Today is the Winter Solstice, which makes it the seventeenth anniversary of this blog. Obviously it’s been much less active in recent years, but it’s not dead yet. I’ve been continuing to research my various projects and traveling to various places of interest, and I’ll continue to do posts intermittently about topics that strike my fancy. There will probably be a few coming up fairly soon based on my travels this year, in fact. (No promises, though!)
For now I just want to mention one site of particular interest on this day: Newgrange in Ireland. We did a family trip to Ireland this summer, and the prehistoric sites at the Brú na Bóinne in County Meath north of Dublin were the highlight of the trip for me. I’ll do a more extended post at some point about these fascinating ancient sites, but for now I’ll just note that Newgrange, the most famous of them, has a very famous winter solstice alignment in its central chamber. The tours do go into the chamber but don’t allow photography inside, so for this post I’ll have to content myself with a couple of exterior pictures. It’s very much worth visiting if you’re ever in Ireland though.
More than twenty years ago, when the world was experiencing a sense of chaos much like it is today, Kieran Healy wrote a very elegant blog post about Newgrange (which is where I first heard of it). The theme of this time of year being a time of darkness and fear, but also a time when the possibility of the light returning begins to shine through, still speaks to me and gives me hope. Happy Solstice.
Today is the summer solstice, on which I like to do posts on archaeoastronomy. I recently came across a very interesting article in the New York Times about recent research on ethnoastronomy among the Northern Athabascan (Dene) groups of Interior Alaska and northern Canada by Chris Cannon of the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who has a new book out that looks very interesting. The article is interesting not just for the research it describes but for the way it narrates Cannon’s process of learning from Native elders in a traditional way, in which knowledge is gradually imparted over time. The main focus is on his relationship with a particular elder, Paul Herbert of the Gwich’in community of Fort Yukon, Alaska.
The basic concept of the model of the night sky among the Gwich’in is that the vast majority of the night sky consists of a single constellation called Yahdii or the “The Traveler.” Various asterisms (subordinate groups of stars within the constellation) are known as body parts of Yahdii. He is conceived as essentially human in for but with a tail consisting of the Big Dipper. Past research generally conceived of “Yahdii” as only referring to the Big Dipper itself, but it’s clear from Cannon’s research that the whole constellation is much larger and serves as a system of reference used for timekeeping, navigation, and other purposes. Yahdii’s arms and legs sprawl across the sky, and his hands and feet reach to or below the horizon.
Cannon’s research was initially presented in a 2014 paper he co-authored with Gary Holton, then of the Alaska Native Language Center at UAF (now at the University of Hawai`i). He didn’t have quite as much knowledge of Yahdii then, as described in the Times article, but the basics of the whole-sky constellation concept were there. A key point this article makes is that, while past anthropology had generally considered the Northern Dene to have little knowledge of or interest in the sky, that idea is quite implausible given the dominating presence of the night sky in the long, dark Arctic winter.
Instead it appears that past investigators were stymied in part by doing their own research in the spring and summer, when the darkness of winter is replaced by the midnight sun and no stars are visible, and in part by the fact that in many Dene groups a lot of traditional knowledge has been lost. Unmentioned in this article, but implicit in the Times one, is the additional possibility that past anthropologists had not developed the relationships and trust for knowledgeable elders to share this information. Even for Cannon that trust was still building in 2014, as the acknowledgments to the paper cite the elders but not by name and note that they preferred to remain anonymous. In subsequent papers some of them, including Herbert, would be listed as co-authors.
One interesting thread that the 2014 paper does emphasize is the widespread nature of the concept of Yahdii in the Northern Dene world and perhaps beyond. It identifies direct cognates for the term Yahdii in 17 Northern Dene languages, as well as a loanword into the more distantly related Tlingit (apparently from a pretty early stratum of the Athabascan family, although the footnote explaining this is not very clear). Additionally, it finds that the concept of a whole-sky constellation in the form of a person is present in other Alaska Athabascan languages under other names. Interestingly, the division between the Yahdii term itself and the others seems to correlate with a more basic division in the Northern Dene languages, with Gwich’in and the other languages of eastern Alaska patterning with those to the east and south in Canada as opposed to the others further west in Alaska (Ahtna, Dena’ina, Koyukon, etc.).
Further afield, the whole-sky constellation itself doesn’t appear to be present in the well-documented astronomy of the Navajo of the Southern branch of the Athabascan family. However, the concept of dividing constellations into named body parts is used by the Navajo, which suggests that the underlying conceptual theme is likely quite old. Also, while the authors of this paper only note this in a brief discussion of cross-cultural comparisons, there is apparently a Zuni whole-sky constellation in human form. While the Zuni are a Pueblo people speaking an isolated language unrelated to the Athabascan family, they have had extensive contact with the Southern Athabascan Navajo and Apache (indeed the Spanish term “Apache” is a loanword from Zuni) and it is conceivable that this could have included this distinctive astronomical concept which was later lost by the Athabascans. Indeed, the Southern Athabascans are notable for the focus of their astronomy on stars rather than the sun and moon, which Pueblo peoples tend to emphasize more. Could this be a remnant of their ancient past in the far northern forest with its long, dark winters?
In any case, this is fascinating stuff. I’ll keep reading through the papers and probably order the book. Happy Solstice!
I’m currently in Bozeman, Montana. I came across some cheap airfares, and I had never been to Montana, so I figured I’d do a long weekend and check it out. It’s a nice town, but of course with my interests I was particularly keen to check out the nearest archaeological site developed for visitation, which is Madison Buffalo Jump State Park. I went there yesterday and figured I’d write up a post with some practical advice for visiting, much as I did for La Cieneguilla.
Madison is a “buffalo jump” or pishkun, a type of site consisting of a steep cliff toward which people would stampede bison herds to kill large numbers of them. There are many of these on the northern Plains, and they were in use for the past few thousand years up until the Plains peoples gained horses a few hundred years ago, which revolutionized bison hunting and led to the end of the buffalo jumps. Over the course of the millennia in which they were used, the buffalo jumps developed very deep bone beds that archaeologists can now excavate and date, by both radiocarbon dating of the bones themselves and relative dating by the types of artifacts found nearby. At many buffalo jumps, including Madison, there was also a nearby site used as a campsite where additional processing of the bison occurred, and these sites also provide artifacts and features (such as stone “tipi rings”) that can be used to learn about the people who used them.
Madison Buffalo Jump is about 30 miles from Bozeman, and the drive takes about 45 minutes. Take I-90 West toward Butte and get off at Logan; there is a sign for the park at the exit. (There are no services in Logan so if you need gas or anything stop at Manhattan, the previous exit.) From the exit it’s a 7-mile drive on a small winding road, the last two miles of which are dirt. This is an agricultural area today, and there are active farms and ranches all the way up to the park boundary.
The park itself is unstaffed, though it does have vault toilets and some interpretive signage. It is day-use only, with no campground. The day-use fee is $8 (free for Montana residents), which can be paid at the “iron ranger” at the entrance. Note that the envelopes only take cash or check, so if like me you neglected to get change earlier and only have a $20 bill, you may need to make a $12 donation to Montana State Parks. I’m sure they’ll use it well.
There are several trails through the park, which are roughly organized into three loops. The shortest one goes to an interpretive viewpoint with a shelter and several interpretive panels, clearly of fairly recent construction. From here you get a good view of the cliff itself, and the panels are very informative about the archaeology of the site.
The longer loop goes up onto the top of the cliff, and includes the “Buffalo Trail” that was used in antiquity by both bison and people to access the land on top. There is a Rim Trail that follows the ridge of the hills on the south side of the cliff. There is a North Ridge trail that follows an additional ridge to the north; I didn’t take this one. The various trails aren’t super clear on the ground, especially in winter, so pay close attention to the map at the entrance kiosk.
I did the first two loops, the one to the interpretative viewpoint and the one to the top of the cliff. In retrospect, I would recommend only doing the first in winter, unless you have serious winter hiking gear including boots with good traction. I was just in street clothes with a down sweater jacket, and some portions of the Rim Trail were quite steep and difficult to manage in regular shoes. I think it would be fine to do this in summer, but would still recommend good boots and probably hiking poles.
That said, it was definitely a very interesting experience and I’m glad I did it. I’m interested in checking out some of the other buffalo jumps in the region on subsequent trips.
Finally, bison ranching is a growing industry in Montana today, so if you’re interested in tasting bison meat after seeing the old way of procuring it, many restaurants in Bozeman serve it. Gute Laune, a German restaurant above the Rialto Theater downtown, has a bison bratwurst that I highly recommend. I liked it so much I went back and had it again. (If you’re surprised to see restaurant reviews here, you shouldn’t be.)
Anyway, Madison Buffalo Jump is highly recommended. It’s a simple park but pretty accessible and very interesting.
Today is the Winter Solstice, and the sixteenth anniversary of this blog. I don’t have much to say right now; I’m still working on my various projects, but I’m generally in the phase of reading and researching rather than writing. I did want to mark the occasion, though, and show that while posting has slowed to a trickle, this blog is still active. Happy Solstice!
I’m still reading up on Africa as part of my project on epidemics and demography. I’ve clearly gotten into a very deep rabbit hole here (it’s been almost a year since my previous post on Africa!), but I think it’s been a productive one. I initially started reading about Africa as a point of comparison for my main focus, which was and remains the impact of Old World diseases on the populations of the Americas. I also looked at the Pacific as another point of comparison, and at some point I’ll get to Asia as well. But as I’ve been digging further into Africa I’ve come to realize that while it is an instructive parallel, it’s also an intrinsic component of the very same story and understanding its role is important in developing the full picture.
The key difference, as I mentioned in my earlier post, is that in Africa colonialism was a failure whereas in the Americas it was a spectacular success. Epidemiology had a major role in both of these developments. In the Americas the main dynamic was that indigenous societies underwent catastrophic demographic collapses as a result of the introduction of new pathogens from the Eastern Hemisphere to which they had no immunity, and immigrants from that hemisphere (both free and enslaved, from both Europe and Africa) either replaced the native populations entirely or merged with them into new societies of mixed ancestry. In Africa, on the other hand, the epidemiological environment was catastrophic for the newcomers rather than the natives, and despite a concerted effort by several European countries colonialism ended up being a brief and highly unsuccessful experiment bookended by native control, though in quite different forms, on either end.
So why the difference? The most obvious reason, as is well known, is that Africa had long been part of the general disease pool of the Eastern Hemisphere/Old World, along with Europe and Asia, though for most of its history it was somewhat peripheral to the main paths of contact and infection. The Americas, being largely (though not entirely!) isolated from those paths for millennia, had no exposure to most pathogens and suffered immensely when they were introduced. This summary is accurate as far as it goes, and identifying it was a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship that continues to be important to understanding the course of modern history.
But dig a little deeper and the story becomes a bit more complicated. American populations weren’t wiped out everywhere; recent scholarship (which I will discuss in a subsequent post) drawing on more sophisticated understanding of epidemiology has shown that the story of pandemics sweeping rapidly across continents well in advance of direct European contact isn’t really an accurate picture. It was sustained contact with multiple Old World pathogens that led to the really spectacular population collapses; more remote areas were able to recover and even thrive, and Native populations have increased tremendously in the past 100 years almost everywhere in the Western Hemisphere now that modern medicine is relatively widely available. Furthermore, introducing diseases across the Atlantic in the early days of contact and colonization was actually pretty difficult.
The basic issue here is that most of the most virulent pathogens when introduced to the Americas had, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, become endemic childhood diseases in Europe. “Endemic” doesn’t mean “mild”; they killed lots and lots of people throughout this period. But the vast majority of those people within Europe were children who had no immunity. The children who got these diseases and survived typically ended up with long-lasting (sometimes lifetime) immunity as adults. Those who grew up to be the explorers, sailors, and soldiers who made initial contact with the New World were unlikely to be carrying any infectious pathogens on their persons.
So a crew of explorers in the early stages of contact with the Americas was unlikely to carry anyone likely to infect the indigenous population with any dangerous pathogens, and indeed in most of the early encounters recorded in written sources the Europeans were greatly outnumbered and at the mercy of their hosts. And these encounters were generally not followed by outbreaks of disease.
But clearly many encounters between Europeans and Native Americans were in fact followed (or accompanied) by outbreaks of disease, some of which were devastating and allowed the Europeans to quickly assume control. How did this happen?
One obvious vector for infection was European children, who had not yet survived the trial by fire of endemic disease. There are in fact examples of this type of infection occurring, including the immigration of French children to Quebec that carried smallpox which ended up devastating the Huron and many other peoples. This only became a major threat once European powers decided to establish settler colonies and send women and children to accompany the men who had spearheaded their presence in the New World. It did however happen in many parts of the hemisphere, especially in the English colonies which were much more oriented toward settlement than those of most other nations.
The other obvious vector was Africa. The endemic childhood diseases of Europe were generally epidemic instead in Africa, which is generally attributed to lower population densities and a relative lack of internal communication prior to the development of the transatlantic slave trade. I’m skeptical about some parts of this explanation, but it does appear to be true that for whatever reason African adults were more susceptible to these diseases that European ones, and many of the early introductions of disease that devastated American populations can be traced to African slaves. Most famously, the epidemic of smallpox that devastated Tenochtitlan and allowed Cortes to conquer the Aztec Empire has traditionally been traced to an African slave accompanying the expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez that the governor of Cuba sent to intercept Cortes once he realized what he was doing. The sourcing of this story turns out to be fairly weak, but it makes epidemiological sense so I think there probably is something to it. Other equally devastating epidemics throughout the Caribbean region may have been introduced by similar but undocumented means.
The depopulation of the Caribbean basin famously led to the introduction of African slaves on a large scale to replace the Indian slaves previously used for mining and agriculture. But a careful read of the history summarized above leads to an interesting question. The collapse of Native populations seems to have been due largely to the transmission of pathogens from Africa by slaves (not a lot of European children immigrating to these areas!), but the traditional story also implies that the introduction of African slaves was a result rather than a cause of the same depopulation. So which is it?
The answer is “both” but the details are complex. The key piece as I see it is that Portuguese explorations down the coast of Africa in the fifteenth century led to a small but vibrant trade in African slaves into Europe (as well as between different parts of Africa). There is abundant documentation of the presence of African slaves in Portugal during this period, and they also seem to have been present in Spain to a lesser extent. This would naturally have led the Spanish to include a few on their expeditions into the Americas, and a small number of them infected with disease over the course of the transatlantic voyage would have been enough to devastate American populations and allow for Spanish conquest. That devastation then led to demand for more African slaves to replace indigenous labor in the developing colonial economies of Spanish America.
But again, this is complicated, and it didn’t develop in the direction one might expect. Spanish America was quite late to catch on to the commodity that benefited most from slave labor: sugar. Here the Portuguese in Brazil were the innovators, building on Iberian experience both in the Mediterranean since the Middle Ages and more recently in the islands off the African coast: the Canaries, Madeira, Cape Verde, and most importantly Sao Tome and Principe. Portuguese innovations were then spread more widely through the Dutch conquest, and subsequent loss, of Brazil over the course of the seventeenth century. After being kicked out of Brazil, where they were introduced to the profitability of slave-grown sugar, the Dutch retreated to islands in the Caribbean that were similarly productive for sugar cultivation, and were quickly copied by the British and French on their existing Caribbean possessions, which had previously depended largely on tobacco grown by European indentured servants.
The British especially went on to dominate the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century before abruptly outlawing it a few years into the nineteenth and trying to stamp it out among all other countries. By the middle of the century only Brazil and the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico) continued to be significant markets for slaves imported illegally from Africa, and the British were ultimately able to snuff out that illegal trade as well. The few remaining years of legal slavery in the New World were dominated by slaves born in the countries in which they ended up working, though not necessarily in the same parts; the US especially in the period shortly before the Civil War saw an extensive internal slave trade from the older states of the South into the new cotton states further south and west.
So that was it for slavery in the Americas, and the complicated relationship it had with the depopulation of Native peoples. But the story continues in Africa after the end of the transatlantic slave trade, and takes some further unexpected twists.
During the period of the transatlantic slave trade, the permanent European presence in Africa was minimal and the vast majority of the trade was carried out between visiting European traders and African traders on land. There were a few exceptions: the Portuguese had a few permanent colonies on the offshore islands and on the mainland, most importantly in Angola, as well as a significant number of Portuguese traders who lived, and often married, among the local people at many points along the coast. The French had permanent colonies in Senegal starting in the seventeenth century, and the British soon followed with a station on the Gambia River. The most important region for permanent European trade on the Africa coast, however, was what was then known as the “Gold Coast” (now Ghana), where several European countries established forts initially to take advantage of the gold trade but which eventually became very involved in the slave trade as well. The Portuguese began this at Elmina in the fifteenth century but were supplanted by the Dutch, who maintained a string of forts until the nineteenth century, when they turned them over to the British, who had their own network of forts. The third major power in the region was Denmark (!), which turned its own forts over to the Dutch shortly before the handover to the British. And then of course there was the small Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope, which ultimately passed into British hands as well. But there were all small enclaves of Europeans amidst vast and overwhelmingly independent African populations. Death rates for the few Europeans were immense due to the unfamiliar disease environment (which cut both ways). Africa was very much a non-colonized continent, especially compared to the Americas.
By the early nineteenth century interest in colonization of Africa had ticked up slightly in western circles, but mostly as a way to deal with the increasing agitation for the abolition of slavery. Even many avid abolitionists were highly averse to the idea of free Black populations coexisting with white ones, so colonization somewhere (not necessarily Africa) was a popular idea. The two projects of this kind that went the furthest were the British colony at Sierra Leone, which was populated by free Black loyalists from Nova Scotia as well as recaptives from the British cruisers that were trying to intercept the illegal slave trade, and Liberia, which was populated by free Black Americans. Neither really thrived in its early years, again in part due to the disease environment. Despite what a lot of white people believed at the time, Black slaves’ relative immunity to many tropical diseases was due primarily to having personal experience of tropical environments rather than an innate “racial” immunity.
So by the middle of the nineteenth century colonization in Africa was highly out of favor in Europe. West Africa especially was commonly, and accurately, known as the “White Man’s Grave” due to the high death rates at the few small enclaves. And yet by the end of the century the “Scramble for Africa” led to a mad dash for colonies there not only by the traditional powers of Britain and France but also newcomers to the colonial scene such as Germany, Italy, and Belgium. What happened?
The literature on this is of course immense, and surely there were multiple factors involved. But one contributing factor that I don’t think has gotten enough attention is the immense growth and prosperity of the older colonies, the ones that had benefited most from the depopulation of Native peoples, and an assumption among a society increasingly oriented toward white supremacy, “scientific” racism, and teleological theories of history that saw an unceasing march of “progress.” This European society saw the rise of the United States especially, and to a lesser degree Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which obviously owed an initial boost to the massive depopulation of the Indigenous societies, and concluded that conquering and colonizing the world was the fate of “progressive” white societies, with an assist by the dying off of the “doomed primitive races” that was assumed to be an inevitable part of the process. (The rather different outcomes in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America could easily be accommodated by the racist worldview that saw important distinctions within the overall “white race.”)
So the European powers decided that a new wave of colonization of still “primitive” regions of the world was their national destiny, and they went looking for worlds to conquer. The main worlds remaining were in the small islands of the Pacific, parts of mainland Southeast Asia, and most importantly the vast majority of Africa. A new wave of exploration helped fill in the European maps, and it was followed and accompanied by a military and diplomatic presence intended to either seize land by conquest or establish “protectorates” over indigenous polities who were allegedly in need of protection either from themselves (the British especially were very committed to justifying their acquisitions by the need to abolish slavery within Africa as well as outside it) or from other grasping Europeans. The rapid improvement of firearms technology helped these European armies defeat the African ones more decisively. In the still notoriously unhealthy (for Europeans) tropical regions the resulting colonies were generally not thought of as “settler” colonies but more as elaborations of the longstanding trade outposts, now claiming and attempting to enforce control over the hinterlands as well.
In other parts of Africa, however, which seemed healthier, the colonial powers made large efforts to establish settler colonies like those in the Americas and Antipodes. The prime examples were the French in Algeria, the British in an expanded South Africa as well as new colonies like Rhodesia and Kenya, the Italians in Eritrea, and the Germans in Namibia. All of these new efforts failed to varying degrees, and Africa went from lightly to entirely colonized then to entirely decolonized within a short span of well under 100 years. The situation in the rest of the world was more complex, but overall the second wave of European colonialism was a bust. The national destiny turned out to not lie in this direction for any of these countries.
Why not? I would posit that a misunderstanding of the older colonies and the epidemiology of their rise led to the assumption that at some point “the Natives” just inevitably die off in any colonial project by a sufficiently progressive modern white nation, and then the real fun begins. Turns out that’s not true, and the Americas and Antipodes happened to have an unusually large disconnect in disease environments that couldn’t just be replicated on command, especially in regions like Africa that had long been in contact, albeit intermittent, with the Eurasian pathogenic continuum. This wasn’t the only reason the first wave of colonization succeeded or the second one failed, of course, but from my reading so far it seems under-discussed. (Israel arguably constitutes a third wave all on its own, in which the lessons of both previous ones have been ignored.)
So yeah, that’s the direction I’m thinking that this project is taking. Not just a reassessment of the research on the depopulation of the Americas and its causes, although that is still an important component, but the interconnected picture of colonization, trade, and disease across the entire world, not just one hemisphere or the other. The intellectual history of how these dynamics worked and were connected, including advances in medical knowledge as well as racial ideas, is also an important component. It’s a complex picture and I’m sure my sketch of it here is incomplete and confused to some extent, but it seems to me to be coming into focus.
Sun Marker at Edge of the Cedars with Bear’s Ears in Background
So there was a total solar eclipse today, visible from a wide swath of the US (though not Alaska; we’ll get our chance in 2033). I also happen to have recently been reading about the use of eclipses to date events in oral tradition, which is pretty cool.
The Journal of African History published articles in 1965 and 1968 with maps of known solar eclipse paths (total and annular respectively) within the past few hundred years, as part of a larger project to find ways of building chronologies for African history stretching back before European contact. The 1968 article also includes a list of known eclipses mentioned in oral tradition and tentative identifications with specific dates.
The list includes an eclipse in Uganda in 1520 associated with the oral traditions of the kingdoms of Bunyoro and Ankole as having occurred on the date of a battle between the two kingdoms, with the names of the specific kings involved being preserved in both traditions. This provides a crucial point for grounding the well-preserved king-lists of not just these two states, but several others with which they interacted, calibrating a whole regional chronology. Interesting!
Another much later eclipse in 1835 coincided with the Ngoni people’s crossing of the Zambezi river, part of the large-scale series of migrations in reaction to Shaka’s consolidation of the Zulu kingdom. Also interesting!
The 1965 article goes into some detail on the distinction between total and partial eclipses in terms of the viewing experience, something that a lot of Americans have probably learned about today. The most impressive effects, and most likely to be preserved in oral tradition, are of course those within the path of totality, but this is a very narrow path and it can be hard to determine how close it needs to be to the remembered site of an event in the tradition to form a plausible association. These articles basically settle on the idea that if the path of totality passed through territory associated with the ethnic group from which the tradition is drawn that is plausible enough, even if the specific location in the tradition wasn’t itself in the path of totality. This seems reasonable to me.
I came across these articles as part of my reading on Africa, an outgrowth of my demographic history research project. I’ll have more to say on the African aspect to that, which is quite interesting in its own right, soon. But for now I thought it was cool to bring up this eclipse stuff. There’s no conceptual reason this approach couldn’t be used on the oral traditions of the Americas as well, but to my knowledge it hasn’t. It’s possible that those traditions just don’t have a lot of eclipses in them. Something to look into, maybe!
Today is the Winter Solstice, and the fifteenth (!) anniversary of this blog, so I thought I would take a break from my ongoing series on epidemics and depopulation to talk about an interesting rock art site I visited recently and its archaeoastronomical potential.
The La Cieneguilla site is relatively obscure and I’ve been able to find very little about it in published sources. It is a few miles southwest of Santa Fe and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has a very basic webpage about it but doesn’t otherwise provide much information. I’ve been curious about it for many years, and this fall I finally got the opportunity to visit it. I had quite a hard time finding the actual petroglyphs there; it’s a semi-developed site but the wayfinding is limited and confusing. Part of the purpose of this post is to clarify how to get to the actual petroglyphs, which is not obvious (or at least wasn’t to me) from the entrance to the site.
Starting from the parking lot, there is a trail that leads to a sign giving some basic information, then there is a trail leading to the petroglyphs themselves. Actually there are trails going in two directions; take the one going left from the sign. It continues along a fence for a ways, then turns right at the foot of the escarpment and sort of fades away. The petroglyphs are on a series of boulders at the top of the escarpment, and there isn’t really a single well-defined trail to get to them. You have to kind of feel your way around the boulders, which cover the entire escarpment. It’s much easier if you already know where the petroglyphs are, which I did not when I first visited. As I was leaving I met some people coming up and pointed out the petroglyphs from the bottom of the escarpment to help them get there easier than I had.
The escarpment and boulder field extend for many miles in both directions, but the petroglyphs are heavily concentrated in a small area. Escarpments with boulder fields like this are common locations for petroglyphs in this region (Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque contains several), but this concentration in one small area is unusual. More on that later.
The petroglyphs themselves generally seem to be classified as part of the Rio Grande Style, which is a late prehistoric style common in the upper Rio Grande Valley and includes the Albuquerque petroglyphs. It is generally dated to the Pueblo IV or Rio Grande Classic period. There are indeed many stylistic similarities at La Cieneguilla to the other Rio Grande Style sites, but there are also some interesting differences that suggest to me that it may be somewhat older. Most noticeably, there are few of the “face” or “mask” images that are so common in the Rio Grande Style, and may derive from the Jornada Style found earlier to the south. Similarly, there is little use of the shape of the rock surface to create “3-D” type images, often associated with the masks at other Jornada and Rio Grande Style sites. Instead there are many spirals, birds, and stylized human figures, including flute-players, motifs commonly found at earlier sites to the north and west, including Chaco Canyon.
So, back to the clustering. Unlike the sites at Petroglyph National Monument, where petroglyphs cover wide swathes of the boulder fields, the La Cieneguilla petroglyphs are concentrated in just a very small area at the top of the escarpment. The rocks themselves don’t seem to have any particular distinction relative to the rest of the boulder field, so something else must have driven this concentration. The escarpment generally faces east, the direction of sunrise, so an astronomical alignment of some kind occurred to me as I was looking at them. I stood in front of one of the most elaborate panels and turned around to look at the horizon.
The horizon was broken, another common feature of astronomical observation sites. There is a distant range of hills or low mountains that occupies the center of one’s field of vision along the horizon from this exact spot. This would be an excellent place to observe a sunrise on an important occasion, I thought. But when? I took out my phone and opened the compass app, and pointed it at the edge of the mountain range to see if the azimuth corresponded to any important date in the solar year.
The result: DUE EAST. That seems significant! It suggests an equinox alignment, which is less common in Puebloan archaeoastronomy than solstice alignments but still a known pattern. I checked a few other azimuths from other elaborate panels but didn’t find anything particularly noteworthy. More diligent analysis may turn up other alignments, but even if this was purely an observing station for the equinox sunrise that would explain the clustering of the petroglyphs in this small area.
Bringing this all together, some thoughts: The combination of stylistic traits that seem relatively early with a possible astronomical alignment is intriguing with regard to regional connections. Astronomical alignments are strongly associated with Chaco, so this could be evidence that the residents of the La Cieneguilla area were part of an interaction sphere including groups to the north and west quite early on, during the Developmental Period that was contemporary with Chaco and Pueblo II to the west, or possibly the succeeding Coalition Period that is usually thought to correspond to the influx of population from the abandonment of the Mesa Verde region.
I’m not aware of documented astronomical alignments at other Rio Grande Style petroglyph sites, but that could be because no one has thought to look for them. A detailed study of other sites might turn up some surprises. But assuming for the moment that this is not a trait associated with the Classic Period and the Rio Grande Style, the La Cieneguilla evidence suggests that the influx of southern influence during (or just before?) the Classic Period may have mixed with an earlier tradition with ties to the west during the Developmental and Coalition Periods to produce what we now call the Rio Grande Style, in the course of which the astronomical association may have been lost or redirected to other contexts.
In any case, La Cieneguilla is an interesting site, well worth a visit. Happy Solstice!
Delaney Park at Noon on the Winter Solstice, Anchorage, Alaska
Happy Solstice! I’m still working on continuing my series of posts on the study of Native American population collapse, but as part of this project I’m also reading about other parts of the world that share some of the same kind of history. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about Africa, which has a fascinating history that overlaps with that of the Americas in some respects but not others, and I was struck by a remarkable difference in how the topic of historical demography has been handled by Africanist scholars in the same period when it became a very large focus of attention for Americanists (i.e., the 1960s and 1970s).
Briefly, while there is historical evidence of population declines in at least some parts of Africa of the same magnitude seen in the Americas (50-90% in some cases), the implications of this decline for the societies in question seems to have aroused little interest from scholars. These declines are often mentioned offhand in footnotes or briefly in a text that goes on to discuss other historical or anthropological topics. It’s not that the scholars are dismissing the veracity of either the population numbers or the magnitude of decline mentioned in their sources, as was the case with earlier generations of Americanist scholarship. Instead they just don’t seem to care at all or to see these declines are relevant to their main interests.
But these are huge declines, often over very short periods! For example, the area that is now the Republic of Sudan is said to have lost something like 80% of its population to a combination of warfare and disease in the few years of the Mahdist uprising in the 1890s. That’s enormous! And very recent, so much so that’s the figures are likely to be pretty accurate in the absence of evidence to the contrary. But they’re so huge that it seems likely that they are exaggerated, and I’d be interested to see some informed source criticism looking at how reliable these numbers are. Studies like this from the same period, and more recently, doing just that are common in the Americas but I have hardly found any for Africa covering any period. One interesting study of the coastal Mpongwe people of Gabon, who were in close contact with Europeans for a long time, concluded that the dramatic population collapse reported was in fact plausible, due to similar contact conditions as typically obtained in the Americas (but not in most other parts of Africa). But otherwise this type of study seems to be very rare.
Not that demography was not of interest to Africanists at this time, mind you. But the main focus was on trying to quantify the impact of the slave trade to the Americas, a very different sort of concern from those of Americanists. The background here is that there was a persistent narrative, fostered especially by nineteenth-century abolitionists, that the slave trade was leading to massive depopulation of African people, with subsequent negative effects on societies within Africa. There were counterarguments and the debate went back and forth for decades, forming a crucial backdrop to the advent of direct European colonization and “pacification” of the continent, which was often justified in the name of eliminating slavery.
By the 1960s this age-old debate was starting to get some rigorous quantitative attention. The key figure here is Philip Curtin, a pioneering economic historian of Africa who was then at the University of Wisconsin. In 1969 he published a book called The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, which was as revolutionary in the study of the African slave trade as Henry Dobyns’s work on Native American population around the same time was on that field. Curtin tried to compile and evaluate whatever quantitative information was available to come up with as rigorous a set of figures as possible for the trade over the course of centuries.
Unlike Dobyns’s work, however, Curtin’s numbers ended up being significantly lower than previous estimates, which may well have been exaggerated by abolitionists trying to stir up opposition to the slave trade. This caused some controversy and pushback, especially by some African researchers who took issue with aspects of Curtin’s methodology. But overall Curtin’s figures were accepted by the field and have formed a baseline ever since for those trying to evaluate the impact of the trade.
So what was that impact? Well, it’s still hard to say. Curtin’s lower figures suggest that the direct demographic impacts of the trade were likely limited. This is not to say that the reorientation of many societies especially in West Africa, the main area of focus of the Atlantic trade for most of its existence, didn’t have important social and economic impacts. Both the exporting societies on the coast, which tended to be complex state-level entities that increased in complexity over time, and the main supply areas in the interior, which tended to be somewhat less complex, were clearly affected in various ways by slave-raiding and -trading. The exact extent of these effects and the way they shifted over time is the subject of a vast literature of which I have been able to read only a tiny portion, and there doesn’t seem to be much consensus.
One key difference between Africa and the Americas, of course, which lurks in the background of all comparisons like this, is that the “indigenous” people of most parts of Africa managed to survive both the slave trade and the period of colonialism that followed, and the continent is now divided overwhelmingly into independent post-colonial states. European colonization only took place on any significant scale in a few places, and of those societies still fewer managed to persist past independence. The Americas are like a mirror image of this situation, with only a few areas still maintaining a significant Native population and the rest of the hemisphere dominated by settler societies (which may have significantly mixed ancestry of course). Clearly these contrasting modern situations have colored the interests of scholars in complex ways, especially in a period that saw both the fall of the great colonial empires in Africa as well as a revival of interest in Native American history and traditional culture. Why the patterns of scholarship ended up how they did exactly is still a bit of a puzzle to me though.
If Sherburne F. Cook was the dominant figure in the “Berkeley Era” of the study of Native American historical demography, his equivalent in the next period was undoubtedly Henry F. Dobyns. Dobyns was a complicated, controversial figure and his legacy today is decidedly mixed, but his importance to the intellectual history of this issue is unquestionable. It is no exaggeration to say that he single-handedly launched the topic into the scholarly limelight, and he continued to pursue it for decades even as questions about his own methodology and approach began to spur a backlash. Although the history is complicated, for convenience and in recognition of Dobyns’s importance I’ve defined this period as bracketed by what are probably his two most important publications on the subject: his 1966 paper in Current Anthropology that first drew extensive scholarly interest to the subfield and was enormously influential in defining it, and his 1983 book that, while also very influential in some circles, in others was considered a major overreach that threw his whole approach into question.
In between, numerous scholars from a wide variety of disciplines investigated the question of population history and the impact of epidemic disease with an unprecedented fervor. Most of these studies, certainly the most influential ones, ended up falling on the “high-counter” side of the demographic debate. With its obvious political implications during a period of intense political awareness, activism, and dispute, there was a clear sense that the high-counter position was ascendant and revolutionizing the whole world’s understanding of the tragedies of the past and how they led inexorably to the inequities of the present.
As I’ve noted before, though, this is an oversimplification. A parallel tradition of low counts continued as an undercurrent to the high-count hegemony, mostly focused in certain disciplines and institutions. This current would emerge into higher prominence in the 1980s and afterward as the work of Dobyns and his acolytes started to be questioned by a wide variety of detailed empirical studies of particular regions. Ironically, this turn in the scholarship would come as the earlier high-count research was just beginning to be incorporated into more popularized accounts which made it better known among the general public.
This chapter of the story is in some sense the heart of it. In some ways it’s a story of scholarly hubris (particularly on the part of Dobyns personally) that eventually led to a painful reckoning, but again that is too simple. The high counters of this era made enduring contributions to understanding of this issue even if not all of their specific conclusions have stood the test of time. In a qualitative sense, at least, even their strongest critics would mostly concede that they were closer to capturing the historical reality than most of their predecessors. Their greatest flaw, perhaps unsurprising in the context of the mid-century modernist context in which they worked, may have been an excessive confidence in the potential for academic research to provide specific, detailed answers to complicated historical questions.
Dobyns was born and raised in Arizona, and his early anthropological work focused mainly on the tribes there, including providing support to their land claims cases against the federal government in the 1950s. After getting his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1960, he was hired by Cornell and went to Peru to work on the Vicos Project, an innovative and groundbreaking exercise in applied anthropology. Both in Arizona and Peru, Dobyns also did research in the colonial and mission archives and developed an interest in historical demography. He noticed very severe population declines in the records of both areas, and began to develop a theory for what was behind them that would end up being enormously influential in anthropology and beyond.
Dobyns published some early work on the population dynamics of southern Arizona, but his first widely influential publication was a 1963 article on the history of epidemics in Peru. This article was foundational to the emerging interest in disease history and is still widely cited today. His most important early work, however, was the aforementioned 1966 Current Anthropology article in which he reviewed previous approaches to the issue of precontact population and introduced a new methodology and estimate of his own.
The majority of this article consists of a thorough and detailed analysis of all the methodologies that had been used to estimate pre-contact Native American populations. Dobyns convincingly demonstrates that the various techniques used by the “low-counter” school of Mooney and Kroeber likely underestimated numbers by disregarding the accounts of contemporary observers and relying overly on extrapolations from later ethnography. He is more positive about the innovative estimation and extrapolation methods of Cook and others in his circle at Berkeley. In addition, he forcefully points out the importance of disease in affecting population numbers, a factor largely ignored by the previous researchers he cites, with the partial exception of Cook. In fact, Dobyns discusses in detail Cook’s monograph on the malaria epidemic of the 1830s in Oregon and California, a very important study still widely cited today. Dobyns specifically emphasizes two important but underappreciated aspects of disease in relation to demography:
Cook’s analysis of this California epidemic demonstrated the operation of two very important processes in the human ecology of aboriginal American populations. First, he showed the magnitude of mortality which a single epidemic can cause in a non-resistant population. Second, he called attention to the biological fact that epidemic infection is not limited to tribal populations in immediate face-to-face contact with Europeans. The decimation of native Californians was not limited to missionized Indians, but extended outward as far as disease agent and vector could spread infection from intrusive (white) carriers to aboriginal populations. It is necessary to maintain constant awareness of these two processes or fundamental trends among natives of the New World. Any interpretation of reported native populations during the early years of contact with Europeans which ignores the tremendous mortality caused by epidemics inevitably underestimates the size of the aboriginal populace.
Dobyns would continue to emphasize these factors throughout his career.
Dobyns’s analysis of past work is highly convincing in showing the flaws that led to past underestimation of population numbers, and this accounts in part for the influence this paper has had on subsequent scholarship. He went beyond this, however, and also attempted to devise a new methodology which would avoid those flaws and provide a sounder basis for making estimates. Here he starts to make some assumptions and interpretive leaps that would ultimately lead him into some methodological flaws of his own.
Dobyns starts by defining a “depopulation ratio” comparing the population of a given group at two times in its history. The two times he is particularly concerned with are the group’s precontact population, or as close to it as is possible to get, and the time when it hit its nadir of population and began to grow again (as most Native populations eventually did). He doesn’t really justify his use of these two endpoints or the generalizability of a ratio derived from them. He looks at several well-documented cases, including central Mexico, the Andes, California, the Amazon, and the Piman-speakers of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, and derives to his satisfaction a ratio of 20:1 as a “sound, if perhaps conservative, tool to employ as a hemispheric minimum.” He considers 25:1 an alternative ratio to derive a reasonable range. Using these two ratios and available data on population nadirs, he comes up with an aggregate hemispheric estimate of 90,043,000 to 112,553,750 for the whole Western Hemisphere at contact. Kroeber had estimated 8,400,000.
A hundred million people! This conclusion was striking and contributed to the influence of Dobyns on further research. He notes in the paper that Cook’s Berkeley colleague Woodrow Borah had recently come to a very similar estimate, so he was not totally on his own and in some ways his estimate was a plausible expansion of the increasingly high counts that were coming out of Berkeley in the wake of Cook’s pioneering research. Much of that research was in relatively obscure regional publications, however, and it was Dobyns who brought it to one of the flagship publications of American anthropology and garnered a large audience. As it typically does for its major paper, Current Anthropology sent the paper around to a wide variety of other scholars and published their comments, which were mostly very positive, with occasional reservations on particular points. The combination of bold thinking with seemingly innovative quantitative techniques fit well with certain tendencies within the social sciences at mid-century.
They also fit with an increasing political awareness of the plight of modern Native people, along with the general political tumult of the 1960s. Dobyns himself was a strong advocate for Native rights, going back to his land claim days, and his concept that precontact Native populations were large and (implicitly) successful, only to lose 95% or more of their people to disease introduced by Europeans, fit well with the political mood of the times.
The following year, Dobyns’s conclusions were bolstered by a paper by the historian Alfred Crosby documenting the smallpox epidemic that accompanied the Spanish conquistadors into central Mexico and, per Dobyns’s earlier Andean epidemic research, probably continued to spread ahead of them into the Inca empire, killing the emperor and fatally weakening the empire itself. This was a concrete example of the dynamics of disease that Dobyns had discussed in general terms, with very clear and dramatic consequences for the course of world history. Crosby would later go on to expand his argument in his groundbreaking 1972 book The Columbian Exchange and a 1976 paper outlining the specifics of how “virgin soil epidemics” contributed to depopulation in the Americas.
Dobyns’s and Crosby’s ideas rapidly caught fire in all sorts of disciplines, and led to innumerable studies of specific areas in the coming decades. The historian Wilbur Jacobs, whom we encountered before through his oral history of the Berkeley medical school and its treatment of S. F. Cook, wrote an important overview of the implications for the history of contact. Other studies, too numerous to list, looked at the issue from the vantage points of geography, anthropology and many other disciplines. Throughout the heyday of 1970s the high-count school of Dobyns and Crosby expanded its reach and refined its estimates and arguments.
There were some dissenting voices even at this time, however. The low-counters may have seen their influence eclipsed, but they didn’t disappear, and as I’ve noted before they were particularly concentrated in certain disciplines.
In direct response to Dobyns’s article, the Andeanist C. T. Smith published his own in Current Anthropology in 1970. Following up on some mild criticism by the geographer William Denevan in his comments on Dobyns, Smith notes that the depopulation ratio of 20:1, if truly an average of well-documented cases, probably conceals considerable variation in the underlying data set. With regard to the colonial Andes, one of Dobyns’s most important cases for determining the ratio, Smith points out that the coastal regions Dobyns used in his analysis have markedly higher depopulation ratios than the interior regions in the same data; combining them reduces the depopulation ratio to 4:1. Smith is not necessarily opposed to Dobyns’s ideas, however, and he merely suggests that the dynamics of coastal and interior populations in this region should be considered separately. He also does a detailed analysis of additional colonial census data to further refine the depopulation estimates, and Dobyns’s comments on his paper are largely positive.
One notable discipline that was strikingly absent from the study of this demographic topic is, perhaps surprisingly, demography. The reasons for this were made clear in a 1975 paper, again in Current Anthropology, by the demographer William Petersen. In an astonishing display of saying-the-quiet-part-loud, Petersen took aim at a wide variety of demographic interpretations widespread in the study of prehistory. This mostly takes the form of noting the very slim data available for various methods of estimating prehistoric population parameters. With regard to catastrophic population loss in the wake of contact, he admits that there certainly have been losses, and does seem to agree with Dobyns in giving historical accounts more credence than Kroeber did, though he also notes Smith’s clarification about the differences between coastal and interior populations in the Andes. Overall, he maintains a skeptical position and notes the contemporary political implications of positing much larger precontact populations, which he also analogizes to the nineteenth-century “Mound Builder” legends to explain the mounds of the midwestern US. In his response to what he terms Petersen’s “pontifical perambulation,” Dobyns attempts to refute his accusation that high-counters are political opponents of modern liberal capitalism by noting that he himself invests in the stock market and admires some companies. This is not very convincing in substance, but the polemical tone foreshadows Dobyns’s reactions to subsequent criticisms.
Archaeologists and physical anthropologists also continued to be skeptical about the ideas coming largely from historians and geographers. Many of these holdouts were associated with the Smithsonian Institution and carried on the legacy of Mooney, in some cases quite directly. Douglas Ubelaker, who worked on the editing of the Smithsonian’s updated Handbook of North American Indians, was in part responsible for updates to Mooney’s demographic estimates included in the original version of the Handbook. In an interim report published in 1976, he noted that the estimates for specific tribes and regions submitted by that point were higher than Mooney’s, but well below Dobyns’s. The total estimate approximately double’s Mooney’s total, which implies a hemispheric total of about 16 million. A significant difference indeed!
These quibbles were fairly minor during this period, however. The event that started to bring them out more forcefully was, perhaps ironically, Dobyns’s publication in 1983 of his book Their Number Become Thinned, which focused on the Timucuan people of northern Florida but served also a vehicle for him to promote his revised and expanded methodology for population estimates and the role of disease in depopulation. By this point the high count hegemony had reached its breaking point.
The study of Native American depopulation and the role of epidemic disease in it began in earnest around the beginning of the twentieth century, and from that point until 1966 it remained a relatively obscure niche topic across several different disciplines. Interestingly, the few scholars interested in this topic, regardless of disciplinary background or specific position on the substantive issues, were overwhelmingly concentrated at a single institution: the University of California at Berkeley.
It’s not entirely clear why Berkeley became the focus of study for this topic, but the precipitous decline in numbers of the California Indians during the nineteenth century, which happened right before the eyes of many of the early white settlers, had spurred more interest in the general topic there than elsewhere starting with the very earliest attempts at professional anthropology. A key early attempt to estimate the numbers of inhabitants in aboriginal California was published in 1905 by C. Hart Merriam. Merriam noted that the part of the state under the influence of the Spanish missions, which he estimated to be approximately one-fifth of the non-desert area, had relatively good demographic data provided by the missionaries. He further assessed, based on his personal experience doing fieldwork throughout the state, that the resource base of the entire non-desert area was pretty similar and could presumably support a similar population density (though he acknowledged that there was no evidence that it actually did). He therefore took the demographic data from the mission records, adjusted it to account for unconverted Indians within the missionized zone, whom he estimated on no evidence to form one-quarter of the total population, and multiplied it by five to come up with a total estimate for the non-desert portion of the state.
For 1834, the year for which Merriam considered the mission data most complete and reliable, he estimated 30,000 Indians in the missions, 10,000 unconverted Indians in the mission zone, and a non-desert state total of 200,000. He further estimated the desert population at 10,000 (again with no basis), for a total within the current state boundaries of 210,000 in 1834. He further noted the decrease of population over the course of the mission period and estimated a total population of 260,000 as of first contact in the late eighteenth century.
Merriam further looked at estimates for Indian population made by various officials during the American period, starting in the 1850s and made some adjustments for under-counting of Indians living away from reservations. He concluded that the population decline had been dramatic, resulting in a 1900 estimate of just 15,500 people. He identified two periods of particularly sharp decline, following the secularization of the missions in 1834 and the start of the Gold Rush in 1848. These two periods overlapped, and Merriam attributed them to similar causes, primarily the greed and oppressive behavior of white settlers, but he saw them as involving distinct groups of both Indians and settlers (Spanish-Mexican ranchers along the coast in the first case, Anglo and international gold prospectors further inland in the second). He mentioned disease in passing as one factor leading to the demographic decline, but didn’t emphasize it.
Merriam’s methodology was fairly crude by modern standards, but it was pretty sophisticated for its time. It’s interesting to note that Merriam combined aspects of what would eventually come to be the two main methodological approaches to estimating pre-contact populations: working backward from ethnohistorical documentation and estimating carrying capacity of particular types of land based on subsistence resources available.
Soon after Merriam’s work was published, James Mooney at the Smithsonian Institution began work on a more ambitious project to estimate contact population for all of North America. A brief summary of this work appeared in the Bureau of American Ethnology’s first Handbook of North American Indians, but Mooney never published his intended full monograph due to his untimely death in 1921. An abbreviated version based on his notes was published posthumously by the Smithsonian in 1928. Mooney primarily made his estimates based on the earliest surviving population counts of reasonable reliability for each tribe, with adjustments to get from there to an estimate of population at whatever date constituted “contact” for the area in question (ranging from 1600 to 1780). Mooney took historically recorded epidemics into consideration in making these adjustments, along with warfare and other factors. For California, however, unlike every other region, Mooney did not make his own estimates but adopted Merriam’s.
Merriam wasn’t based in California, but his pioneering fieldwork there was influential on the development of a local tradition of anthropology at Berkeley, which was developed largely by Alfred Kroeber, a towering figure in American anthropology generally. Kroeber studied a wide variety of topics, and Native American demography was one of them. Around the same time Mooney was working on his estimates for the “Population” chapter of the Handbook of North American Indians, Kroeber began work on his own using a similar methodology for the California chapter of the same publication. Working backward from the earliest solid counts in the ethnographic record, Kroeber came up with a count of approximately 150,000 at the time of contact. This is a much lower number than Merriam’s, and over the years Kroeber became even more conservative in his estimates. By the time he published his own Handbook of the Indians of California in 1925 his overall estimate had declined to 133,000, approximately half of Merriam’s number.
In 1934 Kroeber published an article discussing Native American contact-era population for all of North America, in which he adopted Mooney’s estimates for most areas but substituted his own estimate for California in place of Merriam’s. This reduced the overall continental estimate a bit, and Kroeber stated in the article that he was using Mooney’s estimates but that he thought they were likely a bit high and would come down as more research was done. John R. Swanton, the Smithsonian anthropologist who edited Mooney’s work for the 1928 publication, had a similar opinion, which he expressed in the footnotes at various points.
All this makes Mooney, Swanton, and Kroeber the main founders of the “low counter” school of thought on these issues. Due to Kroeber’s towering reputation within the discipline of anthropology and his prominent post leading the anthropology department at Berkeley, the low count position would come to be popular in many circles among anthropologists for decades to come. This was particularly true among archaeologists and physical anthropologists, who also had other reasons based on their own research and (sub-)disciplinary perspectives to incline toward low counts. Similarly, Mooney and Swanton’s legacy led to a longstanding tendency toward low counts among Smithsonian Institution anthropologists, again especially among physical anthropologists and archaeologists.
At the same time all this was going on in the 1920s and 1930s, however, a very different perspective on population counts and demographic decline was developing among a different set of researchers, again with Berkeley as a major base and California, along with Mexico, as a major field of investigation. This perspective, which would develop into the “high counter” school with a focus on environmental carrying capacity, was largely led by geographers, with the most prominent figure being Carl O. Sauer at Berkeley’s geography department.
Sauer’s role in the development of geography was parallel in many ways to Kroeber’s in anthropology, and his personal research interests were equally broad as well. He had a particular interest in Mexico, and it was his research in the 1930s with Donald Brand (also known for his research on Chaco Canyon around the same time) on the historical demography of northwestern Mexico that set the tone for the school of thought that would follow him on this topic. After reviewing the available historical and archaeological data available at the time, Sauer and Brand concluded that northwestern Mexico had been home to approximately as many people in pre-contact times as in their own time. Given the historical evidence for much lower populations in the initial centuries after Spanish contact, this implied an immense decline in population after contact that contrasted strongly with the interpretations of Kroeber et al. that posited low pre-contact populations and substantial continuity in demographic trends across the boundary of contact. Sauer’s students in geography at Berkeley, and their own students there and at other institutions, would go on to develop his ideas over the next few decades, with the result that geography would become a bastion of “high-counter” thought just as archaeology and physical anthropology would become centers for “low-counter” thought.
The most prominent high counters to emerge in Sauer’s immediate wake, however, were not geographers at all, though they were still associated with Berkeley. They included the Latin Americanist historians Leslie Byrd Simpson and Woodrow Wilson Borah, but the most prominent figure was a physiologist at Berkeley’s medical school named Sherburne Friend Cook.
Cook is a complex figure with an immense but ambiguous impact on the field of Native American historical demography. His eclectic interests and long career at Berkeley echo those of Kroeber and Sauer, but unlike them he was a marginal figure in his own discipline. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1925 with a dissertation on the toxic effects of heavy metals, and after being hired at Berkeley a few years later he continued to study that topic. He was something of a pioneer in studying the physiological effects of environmental contaminants and his early career looked bright.
As Cook continued his studies on heavy metal toxicity in the early 1930s, however, he veered into political ground equally toxic to his career. He documented the presence of heavy metals in chicken feed and began to trace them up the food chain to the chickens and then to the people who ate them. The public health implications of this line of research were considerable, but so were the economic implications to chicken feed manufacturers. It appears (based on later oral history research among Berkeley academics by the historian Wilbur Jacobs) that those manufacturers influenced a dean at the medical school to try to prevent Cook from publishing his results and to go on to use administrative chicanery to sabotage his career for many years.
Discouraged, Cook began to divert his attention away from physiology and explore other fields of interest. He somehow stumbled upon a transcript in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library of an eighteenth-century description of the diseases of the Indians of Baja California written by a Jesuit missionary, which he translated and published in 1935 in a local medical journal. He went on to publish various other odds and ends of medical history and related topics over the course of the next few years. He developed an interest in Indian demography and population history, and was in friendly contact with both Kroeber and Sauer as they did their studies on this topic in the 1930s.
Cook was an astonishingly productive and creative researcher, and he conducted numerous studies of Indian population history, along with many other topics, over the remaining forty years of his life. He developed numerous ingenious methodological approaches to try to wring population estimates out of the most unlikely sources, including Aztec tribute lists and various environmental productivity estimates in California. His methodology was constantly being adjusted, so his specific population estimates for given areas varied from publication to publication, but in general he was coming up with high numbers more in line with Sauer’s results than Kroeber’s. He also did extensive studies of disease history, including a very important 1955 publication on the “fever and ague” that swept California and Oregon in the early 1930s in which he argued, contra earlier researchers, that it was most likely malaria and its extreme death rate among Indians was due to it being their first exposure to the pathogen. (An early glimpse of the “virgin soil” concept that would become so influential later.)
Cook’s research was extraordinarily wide-ranging, and some of it would be controversial on a variety of grounds especially after his death. Many of his ingenious methodologies for estimating populations relied on assumptions that didn’t hold up well to closer investigation, and his conclusions about the oppressive conditions in the California missions were vigorously contested by pro-mission scholars, especially those affiliated with the Catholic Church. He stands as a towering figure in the field of historical demography of Native Americans, however, and set the tone for the emergence of that field as a focal point of scholarship.
Cook’s final estimate for the contact-era population of California was 310,000. This was somewhat higher than Merriam’s estimate of 260,000, and much higher than Kroeber’s 133,000, putting Cook firmly on the “high-counter” side. The influence of Cook and his collaborators, while fairly limited in what was still an obscure field of study in the 1940s and 1950s, would expand dramatically in the 1960s as a new generation of researchers moved the topic out of the back halls of Berkeley and dramatically into the academic and political spotlight.
Gambler's House 