ABSTRACT
Estimates of pre-contact Indigenous populations in the Western Hemisphere have been debated by explorers and scholars since the arrival of Columbus in 1492. There are literally hundreds of studies and texts that deal with the problem of estimating the population of peoples who, in some cases, were decimated by pandemic epidemics brought to the New World by fi shermen and traders long before European colonists set ashore on the continent. Bartolome de Las Casas, Alfred Kroeber, Russell Thornton, James Axtell, Frances Jennings, Ward Churchill, Bruce Trigger, Henry F. Dobyns, and Alfred W. Crosby Jr. have all contributed to the discourse, publishing exhausting works on disease and their impacts on Indigenous populations.
