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Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. David Henige. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. 532 pp.
The contention that initial contacts between Native Americans and Europeans resulted in a disastrous and unprecedented demographic collapse in native populations has become conventional wisdom in anthropology. Research calculating the impacts of these early "virgin soil" epidemics in the Americas frequently estimate mortality rates as high as 80 or 90%. Although we have become accustomed to such estimates, the methodological and epistemological bases of these calculations have rarely been examined in detail. The introduction of European diseases among native peoples most certainly resulted in increased rates of illness and death, but how confident can we be in these mortality estimates when the present volume suggests that every empirically significant figure upon which they are based is no better than an educated guess? How much faith can we place in these numbers when even precontact populations (necessary to establish baselines for mortality calculations) must be estimated from sketchy, incomplete, and often errorridden contact period documents? In truth, as the title of this book suggests, we have often accepted uncritically what are essentially numbers from nowhere.
Henige attacks these issues with a thorough examination of the methodologies and epistemologies employed in the construction of precontact population estimates for the cultures of the southeastern United States, Mexico, and Andean South America. In so doing, he exposes the widespread presence...