The map PRUFROCK451 links to was created in the 1970s by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum at UMass/Amherst, and has become iconic as an explanation for why things happened in Salem Village as they did -- the farmers far away from the merchant-oriented town were suffering economically and were taking their revenge on the villagers who lived closer to town and had more connections to the town. Unfortunately for all the AP US History students being tested on this, the data used to create this map and draw these conclusion has been proven recently to be seriously flawed by two scholars.

Benjamin Ray at the University of Virginia has gone back and reviewed all the markers on this map, and found that there are errors in the placement of a variety of them, and that MANY people are missing, making the data essentially cherry-picked. When the correct points are made on the map, there is a more even distribution, and not this remarkable-looking geographical separation.

Richard Latner at Tulane University has pointed out that the financial status of the accused v. accused was taken from a single data point, the tax roles of one year, 1695, which was, strangely, three years AFTER the events, when the 1690 tax roles were available. When he evaluated the 1690 tax roles, he could not reproduce Boyer & Nissenbaum's findings from the 1695 tax roles. Latner then examined the tax roles over several decades before and after, and discovered that the figures in 1695 turned out to be an anomaly. The accusing families, as a group, were actually on an economic rise, and the wealth of those accused was already on the decline.