12 CHAPTER 1 ANCIENT AMERICA
friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, but those high fi gures
had long been regarded as the exaggerations of a
“Black Legend” enthusiast. After a careful study of
a series of statements and estimates on the aborigi-
nal population of Hispaniola made between 1492
and 1520, Cook and Borah not only confi rmed the
reliability of Las Casas’s fi gures but offered even
higher probable fi gures of from 7 to 8 million.
Aside from Borah’s suggestion in 1964 that
the population of America in 1492 may have been
“upwards of 100 million,” the Berkeley school did
not attempt to estimate the pre-Columbian popula-
tion of the continent as a whole. A systematic effort
of this kind was made by the U.S. anthropologist
Henry Dobyns. Assuming that the indigenous pop-
ulation was reduced by roughly 95 percent after
contact with the Europeans, primarily as a result of
new diseases to which they had no acquired immu-
nity, he estimated a pre-Conquest population of be-
tween 90 and 112 million; of this fi gure he assigned
30 million each to central Mexico and Peru.
The fi ndings and methods of the Berkeley
school and Dobyns have provoked strong dissent;
two notable dissenters from those high fi ndings are
William T. Sanders and David Henige. In general,
however, the evidence of the last half-century of
research in this fi eld quite consistently points to
larger populations than were accepted previously.
One effort to generalize from this evidence, taking
account both of the fi ndings of the Berkeley school
and its critics, is that of William T. Denevan, who
postulates a total population of 57.3 million—a far
cry from Kroeber’s 1939 estimate of 8.4 million.
Scholars have also attempted to establish
long-range population trends in Ancient America.
There is general agreement that on the whole, in
Woodrow Borah’s words, “American Indians had
relatively few diseases and, aside from natural di-
sasters such as fl oods or droughts causing crop
failures, seem to have enjoyed especially good
health.” Until 1492, their isolation protected them
from the unifi ed pool of diseases like smallpox,
measles, and typhus that had formed in the Old
World by the time of the Renaissance. What the
long-range perspective may have been, assuming
no European contact, is problematical. In many
areas, indigenous peoples had developed a system
that combined hunting-gathering and shifting
slash-and-burn agriculture, often based on the
corn-beans-squash triad, that was sustainable and
infl icted little damage on the ecosystem. The Taino
of the West Indies had developed a sophisticated
form of agriculture that was based on permanent
fi elds of knee-high mounds, called conucos, in which
were planted cassava, sweet potato, and various
beans and squashes. This method retarded erosion
and “gave the highest returns of food in continu-
ous supply by the simplest methods and modest
labor.” Little evidence exists of any population
pressure on food resources in such areas. On the
other hand, historical demographers have found
evidence of an approaching crisis in the Aztec Em-
pire; Borah gloomily observed, “By the close of the
fi fteenth century, the Indian population of central
Mexico was doomed even had there been no Euro-
pean conquests.” And scholars are now convinced
that population pressure on scant resources may
have played a major part in the collapse of the clas-
sic Maya civilization of Central America. The evi-
dence includes signs of chronic malnutrition, high
infant mortality, and a decline of population from
perhaps 12 million to a remnant of about 1.8 mil-
lion within 150 years. The crisis is linked to defor-
estation, loss of surface water, and overcultivated,
worn-out soils, among other factors.NUCLEAR AMERICA
Mexico and Peru were the centers of an extensive,
high-culture area that included central and south-
ern Mexico, Central America, and the Andean zone
of South America. This is the heartland of Ancient
America, the home of its fi rst agricultural civiliza-
tions. Evidence of early village life and the basic
techniques of civilization—agriculture, pottery,
weaving—has been found in almost every part of
this territory.
In recent decades, this region has been the
scene of major archaeological discoveries. Excava-
tions in the Valley of Mexico, southern Mexico and
its gulf coast, the high plateau of Bolivia, and the
desert sands of coastal Peru have all uncovered the
remains of splendid temples, mighty fortresses, large
cities and towns, and pottery and textiles of exqui-
site artistry. Combining the testimony of the spade
with that provided by historical accounts, special-