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Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange: Indian Depopulation and Food Sustainability
The Columbian Exchange was a two-way biological and agricultural exchange. The Europeans and Africans brought Old World airborne diseases to the New World for which the Indians did not have any immunity, which they exchanged for syphilis. The Europeans’ livestock provided much-needed labor and food source in the Americas. In return, the Americas supplied the Eastern Hemisphere with an abundance of agricultural products which would relieve hunger, increase nutrition, and enable a rapid growth spurt in the world’s population.
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Indian Tribes of the American Southwest
The pre-Columbian history of the southwestern United States has been easier to trace than pre-columbian history of other regions. In this article, I’ll cover the four main ethnicities of Indians who inhabited the Southwest in the period immediately before European discovery. They included the Anasazi (Pueblos), the Hohokams, the Yumans, and the Athapascans—which include the Navajo and Apache.
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Native American Population Estimates When Columbus Arrived In 1492
Pre-Columbian population estimates range from eight million to Henry Dobyns’s high count of 142 million, with the average estimate of Native American demographers over the past century remaining steady at about 40 million.[2] The high estimates can easily be discounted as exaggerations, considering that the Aztec Empire—one of the most densely populated regions in the Americas—had only about six million on the eve of European contact.
