Indigenous Encounters and Demographic Collapse

Historians have long debated the size of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas, with estimates ranging from roughly 40 million on the low end to figures near 100 million proposed by researchers such as Henry Dobyns in the 1960s; whatever the precise baseline, the documentary and archaeological record agrees that the following century saw a demographic collapse without close parallel in recorded history, driven by a combination of violence, forced labor, social disruption, and above all epidemic disease introduced from the Old World.