On the occasion, Professor Ana Silvia Volpi Scott, a professor in the demography department at Unicamp, and Dario Scott, also a specialist in historical demography, commented on the first version of an article that Camila Loureiro Dias, Fernanda Bombardi and Eliardo Costa are writing on indigenous demography in 17th and 18th century Amazon.

This is a complex and challenging task: to quantify the indigenous population of the Amazon during the colonial period. After an article was published in 2020, which presented an attempt to measure the number of indigenous people incorporated into colonial society, the research has moved on to an even greater challenge: measuring the factors that caused this population to decrease over the centuries.

The difficulty in obtaining accurate and complete data on the indigenous population in colonial times poses major methodological challenges. Existing historical sources are fragmented and often incomplete, requiring researchers to resort to inferences and projections to estimate populations. In addition, indigenous depopulation was a complex and heterogeneous process, influenced by various factors such as diseases, conflicts and enslavement, with significant regional and temporal variations. Epidemic diseases such as smallpox and measles were a determining factor. However, enslavement, territorial displacement and the destruction of the traditional ways of indigenous life contributed to this reduction. In this sense, it is important to stress that indigenous depopulation was not an isolated process, but part of a set of social, economic and political transformations that marked the colonization of America.

Analysis of the age structure of the indigenous population, for example, reveals that epidemic diseases affected children and young adults the hardest, compromising the communities’ ability to reproduce. Population mobility, both through escapes and forced displacement, also contributed to the numerical reduction of indigenous peoples. The researchers involved in this debate stressed the importance of considering the historical dynamics and complexity of the processes, seeking new methodologies and approaches to deepen knowledge on this fundamental issue for understanding the history of Brazil.

Finally, an evaluation was made on the relevance of linking data on colonial indigenous depopulation with attempts at pre-Columbian demographic estimates, a topic that will be explored in greater depth in future research. Although pre-Columbian estimates are imprecise and controversial, they can provide an order of magnitude of the indigenous population before the arrival of the Europeans and make it possible to compare historical data and estimate the magnitude of the population decrease. New methodologies and data sources should, however, be explored in order to improve these estimates and offer a more accurate view of indigenous population dynamics over time.