Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. By David Henige. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. xii, 532 pp. $47.95, isbn 0-8061-3044-X.)

This book contains twenty-one chapters or, more accurately, essays, not all of them integrated with each other. David Henige devotes most of them to criticizing, ostensibly on methodological grounds, scholars he labels "High Counters." They include the historians Woodrow Borah, N. David Cook, Francisco Guerra, and Linda Newson, the ethnohistorians Henry F. Dobyns and Kathleen Deagan, the archaeographers Sarah K. Campbell, Ann Ramenofsky, Jerald T. Milanich, and Marvin Smith, the anthropologists Pierre Clastres and David Stannard, the geographer Carl O. Sauer, and the late physiologist Sherburne F. Cook. 1

The book's tone is negative. Henige's criticism is frequently phrased as castigation and denigration. It characterizes the procedures of the targeted scholars with accusatory verbs including "admit," "concoct," "conjure," "contrive," "rob," and "tamper," without evidence to support such characterizations. Henige's criticism is sprinkled with untrue assertions stated with godlike certitude. . . .

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