It is estimated, based on archaeological data and written records from European settlers, that from 8 to 112 million indigenous people lived in the Americas when the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus began a historical period of large-scale European interaction with the Americas.
While the population of Old World peoples in the Americas steadily grew in the centuries after Columbus, the population of the American indigenous peoples plummeted.
A controversial question relating to the population history of American indigenous peoples is whether or not the natives of the Americas were the victims of genocide. After the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust during World War II, genocide was defined (in part) as a crime “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.”
Historian David Stannard is of the opinion that the indigenous peoples of America (including Hawaii) were the victims of a “Euro-American genocidal war.” While conceding that the majority of the indigenous peoples fell victim to the ravages of European disease, he estimates that almost 100 million died in what he calls the American Holocaust.