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, David Henige first stumbled on the topic of determining the contact population of the Americas, he was intrigued by the historical question. After he observed a class on the subject, Henige’s curiosity was piqued. He subsequently embarked on a less inadvertent and more adversarial course of action, which over the past twenty 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 whom Henige terms “high counters” (xi). Henige’s swashbuckling critiques are well-known and often cited in the literature. His voice having cried out in the wilderness of scholarly journals and edited collections for too long (and, at least to Henige, to little effect or none at all), Henige now offers a thick, uncompromising tome called Numbers from Nowhere. He considers this book “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” (7). Typically, it is the reader’s responsibility to judge whether “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.

Henige believes his purpose is clear. He writes, “At the heart of the High Counters’ enterprise is an ensemble of assumptions,” the most problematic 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 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 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 Newson (chapter 15). For confrontational, in-your-face, me-against-them kind of reading, served up page after page with more than a whiff of righteous indignation at the moronic shortcomings of many academics save one hard-done-by maverick, this is the book.

What if, however, the argument Henige makes about the high counters’ assumptions turns out not to be so very well founded? What if, in fact, 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 some high counters actually have paid attention to what some low counters have said, Henige’s work included? And what if, instead of constructing the whole affair as an orchestrated conspiracy perfectly suited to the whims of the politically correct zeitgeist, it proves simply to be the way that Thomas Kuhn argues the world of knowledge unfolds: one paradigm inexorably giving way to another? What the book consists of, despite Henige’s protestations, is far less constructive commentary about an important debate than the willful insistence of a clever man to exercise his right to voice...