Comment by acdha

Agreed, but this tradition of speculation had been around for decades before researchers figured out just how severe the plague toll had been. I think part of that was the lack of stone buildings in the eastern United States setting the tone for Americans to think that the native peoples outside of Mesoamerica had been small hunter-gatherer tribes because it took time to establish how large the pre-Colombian populations had been in places like the Mississippian culture or that there are ways to manage the environment other than by plowing fields for grains which weren’t native to the continent.