The Pokanoket & the Myth of the Empty Land: Uncovering Pre-Colonial New England

European settlers justified their colonization of New England by casting it as an “empty wilderness,” a land waiting to be tamed. This myth, however, was not a misunderstanding, it was a deliberate erasure. Long before the Mayflower, the region was home to densely populated, agriculturally settled societies like the Pokanoket, whose numbers had already been devastated by epidemic diseases introduced through early European contact. By drawing on Indigenous oral traditions, colonial records, and modern archaeology, this paper argues that the myth of vacancy was not merely a product of ignorance, but a strategic colonial ideology designed to justify dispossession, deny Indigenous sovereignty, and obscure the catastrophic impact of foreign pathogens.

Colonial Justifications: How Europeans Framed the Land as "Unoccupied"

When English settlers arrived in New England in 1620, they found forests rich with game, rivers thick with fish, and fields already cleared for planting. [1] To them, it seemed a paradise untouched, but this perception was a dangerous illusion. What they deliberately ignored was that this “wilderness” had been shaped for generations by the Pokanoket and other Indigenous peoples through seasonal agriculture, controlled burns, and sophisticated land stewardship. By the time the Mayflower landed at Patuxet (modern-day Plymouth), epidemic diseases brought by earlier European contact had already killed up to 90% of the local population. The myth of an “empty land” was not an innocent mistake, it was a colonial strategy that recast devastation as divine opportunity. That myth still echoes today in legal frameworks, historical narratives, and public memory.

This was no passive misunderstanding, it was a weaponized fantasy. European settlers used the myth of an “underpopulated” New England to justify violent expansion. In their narrative, the continent was an untamed wilderness, sparsely inhabited by people they dismissed as culturally backward and technologically inferior. Yet this same land bore the marks of careful cultivation, controlled burning, and ecological sophistication. The settlers’ hypocrisy was stark as they described a “vacant” landscape even as they encountered thriving communities, only to portray those same people as obstacles to progress. Their colonization was cast not as invasion, but as a sacred duty to “civilize” the land and its inhabitants.

These contradictions expose the calculated nature of colonial rhetoric. Claims of New England’s “emptiness” were not passive observations, they were deliberate ideological constructs used to justify Indigenous dispossession. Settlers invoked legal concepts like terra nullius (land belonging to no one) and Puritan doctrines such as John Winthrop’s vacuum domicilium (uninhabited land) to declare territory “unoccupied” simply because it did not mirror European agricultural methods. [2] William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation epitomized this erasure when he described Patuxet, a recently depopulated Indigenous settlement as “a hideous and desolate wilderness,” despite clear evidence of prior habitation. [3] By labeling Indigenous stewardship as primitive, colonists manufactured both a moral and legal pretext for seizure. This rhetorical sleight of hand erased not only Indigenous land claims but also the devastating epidemics that had made such “emptiness” possible. In doing so, colonization could be framed not as exploitation, but as benevolence.

The myth of the “empty land” is not just a relic of the past, it continues to undermine contemporary efforts by Indigenous nations to reclaim their ancestral territories and assert their sovereignty. A powerful example occurred in 2017, when the Pokanoket Tribe occupied land owned by Brown University in Bristol, Rhode Island, to reclaim part of their traditional homeland. After Massasoit Metacom (King Philip) was killed in 1676, Plymouth Colony seized the Pokanoket homeland at Mount Hope (Potumtuk) as war spoils, declaring it forfeit and redistributing it to settlers and soldiers. [4] Over the following centuries, the land passed through private owners, becoming the Haffenreffer family estate before its donation to Brown University in 1955. [5] After sustained resistance by the Pokanoket Tribe and public advocacy, the university agreed to transfer 255 acres to a Pokanoket established preservation trust, an extraordinary institutional recognition of both historical injustice and the land’s sacred significance. [6] This hard won victory stood as a rare acknowledgment of Indigenous sovereignty in a legal and cultural system still shaped by settler logic.

Even in victory, the Pokanoket Tribe faces the same wearying questions that continue to haunt Indigenous land reclamation efforts, questions that reveal just how deeply colonial myths still permeate public consciousness. “Where were you all this time?” “If this is your land, why weren’t you living here?” “Did your ancestors actually own this land?” “What about other tribes who passed through here?” These are not harmless inquiries. When posed to the Pokanoket in 2017, they echo 17th century English deeds that labeled inhabited lands as “unoccupied” while acknowledging nearby Indigenous communities. Such rhetorical sleights of hand were never just historical relics of the past. When modern tribal leaders are asked, “Where were you?”, they are confronting the same logic that once justified the dispossession of their ancestors. This continuity reveals how colonial ideologies still frame today’s legal and moral debates around land, identity, and Indigenous sovereignty. These questions, cloaked in skepticism, reinforce the false and harmful idea that Indigenous peoples were nomads without roots, rather than rightful stewards of their land.

To challenge these enduring stereotypes, we must recenter the historical truth that the Pokanoket and neighboring tribes were not nomads but the sophisticated stewards of southern New England for millennia. Early European explorers like Giovanni da Verrazzano (1524), Samuel de Champlain (1605), and John Smith (1614), unwittingly recorded evidence of this vibrant Indigenous world. Their journals describe dense settlements, cultivated fields, and intricate systems of governance. Far from confirming the myth of an empty wilderness, these early observations now stand as undeniable proof of a land long inhabited and carefully tended. These records offer a silent rebuttal to the colonial fiction that settlers “discovered” a vacant continent.

Reassessing Pre-Contact Populations: From Mooney to Modern Scholarship

To dismantle the myth of a sparsely populated New England, we must first ask a fundamental question. Was the region truly underpopulated and uncultivated before the arrival of English settlers in 1620? The answer may surprise many, as the enduring image of an “empty” and “untamed” landscape has long reduced Indigenous peoples to simplistic caricatures of primitive, scattered, and passive people. In truth, New England was neither uninhabited nor undeveloped. Yet estimating its pre-contact population remains a challenge, in part due to the absence of written records from that era. This lack of documentation led generations of scholars to rely on flawed assumptions, reinforcing colonial narratives that dismissed Indigenous societies as inherently uncivilized and the land as underused. As a result, evidence that contradicted this view was often ignored or minimized.

A key source in shaping the myth of an underpopulated continent was James Mooney’s Aboriginal Population of America North of Mexico, published in 1928. Mooney estimated that the pre-colonial population of all North America north of Mexico was just over one million, with only about 25,000 Indigenous people living in what is now New England at the dawn of the 17th century. [7] Mooney compiled data gathered decades, and in some cases centuries after European contact had already disrupted Indigenous societies. Crucially, his calculations failed to account for "invisible" virgin-soil epidemics transmitted by 16th-century European fishermen, traders, and explorers prior to permanent colonial settlement, including the cataclysmic 1616–1619 pandemic that decimated coastal New England. Furthermore, Mooney’s work reflected early 20th century institutional biases that assumed semi-sedentary, non-European, Indigenous  horticulturists lacked the socio-political infrastructure to support high population densities. By retroactively projecting depopulated census of surviving Indigenous communities as a baseline and ignoring the impact that disease had on pre-colonial population centers, Mooney's methodology unconsciously reinforced the colonial doctrine of vacuum domicilium, transforming a catastrophic human tragedy into a scholarly myth of an inherently empty wilderness. Consequently, these figures, rooted in colonial assumptions and based on post-epidemic data, were accepted for much of the 20th century. 

But contemporary scholars have since challenged Mooney’s estimates, suggesting that the population of the Americas before contact may have ranged from 50 to 100 million. Henry Dobyns argued that the Indigenous population of North America alone may have been as high as 18 million, while William Denevan’s edited volume The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 assembled evidence for substantially higher figures than Mooney proposed. [9] Dobyns was able to rationalize such numbers by theorizing that virgin-soil pathogens responsible for the demographic collage of Indigenous populations such as smallpox, measles, and typhus, routinely inflicted mortality rates of around 90%, creating standard 20:1 depopulation ratio. Using this  disease-loss ratio from surviving post-epidemic populations across a hemispheric scale, Dobyns radically revised North America’s pre-contact estimates from Mooney’s previous estimates. Russell Thornton further emphasized that Mooney’s low count obscured the catastrophic demographic collapse brought by epidemic disease, warfare, and enslavement. [10]  David Henige, meanwhile, critiqued both Mooney and Dobyns for methodological flaws, stressing the uncertainty of all numerical reconstructions while nonetheless rejecting Mooney’s authority. [11] Taken together, these higher estimates suggest that vast regions of the so-called “New World” may have been more densely populated than many parts of Europe, directly challenging the settler myth of a vacant land awaiting discovery and possession.

Neal Salisbury grounded this demographic paradigm shift within southern New England by directly dismantling the European biases embedded in early colonial records. In Manitou and Providence (1982), Salisbury critiqued Puritan observers like Daniel Gookin, who calculated Indigenous populations strictly by counting adult male "warriors" and applying a restrictive European nuclear family multiplier of four. Integrating primary descriptions from early explorers such as Giovanni da Verrazzano and Roger Williams with archaeological data from habitation sites, Salisbury demonstrated that Indigenous dwellings housed extended, multi-generational families. By substituting a realistic household multiplier of 7.5 individuals per dwelling, Salisbury elevated southern New England's pre-contact population estimate to between 100,000 and 135,000. This localized, structural methodology provided concrete empirical evidence that pre-settlement New England supported dense, agriculturally sustained societies, firmly refuting the colonial myth of an underpopulated wilderness. 

To complement these demographic revisions, recent agroecological research provides concrete evidence that Indigenous farming systems possessed the extraordinary caloric capacity required to sustain such dense, settled populations. Colonial doctrine like vacuum domicilium relied on the false premise that Indigenous land use was sparse and inefficient compared to European husbandry. However, empirical field trials conducted by Jane Mt. Pleasant replicating traditional Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Three Sisters polyculture of intercropping maize, pole beans, and winter squash, shatter this colonial fiction. Mt. Pleasant demonstrated that this polyculture system generated two to four times more food energy per hectare than monoculture plantings, producing an astounding 12.25 million kilocalories and 349 kilograms of complete protein per hectare. [13] In practical terms, a single hectare of Three Sisters cultivation provided the annual energy requirements for 13.4 adults and the annual protein needs for 15.8 adults without requiring European plowing or draft animals. [14] By managing soil nitrogen through bean fixation, suppressing weeds with the canopy shade of the squash, and maximizing structural space, this polyculture functioned as a high-density caloric engine throughout the lands of Algonquin speaking people of the  Northeast. These quantitative agroecological findings dismantle the colonial pretext that Indigenous societies lacked the agricultural infrastructure to support large populations, proving that the dense regional numbers proposed by scholars such as Salisbury and Dobyns were backed by sophisticated, highly productive food systems. 

These revised estimates do more than reveal the scale of Indigenous presence, they measure the magnitude of loss. The gulf between Mooney’s low figures and modern scholarship is not simply academic, as it reflects the staggering demographic catastrophe that made colonization possible. When we recognize that southern New England may have supported over 100,000 people before European contact, the mortality rates from Eurasian diseases no longer feel abstract. They represent the destruction of entire generations, families lost, oral traditions silenced, and communities erased just before the English arrived. These numbers become human tragedy when we recall the empty homes Edward Winslow observed, the untended fields that fed starving colonists, and the stories that died with their last speakers.

Yet the story does not end in silence. The survival of the Pokanoket Tribe, through both biological resilience and cultural endurance, defies the narrative of inevitable disappearance. Their reclamation of sacred land at Mount Hope in 2017 proves that despite plague, invasion, and centuries of erasure, the thread of Indigenous continuity was never broken.

Demographic Collapse: The Catastrophic Impact of Eurasian Diseases

The stark differences in pre-contact population estimates can be traced to one devastating factor, the introduction of Eurasian diseases. Ethnohistoric data confirms that New England was once home to a dense and thriving Indigenous population, which was catastrophically reduced by epidemics in the early 1600s. [15] Diseases such as smallpox, leptospirosis, and influenza swept through communities with no prior exposure or immunity, killing up to 90% of the population in some areas. This sudden and large-scale depopulation left behind abandoned villages, overgrown fields, and silent forests, giving arriving settlers the false impression of an untouched wilderness. That illusion would become one of the most powerful justifications for colonial occupation.

Modern scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the devastating demographic collapse caused by the introduction of Eurasian diseases to Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Earlier estimates, like James Mooney’s widely cited figure of just over one million people in North America north of Mexico, are now seen by many scholars as vast undercounts, possibly reflecting only 10–15% of the actual pre-contact population. [16] Contemporary research suggests the true number may have been closer to 10 million, a figure supported by new archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence. [17]

Global Parallels: Indigenous Depopulation in Australia and the Americas

Critics sometimes question whether diseases alone could have caused such catastrophic loss. But historical precedents like the Black Death in 14th-century Europe or the Justinian Plague in the 6th century show that mortality rates of 60–90% are not unprecedented. [18] These cycles of pandemic collapse followed by settler denial were not confined to the Americas. 

When the British began colonizing Australia in 1788, Indigenous communities there experienced similar devastation, rationalized through the same colonial myth of terra nullius, or “land belonging to no one.” [19] A similar pattern unfolded in 18th-century Australia, where the introduction of Eurasian pathogens triggered a catastrophic demographic collapse among Aboriginal peoples. John Maynard, professor of Aboriginal History at the University of Newcastle, acknowledges the uncertainty around pre-contact population figures but notes that early estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people lived there prior to 1788. [20] Economic historian Noel Butlin later estimated the number closer to one million, and within just 60 years of British colonization, that population had fallen by an estimated 60 to 90 percent due to disease, violence, and displacement. [21] Taken together, these global parallels underscore the devastating role of disease in settler colonialism and challenge the enduring myth that colonized regions, from Australia to the Americas were sparsely inhabited, or culturally undeveloped. Such myths persist not because they reflect historical reality, but because they continue to serve colonial interests.

One of the most devastating realities that dismantles the “empty land” myth is the impact of virgin soil epidemics, disease outbreaks that occurred when pathogens spread through populations with no prior exposure and no natural immunity. In such cases, illness moves rapidly, mortality is high, and entire communities can be wiped out in a matter of weeks. [22]

For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere had been isolated from Old World diseases like leptospirosis, smallpox, bubonic plague, and measles. When these pathogens arrived with European contact, they ignited epidemics on a scale unprecedented even by European standards. [23] These were not just waves of sickness, they were cataclysmic events that shattered societies, eroded memory, and helped enable colonial conquest under the illusion of vacancy.

Before the arrival of foreign diseases, the Pokanoket, like many Indigenous peoples in New England, enjoyed generally good health, with individuals often living into old age in multi-generational households. This stability was supported by high birth rates, large family sizes, and relatively low mortality, resulting in robust and densely populated coastal communities that later caught the attention of early European explorers. [24] In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano encountered the Pokanoket near Mount Hope Bay. He noted, “There lives a father with a very large family, for in some [households] we saw 25 to 30 people,” and added, “They live long lives…and rarely fall sick. If wounded, they heal themselves with fire, without medicine, and their end comes with old age.” [25] His description of thriving communities, vibrant, populous, and self-sufficient, stands in tragic contrast to William Bradford’s 1620 account of the same area as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” [26] In just under a century, the devastation of disease had turned a living homeland into a settler fantasy of emptiness.

In the 1630s, Roger Williams, while living among the Narragansett, recorded observations that echoed earlier European accounts. He noted the communal nature of Indigenous living arrangements: “Two families will live comfortably and lovingly in a little round house of some fourteen or sixteen feet [in diameter], and so more and more families in proportion.” [27]

French explorer Samuel de Champlain made similar observations in 1606 when he arrived at “Le Beau Port” (modern-day Gloucester). He reported encountering 200 adult Indigenous men in the area and was warned that hundreds more were arriving to trade. [28] Alarmed by the large gathering, the French withdrew, fearing they were outnumbered. This moment, in which European explorers were overwhelmed by the visible Indigenous presence, directly contradicts later Puritan claims of “vacant lands.”

In 1614, English explorer John Smith identified at least thirty villages along the Merrimack River, including Patuxet (Plymouth), which he estimated housed some 2,000 people. Again, Smith's observations confirm larger populations in areas under the influence of Massasoit Osemquin who the Pilgrims would confirm resided in Sowams the heartland of the Pokanoket Tribe. [29] Archaeological surveys conducted in the early 20th century have since confirmed Smith’s estimates, affirming the density and complexity of Indigenous settlement in the region. [30]

One of the most respected colonial sources on Indigenous life in 17th-century New England is Daniel Gookin’s Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, written in 1674. Gookin, a Puritan magistrate known for his sympathetic view of Indigenous peoples, offered a systematic overview of the region’s Indigenous nations, which he grouped into five major confederacies. They were identified as the Pequots, Narragansetts, Pawtuckets, Massachusetts, and Pokanokets. He estimated that these groups together included approximately 18,000 adult males prior to the first major epidemic. Using a conservative multiplier of four people per household, this would place the total Indigenous population of southern New England at around 72,000, though archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence suggests the true number was likely even higher. [31]

Building on Gookin’s account, historian Neal Salisbury has proposed using a theoretical household size of approximately 7.5 individuals. By this estimate, the Indigenous population from the Saco to Quinnipiac Rivers may have reached as high as 135,000 people. [32] Salisbury based this multiplier on ethnohistorical records and archaeological evidence of extended family households, commonly found in Indigenous villages throughout southern New England. His methodology translates observed household or adult male counts into broader regional demographic estimates by applying this average family size. Gookin himself reported that the Pokanokets alone could field nearly 3,000 warriors before disease struck. [33] Based on that figure, the pre-contact population of the Pokanoket Tribe may have surpassed 20,000, with neighboring nations such as the Narragansetts numbering conceivably even more.

Restoring the Pokanoket to History

Taken together, these estimates make it plausible that the Indigenous population of southern New England prior to the first pandemics approached or surpassed 100,000. While exact figures remain debated, it is no longer credible to describe the region as sparsely populated. The evidence reveals that peoples like the Pokanoket lived in densely settled, culturally rich landscapes that were dramatically altered, but not erased, by the arrival of European settlers and waves of epidemic disease. Modern scholarship continues to refine these estimates, but the conclusion is clear, Indigenous New England was far more populous, vibrant, and enduring than colonial myths have long claimed.

When the descendants of the Pokanokets occupied Brown University land in 2017, they were not merely reclaiming territory, they were reclaiming memory. Their action declared that four centuries of colonial erasure could not extinguish what even disease and dispossession had failed to destroy. It was a reminder that the thread of Indigenous continuity endures.

Their success offers a powerful model for how historical scholarship and contemporary Indigenous leadership can work together to restore what settler logic tried to erase. When the Pokanoket Tribe celebrates the Strawberry Moon, commemorates their sacred Renewal of the Covenant ceremony, or plants crops at Mount Hope, they are doing more than gathering or cultivating soil, they are defying erasure.

Each seed rebuts Mooney’s theory. Each harvest testifies to survival. Each celebration discredits the colonial claim of terra nullius, “nobody’s land.” Their story compels us to abandon the question, “Where were you?” and embrace the enduring truth, “We never left.”

Endnotes

1. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 24–31; Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976), 17–19; Darrett B. Rutman, “The Pilgrims’ Harbor: An Early Account of the Landing at Plymouth,” The New England Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1960): 342–45.

2. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

3. William Bradford, Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646 (Project Gutenberg, 2008), accessed [April,4, 2025], https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24950.

4. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 142–47; Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

5. Christina H. Nelson, A Century of Collecting: The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology (Providence: Brown University, 2003).

6. “Brown University Transfers 225 Acres to Pokanoket Tribe in Rhode Island,” Boston.com, November 26, 2024, https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2024/11/26/brown-university-transfers-225-acres-to-pokanoket-tribe-in-rhode-island/.

7. James Mooney, “The Aboriginal Population of America North of Mexico,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 80, no. 7 (1928): 1–40.

8.  Wilbur R. Jacobs, “The Tip of an Iceberg: Pre-Columbian Indian Demography and Some Implications for Revisionism,” The William and Mary Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1974): 123–132. https://doi.org/10.2307/1920915.

9. Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

10. Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).

11. David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

12. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 121.

13. Jane Mt. Pleasant, "Food Yields and Nutrient Analyses of the Three Sisters: A Haudenosaunee Cropping System," Ethnobiology Letters 7, no. 1 (2016): 87–98, https://doi.org/10.14237/ebl.7.1.2016.721. 

14.  Jane Mt. Pleasant, "Food Yields and Nutrient Analyses of the Three Sisters: A Haudenosaunee Cropping System," Ethnobiology Letters 7, no. 1 (2016): 92–95, https://doi.org/10.14237/ebl.7.1.2016.721.

15. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 40.

16. Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); John D. Daniels, “The Indian Population of North America in 1492,” William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1992): 298–320; Linda A. Newson, “The Demographic Collapse of Native Peoples of the Americas, 1492–1650,” Proceedings of the British Academy 81 (1993): 247–288; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 23.

17.   William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Erick Robinson, Jacob Freeman, and Briggs Buchanan, “Spatiotemporal Distribution of the North American Indigenous Population Prior to European Contact,” PLoS One 14, no. 4 (2019): e0215582; Alexander Koch et al., “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13–36.

18. Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004); Sharon N. DeWitte, “The Effect of Sex on Risk of Mortality during the Black Death in London, A.D. 1349–1350,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139, no. 2 (2009): 222–34; Lester K. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lee Mordechai and Merle Eisenberg, “Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of the Justinianic Plague,” Past & Present 244, no. 1 (2019): 3–50; Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

19.  Bruce Buchan and Mary Heath, Savagery and Civilization (2006); Stuart Banner, “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia,” Law and History Review (2005); Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981); Michael-Shawn Fletcher et al., “The Loss of an Indigenous Constructed Landscape Following British Invasion of Australia,” Scientific Reports (2020); Josephine Flood in The Cambridge History of Australia (2013); Historical records on the 1789 smallpox epidemic in Sydney (History of Australia 1788–1850; History of Sydney)

20. Ariel Bogle, “Who Was ‘Patient Zero’ in Australia’s 1789 Smallpox Outbreak, and Was the Disease Deliberately Spread?,” ABC News, June 7, 2021, https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2021-06-07/patient-zero-smallpox-outbreak-of-1789/100174988.

21. Ibid

22.  Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1976): 289–99; David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2003): 703–42; Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

23. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972); Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2003): 703–42.

24.  Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 18–27; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 33–41; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).

25. Giovanni da Verrazzano, The Voyage of Verrazzano, 1524 (National Humanities Center, 2006), 8, accessed December 2, 2024, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text4/verrazzano.pdf.

26. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Harold Paget (New York: Modern Library, 1981), book 1, chap. 9, 76.

27.  Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (Project Gutenberg), 48, accessed October 13, 2024, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/63701/63701-h/63701-h.htm.

28. Neal Salisbury, “Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England,1500–1643” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 27.

29.  John Smith, A Description of New England (London: Humfrey Lownes, 1616), 16–21; Edward Winslow, Good News from New England (London: William Bladen, 1624), 20; Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green, 1674), 12–13; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 25–27.

30. Maurice Robbins, Plymouth Colony: Archaeological Perspectives (New York: Academic Press, 1985); Dean R. Snow, The Archaeology of New England (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 137–44; Elizabeth S. Chilton, “The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Contact Period in the Northeastern United States,” Reviews in Anthropology 28, no. 1 (1999): 57–78; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 23–28.

31. Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green, 1674), 12–13; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 23–30; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 33–41; Dean R. Snow, The Archaeology of New England (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 137–44.

32.  David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 121.

33.  Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green, 1674), 12–13; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 25–30; Dean R. Snow, The Archaeology of New England (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 137–44; Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).

    
    
34.