What was the American Indian Population in 1492?

What was the population of Turtle Island (North America) in 1492?

The answer is.... We don't know.

But that isn't for a lack of trying. No doubt learned scholars have made estimates.

And they vary widely.

 

Russell Thornton, a professor of Anthropology, includes a chapter called "American Indian Population in 1492," in his book,  American Indian Holocaust and Survival. According to Thornton

Overall, there seems little relationship between the types of data and methodologies used in estimating American Indian population sizes and the resulting estimates. Competent scholars have used the same basic data and the same basic techniques to yield very high or very low estimated populations (page 34).

Thornton's research led him to conclude that it wasn't the sets of data nor the statistical research methods used that determined a population estimate, but rather, as he put it, "the psychologies of the scholars themselves." He determined that scholars "holding the idea of elaborate and extensive societies will...generally hold the idea also of large numbers of people"(35).

Another factor had to do with the scholars' view of history after contact with whites. Thornton says that "if we consider history to have been especially destructive to aboriginal people of the Western Hemisphere, then we assume larger aboriginal numbers than if we consider subsequent history to have been "kinder"(35).

Another aspect of the researchers' "psychology" is simply that they were aware of the numbers coming from other researchers and so the population estimates also correspond - at least to some extent - with changing trends, for a decade or two they might tend toward high numbers and for the next ten or twenty years following that, the estimates would tend to be low.

So I'm not going to bother to give you any numbers at all (not in this post, at least). The best answer still is that we simply don't know how many Indians lived on Turtle Island in 1492.

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