ENVIRONMENT AND CULTURE IN ANCIENT AMERICA 11
What were the decisive factors in the qualita-
tive leap from the chiefdom to the state in Ancient
America? Some regard warfare leading to territo-
rial conquest as the prime mover in this process;
others believe that the state arose primarily as a
coercive mechanism to resolve internal confl ict be-
tween economically stratifi ed classes. Others stress
the importance of religious ideology in promoting
centralized control by elites over populations and
their resources. All these factors played a part in
the process of state formation.
What appears certain is that, as just noted,
certain environmental conditions are more favor-
able than others for the formation of early states,
especially of their highest form, the empire. Indeed,
it is more than doubtful that such states could have
arisen in such natural settings as the grassy plains
of North America, whose hard sod was impervious
to digging sticks, or the Amazonian rain forests,
usually thought to be unsuitable for farming other
than transient slash-and-burn clearings.^1 Special-
ists often refer to the favored region that combined
the necessary environmental conditions for the
rise of states and empires as Nuclear America.
POPULATIONS IN 1492
As a result of research conducted by anthropologists
and historians, information on Ancient America
is growing at a rapid rate. Students are more im-
pressed with the complexity of the civilizations of
Ancient America and commonly compare them
with such advanced Old World cultures as ancient
Egypt and Mesopotamia. Recent studies of the popu-
lation history of Ancient America have contributed
to the rising respect for its cultural achievement. If
we assume, as many social scientists do, that popu-
lation density is correlated with a certain technolog-
ical and cultural level, then a high estimate of the
indigenous population in 1492 is in some measure
(^1) Archaeologists have recently found evidence at various
sites along the shores of the Amazon of complex socie ties
with elaborate pottery, raised fi elds, and large statues of
chiefs. But none of these ancient Amazonian societies
appear to have evolved beyond the chiefdom level, and
questions remain regarding their origin and the size of
their populations.
a judgment of its social achievement and of the colo-
nial societies that arose on its ruins.
The subject of the pre-Conquest population
of the Americas, however, has produced sharp,
sometimes bitter, debate. The fi rst Spanish arrivals
in the New World reported very dense populations.
Some early estimates of the native population of
Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Re-
public) ranged as high as 2 and 4 million. The fa-
mous missionary known as Motolinía, who arrived
in Mexico in 1524, offered no numbers but wrote
that the inhabitants were as numerous as “the
blades of grass in a fi eld.” Great densities were also
reported for the Inca Empire and Central America.
In the twentieth century, scholars who assessed
these early reports tended to divide into two groups.
Some found them generally credible; in the 1920s
the American archaeologist H. J. Spinden and the
German archaeologist Karl Sapper, taking account
of indigenous technology and resources, came up
with the same overall totals of 40 to 50 million for
the whole New World. Others, like the U.S. anthro-
pologist A. L. Kroeber and the Argentine scholar
Angel Rosenblat, concluded that this technology
could not support the densities cited by the early
sources and that the Spaniards had consciously or
unconsciously exaggerated the number of people
they found to enhance their own achievements
as conquerors or missionaries. Kroeber produced
a hemispheric estimate of 8,400,000; Rosenblat
raised this fi gure to 13,385,000.
Beginning in the 1940s, three professors at the
University of California, Woodrow Borah, Sher-
burne Cook, and Lesley B. Simpson, opened a new
line of inquiry into the demographic history of An-
cient America with a remarkable series of studies
that focused on ancient Mexico. Using a variety of
records and sophisticated statistical methods, the
Berkeley school projected backward from a base es-
tablished from Spanish counts for tribute purposes
and arrived at a population fi gure of 25.3 million
for central Mexico on the eve of the Conquest.
Later, Cook and Borah extended their inquiries
into other areas. Particularly striking are their con-
clusions concerning the population of Hispaniola
in 1492. Previous estimates of the island’s popula-
tion had ranged from a low of 600,000 to the 3 to 4
million proposed by the sixteenth-century Spanish