Population.—The original numbers of the American Indians are imperfectly known. The most complete and careful count, that by Mooney (Smithsonian Misc. Coll., lxxx., 1928) arrives at a total of 1,150,000 souls north of Mexico at the time of first contact with Europeans. Inasmuch as several specialists have set a somewhat lower figure for the regions with which they were most familiar, Mooney's total is probably too large rather than too small, and one million in the United States and Canada is, perhaps, not far from the true number. In Mexico and in Central America population was much denser relatively and absolutely; it cannot well be put at less than three to four million. Similar conditions prevailed in South America: there may have been nearly as many natives in Peru as in the remainder of the conti nent.
In general, the race has declined after contact with Europeans. Some North American tribes have become completely extinct.
Some have shrunk, lost their identity and merged. Some have more or less held their own, and a few, like the Navaho, have increased markedly.
In the United States, most tribes began slowly to increase again about 191o. In many tribes there has been an infusion of white and sometimes of Negro blood.
Except in the south-west, it may be said that even those tribes that remain as numerous as originally, are so only through the inclusion of alien blood. Socially the mixed bloods generally are Indians.
Of this population of pure and mixed blood, there remains not quite half a million in the United States and Canada. Mexico is estimated to be about one-third pure Indian, and more than another third, part Indian.
History.—There is no native documented history of the Amer ican Indian, except for the Aztec and Maya. The great bulk of the tribes possessed neither time systems nor writing, and left only legendary traditions. These usually possess limited authen ticity. In the main the history of the tribes is a history of their contacts with Caucasians. Often more can be gathered as to the movements or other fortunes of a stock, from its recent dis tribution and from the relations of its component languages, than from any directly historical source.
The earliest date found converts to 96 B.C. The present tend ency is to construe the time as 26o years later; some authori ties incline to 520 years later. This calendar system involves long observation, some astronomical knowledge, considerable facility in computing, and is accompanied by hieroglyphic writing, fine sculpture, and advanced architecture. In short, Maya civiliza tion was becoming full blown somewhere between 1 and 500 A.D.
Beyond this was a formative period on which information is only beginning to be discovered by archaeology.
An Archaic period is well known from remains in the valley of Mexico. This, however, was a culture already emerged from prim itiveness, since the first of its several stages possessed agri culture and pottery. It seems anterior to the Maya development but not to go back much, if at all, beyond the Christian era. It was succeeded by the more advanced culture of the Toltecs (Teotihuacan), and on this legendary data were preserved by the still later Aztecs. Some of the Aztec accounts are chronological and carry Toltec history back to about A.D. 600, with a period of florescence around A.D. 900-1000.
The Toltec-Aztec calendar, however, while absolutely accu rate within its cycles of 52 years, did not with certainty distin guish successive cycles, so that all Toltec dates must be accepted as being only approximations.
In the south-western U.S., Pueblo and pre-Pueblo culture has been unravelled by intensive archaeological work, until a series of seven stages is known, the first being without pottery and dated by dendrochronology (tree rings) to the 3rd century A.D. The Hohokam culture of S. Arizona may be older.