Researchers studying pre-Columbian Indigenous demography have struggled to determine how many people lived in the Americas prior to the arrival of European colonizers. Estimates based on historical censuses, archaeological sites, and land carrying capacity have varied wildly.
When Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas on Oct. 12, 1492, he encountered Indigenous Lucayans living on the Bahamian island now called San Salvador. In his journal, Columbus recorded entries regarding great multitudes of men
who welcomed him that same day, exchanged goods with him, and described other populations residing on nearby islands. Within a few decades after Columbus’ arrival, the Indigenous people of the Americas were decimated by what anthropologist Eric Wolf called the Great Dying
— a combination of epidemic disease, warfare, and enslavement that led to a rapid decline in the Native population.
Revising the Numbers Behind the Great Dying
Investigators have spent centuries attempting to calculate the pre-contact Indigenous population inhabiting the Americas immediately before European colonizers arrived. Using land carrying capacity estimates along with historical documentation from 16th-century illness outbreaks, Dobyns calculated an Indigenous population figure of approximately 112 million individuals in his 1983 publication. In essence, Dobyns filled up the landscape to its maximum carrying capacity, so that all environmentally similar places were occupied by the same number of people,
Milner said. He also made the assumption that epidemic disease spread widely and universally, which would make sense if the landscape was filled up.
However, archaeological discoveries during the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that human settlement across the Americas was uneven, according to Milner. Dobyns’ estimates were therefore much too high.
Milner and Chaplin wrote that North America held roughly 2.8 to 5.7 million people, or a best estimate
of 3.8 million people in the early 16th century, before European diseases decreased the size of the Indigenous population. If you want to start estimating specific populations, you should use measures that work across regions,
Robert Kelly, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming, told Live Science.
Larger Indigenous Populations Populated Cahokia Before European Settlement
Alternatively, if human settlement occurred well before 15,000 years ago — a possibility supported by archaeological finds like the 23,000-year-old footprints at White Sands, New Mexico — or if migration brought larger groups, those population totals would increase further. Had Europeans tried settling the continent at A.D. 1000, they would have run into a much, much larger Indigenous population,
Kelly said. At that time, the city of Cahokia, near modern-day St. Louis, encompassed 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) and had a population of nearly 20,000 people. They could have fielded thousands of warriors, and it would have been a very different experience for the Europeans,
Kelly said.
Grasping the demographic scale of the Western Hemisphere’s Indigenous populations in 1492 remains essential for interpreting North American history. North America was not an empty continent when the Europeans arrived,
Peros said. There were people and civilizations pretty much everywhere in the Americas for a long period of time.
