America circa Columbus: help

[caradoc]

Need help finding something.  I was reading a while ago that claimed there may have been tens of millions of people (or more than 100 million) living in North America in large cities (in the eastern Mississippi valley area if I am remembering the term correctly) before the first of the Columbus era explorers, but the diseases they carried basically wiped these cultures out an left only the nomadic tribes that we tend to think of as the actual native population that were encountered when colonization began in earnest.  This wasn't an atlantean/alien conspiracy, just some kind of unusual archaeological argument, one that ups the body count by several orders of magnitude. 

Do any of you guys here who delight in this stuff have any resources on this that you can point me at?

[dalbuc]

I think what you are thinking of are the Mississipian Cultures (aka the mound builders): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture

[caradoc]

Yeah, what I think is I'm remembering someone taking a bit of artistic license with those cultures, because the numbers were massively larger than that - they supposedly outnumbered Europe at the time.

[wreck ship]

Olmecs of the americas comes to mind but that was waay before columbus or aztecs settled in america. About 75,000 yrs ago.

[deadzone]

Columbus didn't come to America.....

[tripblood]

Columbus didn't come to America.....

Great post deadzone.

[caradoc]

Columbus didn't come to America.....

... Eddie Murphy did.

[NovaBuc]

 There is a lot of somewhat anecdotal evidence that the native american population was larger than commonly thought and that shortly before/after Europeans arrived, a good portion of the population was wiped out by disease. You might look for a book called 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles Mann. It isn't exactly a scholarly work (though at times the author certainly seems to think it is), but does raise some interesting points. Excerpts from Giovanni di Verrazzano's diaries/letters from his several expeditionary trips to South/North America are particularly supportive of the idea that the Americas was more heavily populated than we tend to think today. Also, the information about Cahokia prompted me to find more information about the city and the mounds that were built around it.

 In the end, I don't think I agree with most of Mann's conclusions though he presents them well.

[dalbuc]

The idea that the Mound Builders population was potentially massive was popular a few decades ago and built off the idea that the cities were larger and more numerous than we thought. IIRC the fight got into how much these sites were cities vs ceremonial centers in terms of what they meant for population.

There is, or was last I was looking at it, a lot of new research on cities in the Amazon as well implying a much, much larger population there than anyone thought as well.