with contemporary
observation has been carried too far and that a more liberal attitude
of mind is needed. If so, then the reduction of the population which
has taken place in print may have overshot its mark and the figures may
require revision upwards.

The second factor is methodological. Throughout the last half-century,
and beginning with the pioneer work of Barrett and Kroeber,
ethnographers have employed the informant method almost exclusively. It
is not my intention to deprecate this procedure in any way or to imply
that it has not proved an exceedingly valuable tool. I would like to
suggest, however that it does carry certain limitations. I refer
specifically to the inability of old men and women to remember and
transmit _quantitative_ facts over a great span of years. On the other
hand, _qualitative_ facts and ideas can persist in the mind with little
or no blurring or alteration. Thus a man might retain clearly from his
own memory, or through that of his parents, _where_ a village was
located, what its _name_ was, and some of the _people_ who lived there.
Yet he might have no clear concept whatever _how many_ persons
inhabited the village or _how many_ villages were known to the tribe.
This failure to retain and transmit accurate knowledge of number or
mensuration becomes intensified if the informant is required to reach
across an intervening period of unrest and confusion, both physical and
mental, to an era of stability long since vanished. Yet this is just
what the informant is asked to do when he tries to tell about the
geographic and demographic conditions existing one or more generations
prior to his own youth.

I do not wish to advocate throwing out all informant testimony for
these reasons--or, indeed, any of it. I merely wish to suggest that an
undeviating adherence to literal statements of informants may on
occasion lead to population estimates which are too low. The same
discretion and criticism should be accorded them as in the other
direction should be accorded to the statements left by contemporary
white observers.

THE YUROK

The first exhaustive and scholarly attempt to assess aboriginal
population was that of A. L. Kroeber (1925) in his Handbook of the
Indians of California. He made a particularly careful study of and
worked out his fundamental principles with the Yurok. Hence any
reappraisement of the population problem in Northwest California must
begin with a thorough examin