Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (review)

Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. By David Henige. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. xi + 532 pp., bibliography, index. $47.95 cloth.)

When, in 1976, he first stumbled onto the topic—"a friend told me that he was taking a seminar on determining the contact population of the Americas"—David Henige tells us that, as a historical question about which he was then uninformed, "the notion intrigued me" (4). After he "secured permission to sit in on the course as an observer" (5), Henige's curiosity was piqued. He subsequently embarked on a less inadvertent, more adversarial course of action which, over the past twenty-five years, has seen him subject to scrutiny (some would allege subject to scorn) the research findings of an eclectic mix of physical and social scientists he terms "High Counters" (xi). Henige's swashbuckling critiques are well known and cited often enough in the literature, though manifestly not with sufficient reverence, frequency, or acclaim to appease him. His voice having cried out in the wilderness of scholarly journals and edited collections for too long—and, at least in his mind, to little effect or none at all—Henige now offers us a thick, uncompromising tome he calls Numbers from Nowhere. Henige considers his book (p. 7) "a series of essays that are disparate and self-contained yet not, I think, so much so that their aggregate does not offer a reasonable assessment." Excuse me, but isn't it the reader's responsibility to judge whether or not "a reasonable assessment" has been made of the subject at hand, not least one so charged and controversial as Native American population size at European contact? Authors who claim to be reasonable are often anything but, and Henige is one of them.

His purpose he believes to be clear. Henige writes: "At the heart of the High Counters' enterprise is an ensemble of assumptions," for him the most problematical being "(1) that early European observers could count or estimate large numbers closely; (2) that they wanted to do just this, reckoning precision a virtue; (3) that they actually did so; and (4) that these counts were transmitted into and through the written sources accurately" (6). In eighteen relentlessly combative chapters Henige engages "with all but the second of these, and I see the first and third as different in the abstract but in practice much the same." He seeks to demolish the work of a host of researchers whose heinous scholarly crime is to marshal evidence in such a way as to postulate that, in all likelihood, there were more Native Americans alive at the time of Columbus's landfall than previously thought.

Few "High Counters" in the field of Native American historical demography escape the rapier thrusts of Henige's sustained attack, but those whose work is singled out for special inquisitorial attention include Woodrow Borah, Sherburne F. Cook, and Lesley B. Simpson (chapter 4), Henry F. Dobyns (chapter 5), Pierre Clastres (chapter 8), Ann Ramenofsky (chapter 9), Sarah Campbell (chapter 10), Noble David Cook and Francisco Guerra (chapter 11), and Linda A. Newson (chapter 15). If you like your reading to be confrontational, in-your-face, me-against-them kind of stuff, served up page after page with more than a whiff of righteous indignation at the moronic shortcomings of just about every academic besides one hard-done-by maverick, this is the book for you.

What if, however, the argument Henige makes about the assumptions of the "High Counters" turns out not to be so very well founded? What if, in fact, a good many of the valid points he discusses have already been raised, usually with less clamor and more collegial respect, by the likes of such "Low Counters" as Angel Rosenblat, William Sanders, B. H. Slicher van Bath, Rudolph Zambardino, and Elías Zamora? What if, miracle of miracles, some "High Counters" actually have paid attention to...