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We are now in a period of marked disagreement about the size of former Indian populations, both regionally and for the hemisphere, with a strongly realized need for resolution based on better techniques and evidence.
William M. Denevan, Native Population, p. xix
The controversy over the size of the aboriginal population of the Americas on the eve of discovery has been heated in the last quarter-century and has become especially intense in the past decade. The battle is waged even though in most cases no mass of new documentary evidence has become available upon which to base unchallenged conclusions. Generally, historians agree on population totals for various regions fifty to one hundred years after contact. Figures for the 1550s to the 1650s are accepted, with provisions made for uncounted groups and the possibility of fraud. The numbers that are presented for the initial period vary widely. At both extremes – on the one hand, those who posit very high aboriginal populations and, on the other, those who accept only limited totals – the figures are held almost as a matter of faith rather than fact. The issue, in part, has become one over methods rather than evidence solely. Some recent historians have questioned whether the techniques of modern demographic analysis can be applied to preindustrial societies, where the sources were never intended for such study and are often fragmentary at best. Others ask how powerful statistical tools are for estimation of populations chronologically distant from acceptable censuses.
Social scientists have long been aware that a relationship exists between the size of a society in terms of population and its degree of sociocultural complexity.
Robert L. Carneiro, “On the Relationship between Size of Population and Complexity of Social Organization,” p. 234
Population estimation on the basis of social organization is one of the least accurate of the methods we shall examine. At best, we can only infer in general terms how high populations were at various levels of societal complexity. It is obvious that a people supported by a hunting, fishing, and gathering technology would be smaller than a group living by intensive irrigation agriculture. The basic differences in the population characteristics of primitive, agricultural, and industrial economic systems have long been a subject of investigation of historical demographers. In the present chapter we shall review some recent developments in the study of social structure and population size, then examine applications of the method to Incaic Peru.
Robert L. Carneiro has documented a relationship between the number of organizational traits of a society and the size of the group. As societies become larger they become structurally more complex. The relationship is direct, but structural complexity does not increase as rapidly as population. Indeed, for Carneiro, growth provides the very impetus for societal development. “The pressure brought about by the quantitative increase of like units leads inevitably to a critical point at which the system must either fission or advance to new levels of organization by undergoing a qualitative transformation.” D. E. Dumond goes so far as to suggest that population is the independent variable and that any change in social organization is dependent on population size.
When the Spaniards arrived there (Cuzco) there was a great number of people; it would have been a pueblo of more than 40,000 vecinos, within the city alone, and what with the suburbs and districts around Cuzco, within 10 or 12 leagues, I believe that there would have been 200,000 Indians, because it was the most densely populated of all these realms.
Cristóbal de Molina, Relatón de muchas cosas acaetidas en el Perú … (1553), P. 33
Almost half the Indian inhabitants of Peru, some 600 thousand, lived in the southern highlands in 1570. Many large repartimientos dotted the landscape: About 142 of the 260 holdings of the south sierra had more than a thousand residents. The largest population unit in all Peru, the Crown repartimiento of Chucuito, was composed of almost 75 thousand people at the time of Viceroy Toledo's visita general. Further, the rate of population change for the region was the lowest of all Peru from the 1570s to 1600s: The tributary population declined at only – 1.1 percent annually, and the total population fell at –1.2 percent each year. Thus, the broad outlines of population change in the southern highlands are clear, but the details of the process are still poorly understood. The region is vast: It is almost a country within a country. Many communities made up each repartimiento; we are dealing with more than a thousand such population clusters. It is impossible to study them individually. Once again, we are forced to select some areas and problems to examine in greater depth. The balance must await the results of the ongoing investigation of other researchers.
Archaeology is a fascinating exercise, but reason has to set bounds to extravagant flights of fancy when seeking to interpret the evidence of inert matter.
Nicolas Sanchez-Albornoz, Population of Latin America, p. xiii
In 1965 I suggested that the pre-Spanish population of Peru could best be estimated by archaeologists after careful valley-by-valley investigation of sites and analysis of the productive capacity of ecological systems. As late as 1973 I continued to believe that archaeology held the key to an understanding of the native population. I overestimated, however, both the speed of archaeological fieldwork and the soundness of its methodology. Deriving population numbers from archaeological sources, whether skeletal remains, artifacts, remnants of foodstuffs, or mapping of settlement sites, is a very slow and painstaking process, fraught with major difficulties in the interpretation of the data. I have come to the conclusion that archaeological results covering large segments of the Andean region and providing noncontroversial population material will not be available in the immediate future. In this chapter we shall examine the general methods of paleodemographers and evaluate the potential of the information they can provide on prehistoric populations in the Americas as well as the limitations in their work. The chapter is organized thematically: We review the value of skeletal remains for population reconstruction, the relation of household dwelling area to the number of inhabitants, and human density and midden deposits; finally, we examine what monumental architecture and cities can tell us about population size. I shall attempt to limit the study chronologically to the two centuries preceding the arrival of Francisco Pizarro and his men on the South American west coast.
Arguing by analogy with some known population (e.g. as in a model life-table) may help, assuming that the analogy is sociologically fair, but the society in question may be unique in history, and consequently not susceptible to such an analogy.
T. H. Hollingsworth, Historical Demography P. 304
One of the simplest ways of estimating Peru's aboriginal population, and one that has been frequently used by scholars, is the depopulation ratio method. Use of depopulation ratios is straightforward. It does not presume an extensive knowledge of statistics.The argument is clearly understandable, and the manipulation of numbers gives an impression of scientific accuracy. The procedure is logical: Known population figures for precontact groups and later census figures for the same population unit are used to derive a ratio. The ratio is then applied to estimate the total regional population from a known census total. In this chapter we shall examine the sources, techniques, and conclusions of four recent investigators who have used depopulation ratios to estimate the Andean native population: John H. Rowe, Henry F. Dobyns, C. T. Smith, and Nathan Wachtel. John H. Rowe was one of the first modern scholars to utilize the depopulation method to calculate the aboriginal population. His estimate is based on five samples: two (Rimac and Chincha) for the coast and three (Yauyos, Huancas, and Soras) for the central highlands (see Table 4). These five cases are employed by Rowe because there are data for both the Inca period (ca. 1525) and the Toledo era (ca.1571).
Historians of U.S.-Mexican relations are confronted by a conundrum in the Punitive Expedition of 1916–1917. Ostensibly motivated by the attack of General Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa upon Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916, the expedition traditionally has been evaluated in terms of its supposed mission. The puzzle lies in the fact that President Woodrow Wilson publicly told the American and Mexican people one thing and privately told his field commander, John J. Pershing, quite another. Wilson's press release on the morning of March 10, 1916 announced: ‘An adequate force will be sent at once in pursuit of Villa with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays’.
A prominent feature of Spain's response to the rebellions of its Latin American colonies, both during the constitutional régime of 1810–1814 and the absolutist system of Ferdinand VII from 1814–1820, was wide-spread bureaucratic confusion. When José García de Léon y Pizarro became Secretary of State in 1816, he found the whole question of the pacification of America in a deplorable state which had reached ‘un punto de exasperación increíble’1 In a Council of State session of December 1816, the Navy Minister, José Vázquez de Figueroa, angrily denounced the red tape and inefficient administrative system in which decisions were lost in ‘una verdadera lucha de papeles’.2
On January 28, 1808, the ports of Brazil, hitherto restricted to Portuguese vessels, were thrown open to direct trade with all friendly nations. Two months later, the ban on manufacturing in the colony was lifted. In October the Banco do Brasil was authorized as a bank of issue designed to supply the government's credit needs and to foster internal and external trade. The most urgent financial needs of the Portuguese government, which in November 1807 had fled to its American colony in order to escape the invading forces of Napoleon I, were met by negotiating a loan in London, the leading market for capital in the Atlantic economy. Two years later, in 1810, the Portuguese government signed a treaty with Great Britain admitting British goods into Brazil at a standard duty of 17 per cent for the next fifteen years.