The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before

[Igel]

23. The estimates vary.

Often for political or ideological reasons. Some of the larger ones are just plain screwy. On occasion you find sort of "let's add up all the largest estimates for a region over time" estimates--population of the Amazon at its peak, population of Cahokia at its peak, population of the SW US at its peak. Even if the peaks really didn't coincide in time.

The estimates for those lost to disease also vary.

However, while a lot of the agriculture was sustainable--most agriculture has been, over time, not so much because of cultural merit as technological inability to make it truly unsustainable--in some cases it wasn't. Some species were overfished in S. California and are well attested in middens, then their numbers dwindle and vanish. We only know them from fossils and from kitchen middens.

Mast was widely spread throughout the eastern portion of North America, with consequences for the species that were native. Pawpaw was not original to Texas through Quebec. It, too, was spread--and with it went some animal and insect species, and the space it took up was space lost to native species.

And there are places that had irrigation in the SW that were rendered unusable. Irrigation introduced too many salts into the soil. The same happened to "sustainable" irrigation in N. India, the Middle East, N. Africa.