Editor's Statement

This issue of Ethnohistory focuses on the ways in which the disciplines and methods of geography, demography, and cartography are relevant and revealing for ethnohistorical analyses. The article by Graham Burnett and that by Alan McMillan and Ian Hutchinson present culturally distinct views of landscapes and underline the importance of such concepts for the integrated study of the past by encouraging holistic approaches to the interpretation of cultural knowledge of human environments. Elinore Barrett and Henry Dobyns, in closely related articles, provide fine examples of the progress, and remaining difficulties, in reconstructing the past of human populations. The benefits of doing so are manifest in both contributions, and the relevance of demography to ethnohistorical research is underlined further by William Preston's article on early native California. All three contributions also engage archaeological issues and so remind scholars of the importance of archaeology as a complementary approach to the study of the past.