pattern our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, without resorting to the tribes who even at that time, were killing and scalping their fellow citizens living on the frontier.
 
  Just my 2 cents..take it or junk it..