Talk:Ancient Hawaiian population

Major update/revision needed…
This article summarizes the story of Hawaii's population history largely from the perspective one of the participants in an academic debate, namely Dye 1994. It thereby tends to accept as conclusive his arguments from somewhat fragmentary archaeological sources. The article frequently fails to attribute this point of view.

Just as important, there is a range of more recent research coming to conclusions somewhere between Dye's low estimate and Stannard's high estimates. This material should be cited and incorporated. Notably, David Swanson comes to a point estimate of 683,000 Native Hawaiians in 1778. His work is described here:

A possibly complete review of populations estimates is offered in this work by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs' Research Division. It shows that European observers in the 1770s and 1780s estimated between 200,000 and 400,000 Native Hawaiians (another estimated 100,000 on Hawai'i island alone). The work is sufficiently careful and exhaustive as to be a good basis for this article overall.--Carwil (talk) 03:08, 24 November 2020 (UTC)