This is not a real old time myth but it is what they say now, and it must have been like that.This man from Ulimang was highly skilled in the art of warfare—like Eisenhower.A Tahitian businessman who provides ‘Polynesian’ entertainment for tourists in Hawaii with a young Marquesan man whom he took to Samoa to be tattooed by their artistsfollowing designs recorded by early European visitors.… as for oral Traditions, what certainty can there be in them? What foundation of truth can be laid upon the breath of man? How do we see the reports vary, of those things which our eyes have seen done? How do they multiply in their passage, and either grow, or die upon hazards?Writing about American Indian reactions to their discovery of large fossil remains, Adrienne Mayor observes in passing that “[f]olklore scholars now generally accept that oral traditions about historical events endure for about a thousand years, although some oral myths about geological and astronomical events can be reliably dated to about seven thousand years.” Mayor's chosen task is to demonstrate that American Indian legends suggest that they rightly regarded fossils as the remains of long extinct megafauna populations. In aid of this, Mayor accepts these arguments in her own work. While this claim might seem extravagantprima facie, and while most folklorists would disown Mayor's claim, she is not without support from the work of a relatively small, but not uninfluential (and possibly growing), cadre of anthropologists, mythographers, geologists, and historians, whose efforts on behalf of deep-time oral tradition I address here.Some interesting—even intriguing—things have been happening recently in discussions of the carrying capacity of oral tradition—its long-term historicity, in particular.À laMayor, the thrust of this is to credit tradition with being able to preserve “intact” various pieces of information for as long as tens of thousands of years. To the historian interested in the reality of the past in oral societies, this state of affairs is challenging, perplexing, and no doubt to some, highly promising. If, for instance, it can be demonstrated that certain information in oral data is thousands of years old and at the same time an accurate recollection, then reservations about much later (say, several centuries old) orally transmitted information might need to be reassessed, and with such rethinking would come new ways to approach great swaths of the past.

No abstract

The population levels of the newly discovered western hemisphere at contact have been an object of observers’ attention since the first voyage of Columbus. The numbers that have been developed over time reflected the environments in which they evolved – sometimes they were very high and sometimes very low. The latest of these cycles, dating from the 1940s and still in vogue, reflects the highest numbers, as well as the most elaborate methodology, ever applied to the problem. The results have been estimates that are many times most of those previously advanced, and the mechanism to explain this substantially greater decline has been epidemic European diseases, to which the American Indians had no resistance. The High Counters’ methodology involves taking relatively small numbers in the record and multiplying these many times over to reach new numbers that are ten to twenty times as large. A major component of this practice is to presume that the epidemics in question spread across the hemisphere even before Europeans could assess their impact. For this hypothesis, and for several other elements of the exercise, there is no evidence whatever. Despite this handicap, the new cadres of numbers have themselves spread far and wide and can be found in a variety of sources aimed at various audiences.

No problem has exercised Africanists for so long and so heatedly as the slave trade. Now that any difference of opinion as to its morality has ended, debate tends to concentrate on its economic and political aspects, particularly on its magnitude and regional characteristics. In the past few scholarly generations, sophisticated statistical manipulations have supplied more evidence, but it has been concentrated on the number of slaves who arrived in the New World. Nonetheless, dearth of evidence (sometimes total) regarding the other components of the trade has not seemed to discourage efforts to arrive at global figures and, by extension, to determine its effects on African societies.The present paper asks why this should be so, and wonders how any defensible conclusions can ever be reached about almost any facet of the trade that can go beyond ideology or truism. It concludes that no global estimate of the slave trade, or of any ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘underpopulation’ it may have caused, are possible, though carefully constructed micro-studies might provide limited answers. Under the circumstances, to believe or advocate any particular set or range of figures becomes an act of faith rather than an epistemologically sound decision

The purpose of reference notes in scholarly writing is to provide readers with the opportunity to learn more about an issue or to test an author's credibility. As such, they need to include whatever details are necessary to ensure that access be maximally efficient. These data should always include page numbers for both quotes and close paraphrases. Unfortunately, this practice is remarkably uncommon in the sciences and even the social sciences. Failure to include these data is also a failure of good epistemological practice.