Thank the Lord for the freeway (and the pipeline)

Without rescue archaeology, a major period of North American archaeology would still be shrouded in semi-darkness, as would the beginnings of agriculture in Taiwan (see chapter 7). For many years it has been apparent that maize was eaten widely in the Southwest prior to 1000 Bc (Figure 8.7), being particularly well represented in the form of cobs placed in caches inside caves. Some of these sites have a definite Archaic hunter-gatherer "feel," hence the long uncertainty about what all this cave-focused early maize really signified (Simmons 1986; Matson 1991).

During the 1990s, rescue excavations in alluvial and river terrace locations along tributaries of the Gila River in southern Arizona changed everything. At Milagro in the Tucson Basin, excavations on the route of a sewer pipeline in 1993 produced a settlement of oval pithouses, bell-shaped underground storage pits, fired-clay figurines, projectile points, and maize cobs, the latter directly radiocarbon dated to 1200-1000 Be. Some of the pits were calculated to be big enough to hold enough corn to support a family of four, eating only maize, for four months. Pottery in this site only appeared in upper levels, dating to about AD 100 (Huckell et al. 1995). The Milagro findings were a major factor in switching opinion away from a favored highland spread of maize from Mexico into the Southwest, toward a lowland riverine spread.

Already, many other pithouse finds had indicated a major role for maize back to at least 800 BC in the Tucson region. The growing idea that the spread of maize was rapid and large-scale was given support by the discovery of a fourhectare settlement at Cerro Juanaquena in northern Chihuahua, where maize was again AMS dated to between 1500 and 1000 BC, possibly grown on about 8 km of linear stone-faced terraces associated with the site (although the terraces themselves were also, perhaps primarily, intended for housing and defense against atlatl warfare).5 Robert Hard and John Roney (1998, 1999) note that maize was not necessarily a staple here; the inhabitants also grew chenopods and amaranth grasses and continued hunting and gathering. However, at the contemporary site of La Playa in Sonora, excavators note that maize was "ubiquitous" and enjoyed by a population in "relatively good health"

(Carpenter et al. 1999).

Perhaps the most important discoveries have been made during freeway construction in the basin of the Santa Cruz River, a tributary of the Gila, to the north of Tucson. At a site called Santa Cruz Bend, a large area of 1.2 hectares was stripped of overburden, revealing 730 features, mostly house floors (total of 183) and storage pits, dating to the San Pedro (1200-800 BC), Cienega (800 BC-AD 150), and Agua Caliente phases (AD 150-550) (Mabry 1998). It is possible that only 15 percent of whole site was uncovered, giving some idea of the sheer size of this early farmer village (7-8 hectares). The house floors are all circular with post walls, one being a massive 8.5 meters in diameter and probably a communal structure of some kind. Remains of maize, squash, tobacco, and cotton indicate the agricultural nature of the economy; there was also a decrease of large hunted animals over time, suggesting increasing pressure on the environment owing to population growth. Pottery of crude form appeared in the Santa Cruz Bend site during the Cienega phase, later developing in the Agua Caliente phase into the polished form of tecomate which also characterized contemporary pottery all over northern Mexico. Interestingly, the oldest pottery at Santa Cruz Bend does not appear to have been used for cooking, and might have been used for storage.

The most recent and most dramatic results come from Las Capas, another freeway rescue site in the Santa Cruz valley, excavated also by Jonathan Mabry (Muro 1998-9; Mabry 1999). This site has a fully fledged settlement of the San Pedro phase dating from at least 1200 BC (Figure 8.8), associated with circular house floors, irrigation canals, and the usual bell-shaped storage pits (also fairly universal in the Mesoamerican Early Formative at about the same time). In Las Capas, pottery made its appearance at about 900 BC. Also characteristic are the side-notched San Pedro points, perhaps used to tip atlatl darts, which seem to represent a break from earlier local Archaic types. The oldest Las Capas maize is dated to 1500 BC, and to 1700 Bc at another site called Los Pozos (Stevens 1999).

Immigrant Mesoamerican farmers in the Southwest?

One important observation made during the research at Santa Cruz Bend was that the rate of alluvial deposition in the vicinity of the site underwent a marked increase at about 1700 BC. Bruce Huckell (1998:64) attributes this increase to climatic factors and notes that roughly synchronous changes occurred in other valleys in the general region. But one must ask here, given the known aggradational effects of human vegetation clearance for early agricultural purposes in other parts of the world, if the first farmers were not also responsible to some degree. If so, an arrival of maize agriculture in the Southwest by soon after 2000 BC seems likely, and indeed is strongly suggested by recent radiocarbon dates.

In a recent conference paper, John Carpenter, Jonathan Mabry, and Sanchez de Carpenter (2002) point to a spread of maize from Mesoamerica into the Tucson Basin by at least 2000 BC, in association with Cortaro and Gypsum projectile points. These are forms that also occur in Mesoamerica, for instance in Coxcatlan Cave in the Tehuacan Valley and Tlatilco in the Valley of Mexico. They may thus be good evidence for a population movement behind the initial spread of maize farming into Arizona. However, just as I finished writing this chapter I received an e-mail from Jonathan Mabry telling me that maize and pottery have also been found in the Tucson region with a point type called Armijo, which seems to be indigenous to Arizona. This suggests that maize cultivation could have spread very early amongst Archaic hunter-gatherers as well.

Figure 8.8 A reconstruction of the Las Capas site through time, showing houses, irrigation canals, and bell-shaped pits for maize storage. Credit: Michael A.

Hampshire (reproduced with permission from the artist).

My own assumption here is that agricultural introduction occurred with population movement from Mexico, an assumption supported by new interpretations of the history of the Uto-Aztecan language family, to which we return in chapter 10. But we need to ask if this explanation applies to the whole of the Southwest, or if some former hunters might not also have adopted agriculture from the farmers. Many sites with maize, but with hints of the kind of mobility characteristic of hunter-gatherers, occur widely throughout the region, especially in relatively marginal areas away from the major alluvial zones (Whalen 1994; Roth 1996; Gilman 1997). The most recent statement on this issue, by R. G. Matson (2003), accepts a core spread of maize cultivation into Arizona as a result of a movement of agriculturalists from northern Mexico. He raises the possibility that the movement was very rapid, requiring perhaps only 500 years for maize to travel from the Balsas Basin of Guerrero in western Mexico to Arizona.

But Matson also considers other evidence from Basketmaker II sites in the higher altitude eastern (Mogollon) regions of the Colorado Plateau, these being techniques of basketry and sandal manufacture (such items are often found in dry caves), paleoanthropological data, and modem pueblo languages (some being non-Uto- Aztecan). From this evidence he suggests that there was indigenous adoption of agriculture by Archaic hunter-gatherers in this region. A similar viewpoint is taken by Steven LeBlanc (2003). The overall conclusion for the Southwest from the archaeological evidence is therefore that maize agriculture was introduced from Mexico, by 2000 Bc and most probably by lowland population movement, albeit with varying degrees of adoption by indigenous hunter-gatherer populations, living at higher altitudes.

Independent Agricultural Origins in the Eastern

Woodlands

As in the Southwest, the archaeology of early agriculture in the eastern part of the USA has recently undergone a paradigm shift as a result of the demonstration that a local domestication of annual seed-bearing plants was under way in the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, and middle Mississippi river basins by 2000 BC or before. Although this observation was presaged as early as 1936, most American archaeologists until recently still considered the mound-building Early and Middle Woodland cultures of this region (1000 Be to AD 500) to be essentially hunter-gatherer, prior to the widespread adoption of maize agriculture in the midto late first millennium AD. Actual maize remains in the eastern USA so far date back only to about 200 Be, at the Holding site in Illinois, after being introduced possibly across the Caribbean (Riley et al. 1991; Riley et al. 1994). Maize apparently did not reach New England until about AD 650 (Hart et al. 2003).

Yet even with the new knowledge there are still some puzzling aspects. For one thing, the pre-maize native domesticates were apparently absent in large regions of the southern and eastern coastal regions of the USA, being concentrated in the central interior of the Eastern Woodlands, north of about 34 degrees latitude (see the circled area in Figure 10.13). Paradoxically, some of the large mounded ceremonial sites which lie outside the early domestication zone, such as Poverty Point in Louisiana, show few signs of agricultural production, even though their sizes would suggest on comparative grounds that some form of food production was present. Furthermore, agriculture shows few signs of being very significant anywhere before about 500 BC, suggesting that in the Woodlands, as perhaps in northern South America, hunters and gatherers initially toyed with domesticated plants on the edges of fairly rich nonfarming economies, as hedges against periods of scarcity. Overall, the Woodlands trajectory toward agriculture has a gentle and gradual feel which perhaps aligns it with that of other forested regions such as the New Guinea Highlands and Amazonia, contrary to the more frenetic pattern of change which we have witnessed in the Middle East, China, Mesoamerica/Southwest, and the Andes.

Let us look first of all at the crops themselves.' As in Mesoamerica, it is highly likely that non-food indigenous plants were domesticated first, in this case squash (Cucurbita pepo) and gourds, the latter used for containers. Their eventual domestication was due, no doubt, to continuous human selection and planting of seeds around camps. Annual food plants were domesticated as well, including starchy-seeded Chenopodium berlandieri (goosefoot, so called because of its leaf shape), and the oilyseeded species Helianthus annuus (sunflower) and Iva annua (sumpweed or marsh elder). These plants are recognizable as domesticated because of their increasing seed sizes and/or thinner seed coats (Figure 8.9). All are native to the Woodlands, except possibly for the sunflower, which could be of Mexican or Southwestern origin. Some other starchy-seeded annuals such as maygrass, little barley, and knotweed also occur in large quantities in some sites, but do not in themselves reveal clear domesticated characteristics. Apart from squashes and sunflower, none of the above food plants continue in cultivation today.

Of these crops, the chenopods appears to have been the most important; Gayle Fritz (1993) mentions a cache of nine million goosefoot seeds buried in a pit during the early first millennium AD in the floor of Ash Cave in Ohio. Knotweed and little barley apparently did not become common until about 2,000 years ago, by which time maize was also making its initial appearance. The common bean Phaseolis vulgaris, like maize of Mesoamerican origin, did not spread into the Eastern Woodlands until about AD 1000.

One of the main proponents of the view that these domesticated plants supported a truly agricultural economy, rather than just being an adjunct to hunting and gathering, has been Bruce Smith (1987, 1992a, 1992b, 1995). He suggests that a "floodplain weed" domestication process occurred in anthropogenically disturbed alluvial terrain along the major rivers, in circumstances of increased mid-Holocene alluvial deposition. Such increased deposition often attracts a climatic explanation but, in view of comments made above about the Tucson Basin, one could perhaps also justify an inpart anthropogenic origin through vegetation clearance. In other words, the increased alluvial deposition could perhaps have been promoted by the transition to field planting on cleared land.

How important in the diet were these native Woodland domesticates? The plants concerned are described by Smith (1992b:208) as having "impressive

nutritional profiles and substantial potential harvest yield values." Richard A. Yarnell (1993:17, 1994) estimates, from a number of cave flotation and paleofeces samples, that a possible dietary intake from plants during the period 650-250 BC in Kentucky could have consisted of 40 percent oily seeds (such as sunflower, sumpweed, and squash), 36 percent starchy seeds (chenopods, maygrass, amaranth), 20 percent nuts, and rare greens and fruits. This listing suggests that at least 75 percent of plant food dietary intake came from domesticated garden products. Obviously, regional variation would have spread such percentages for individual crops widely, as shown by Bruce Smith, who indicates chenopods dominating in eastern Tennessee but apparently playing only a minor role in west-central Illinois. Smith (1992b: 200) also suggests that a field 70 by 70 meters, planted with marsh elder and goosefoot, could have provided half the caloric requirements for a ten-person household for six months.

Thus, by the second millennium BC, communities in the central part of the Eastern Woodlands were depending increasingly on plant domestication. By AD 1, early in the Hopewell phase of the Middle Woodland Period, pre-maize systems of agriculture were present through Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio, extending across the Mississippi into Missouri and Kansas (Adair 1988; O'Brien and Wood 1998). By this time there is ample archaeological evidence for a pattern of small settlements of circular huts, mostly under 2 hectares in size, located along the edges of floodplains and interspersed with burial mounds and "ceremonial centers" (Smith 1992b).

Figure 8.9 Trajectories for the domestication of sunflower, sumpweed, squash, and goosefoot in the Eastern Woodlands. From Smith 1992b. In a recent personal communication (2003), Bruce Smith has informed me that current commencement dates for domestication, in terms of the baselines shown here, fall close to 3000 BC for squash and 2000 BC for sunflower.

Unlike Mexico, Peru, the Middle East, or China, there is here no ebullient trend toward settlement concentration, at least not until a millennium later during the maize-based Mississippian complex after AD 1000. But some of the Early and Middle Woodland mound complexes are of course of great size; Adena burial mounds of the first millennium BC in Ohio can be up to 20 meters high, constructed over circular posthole structures and supplied with central log-lined burial pits. Such mounds are sometimes associated with complex embanked enclosures enclosing up to 10 hectares (Brose et al. 1985; Webb and Snow 1988; Mainfort and Sullivan 1998). Even more impressive mound and bank constructions, including animal-shaped mounds, together with widespread trading networks enmeshing much of the eastern USA, are characteristic of the following Hopewell phase of the first millennium AD (Figure 10.13) (Brown 1994).

The Early and Middle Woodland periods were also a time of population increase in terms of skeletal data and fertility estimates, an increase continuing

onward into the Late Woodland and Mississippian periods (Buikstra et al. 1986). Numerous questions arise, however, with respect to this early agricultural complex. How does pottery technology relate to the Woodland picture? What was the economic status of the people in those very extensive regions around the edges of the confirmed agricultural zone, some also builders of impressive mounds, for whom there appears to be no evidence for farming activity? How did the people who created the Woodland agricultural sites relate to their Archaic predecessors? Was there any population reassortment or replacement across the transition? In many ways, the record in this region is much harder to read coherently than those in central Mesoamerica or northern Peru. This may reflect factors of preservation, but it may also reflect the possibility that the Eastern Woodlands were always much more a region of balance between farming and foraging than were the regions of burgeoning complex civilization. The farming picture seems to be diffuse and muted right down to the period of maize dominance after AD 900.

As far as pottery is concerned, the early fiber-tempered pottery of the southeastern USA, with its possible South American parallels (discussed above), has not yet been found in agricultural contexts. This pottery dates back to perhaps 2500 BC in Georgia and northern Florida and seems everywhere to precede any significant agricultural presence (Peterson 1980; Adair 1988; Walthall 1990; Milanich 1996). Between 1200 and 600 BC, varieties of paddleimpressed, stamped, and incised pottery, mostly with non-fiber tempers, appeared widely to the east of the Mississippi, extending right up to New York State (Jenkins et al. 1986). Whether or not this Early Woodland pottery was derived indigenously from the earlier fiber-tempered wares, or whether there was some input of technique and style from Mesoamerica, as claimed by Ford (1969) and Webb and Snow (1988), is an intriguing question. It is not possible linguistically to have a major migration from Mesoamerica as recent in time as 1000 Be covering most of the eastern USA and replacing earlier languages - on these grounds alone, the Early Woodland peoples must surely be mainly the descendants of Archaic forebears.

But there are some very important "big-picture" aspects to all of this that tend to be overlooked in discussions of regional prehistory. The Early Woodland pottery becomes very widespread at about the same time as the evidence for early agriculture and the beginnings of mound and earthwork construction. This

is the case even if the pottery, agriculture, and mounds do not overlap in distribution with absolute precision. Thus, some correlation between pottery and agriculture can be suggested. Furthermore, on the Mesoamerican contact issue, some of the southern sites, for instance Poverty Point in Louisiana, have tecomate pottery forms resembling contemporary Mesoamerican pottery. Some southern pottery traditions of the period before 600 Bc also have incised and stamped forms of surface decoration which again parallel similar and contemporary styles in Mesoamerica (Ford 1969; Jenkins et al. 1986).

So what does the Early Woodland picture in the eastern USA really tell us? I think we have a non-coincidental association of earthwork monuments, pottery manufacture, and a developing agricultural economy, at least in the central Mississippi basin and its major tributaries, during the Early Woodland Period, from the third millennium BC onward. The evidence suggests that this is a locally generated transition into farming, with some strong evidence for a degree of stylistic contact with Mesoamerica, but not in the first instance for a successful agricultural transfer from Mesoamerica, given that maize clearly took some centuries to adapt to the northerly latitudes.

But what about developments much further to the south, seemingly beyond the range of the Woodland agricultural zone? The impressive 60-hectare site of Poverty Point in Louisiana, for instance, has six massive semi-circular concentric earthworks, a bird-shaped mound with possibly Olmec parallels, figurines, pottery, a possible supporting population of 5,000 people living in 600 houses, all set in a landscape with at least 80 contemporary and culturally related sites. The whole complex dates to the second millennium BC, with dates of 1750 to 1350 BC currently being suggested for Poverty Point itself, and in this region there are stated to be much older mounds dating back to almost 4000 BC (Gibson 1998). Yet Poverty Point has yielded absolutely no evidence of domesticated plants or agriculture at all (Webb 1977; Byrd 1991; Gibson 1996, 1998). Is this due to fugitive evidence? Was some form of predomestication cultivation being practiced? Or were the inhabitants of Poverty Point still purely Archaic hunters and gatherers? Were foodstuffs obtained from subject populations? We do not know, but it is somehow hard to imagine that such a massive site could have existed for so long merely supported by collected and hunted food from the local environment.

To the later phases of Woodland prehistory, those connected with the gradual

expansion of maize cultivation after 2,000 years ago, we return in chapter 10. For we still have to tease out the ethnolinguistic prehistory of this region in terms of the movement of populations such as the Siouans, Caddoans, and Iroquoians. While the indigenous plant domestication process must have laid the ethnolinguistic foundations in part for these language families, it is clear that major changes and population reassortments also occurred during the first and early second millennia AD. The most intensive episode of expansion of agricultural communities across the Mississippi on to the Great Plains was essentially a phenomenon of this later period of developing maize cultivation, as was the expansion of maize farmers northward to Ontario.

Chapter 9

What Do Language Families Mean for Human Prehistory?

all these dialects preserve several words of a more antient language, which was more universal, and was gradually divided into many languages, now remarkably different. (Johann Reinhold Forster 1778')

The central job of comparative-historical linguistics is the identification of groups of genetically related languages, the reconstruction of their ancestors, and the tracing of the historical development of each of the member languages. (Kaufman 1990a:15)

The first eight chapters of this book have detailed the early history of agricultural dispersal from a number of homelands in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Crops, domestic animals, and new forms of technology spread over vast areas. Burgeoning human populations moved from seasonally mobile camps into sedentary villages and towns. Ancestors, communal tombs, monuments to the gods, and ranked lineages impinged on human affairs with an ever-increasing intensity. The essential social and productive foundations were put in place beneath the long haul to the first literate civilizations.

What did all this mean in real human terms? Who were these early farmers and how do they relate as possible ancestors, in cultural, linguistic, and biological senses, to modem populations? At this point, we must be very strict in keeping apart the implications of the records derived from different disciplines. The archaeological record deals with the material aspects of ancient life, not with language or biology. The comparative and historical linguistic record suggests how languages might have developed and spread, and is not tied in any absolute way to the history of agricultural systems or human

genotypes.

In this chapter and the next, our interest is not with named individual ethnic groups (such as Celts or Chinese), but rather with whole families of languages - for instance, with the Indo-European language family, the Sino-Tibetan family, and so forth. On this whole-family scale, major patterns of expansion in the deep past can be perceived that can, with considerable profit, be compared with the records of agricultural expansion derived from archaeology.

Language families are remarkable phenomena. The largest ones, situated mostly in the Old World, tie together hundreds, sometimes thousands, of languages and communities spread right across continents and oceans. They extend far beyond individual community awareness - how many speakers of English (excluding linguists!) would be aware that their language shares a common origin with Bengali, or have the faintest idea why? They also extend far beyond the reaches of history - related languages ancestral to both English and Bengali were spoken in northwestern Europe and northern India respectively by at least 1500 ac and perhaps earlier; long before the existence of any western European or Indian historical records or great empires.

If we dissect a language family, for example the Austronesian family of Southeast Asia and Oceania, we find a sharing of related forms in lexicon, grammar, and phonology so widespread (Table 9.1) that only a concept of common ancestry, of descent from a homeland ancestral linguistic entity, can explain them. Phonological considerations make it clear that the vast majority of these forms did not spread secondarily as borrowings - they descend directly from the source linguistic complex and have undergone the same sound changes over time as the rest of the vocabulary in the languages concerned.

Common ancestry, or phylogenetic relationship to use the terminology of science, is a very powerful concept. This is because language families, like animal species, cannot form because of the convergence of taxa originally unrelated, such as Germanic and Sinitic languages, or horses and rhinos, to form a single genetic taxon within which all units share a common ancestry. Admittedly, some closely related animal species can interbreed and produce offspring, mostly infertile, and languages that already share close genetic relationship and have previously differentiated only slightly can undergo some degree of "advergence" toward reunification (Renfrew 2001a). Furthermore, speakers of unrelated languages can sometimes be forced together under socially unusual circumstances (e.g., slavery, migrant labor) and obliged to create pidgin languages. But examples of such pidgin developments in language history are quite rare and hardly convincing as explanations for the genesis of

foundation for a language family, no matter what circumstances gave rise to the eventual daughter-language differentiation.

Once a linguistic spread has occurred, the circumstances of subsequent differentiation can be quite varied. Communities can stay in contact or split irrevocably as the expansion takes place; they can also be split apart through invasion by other unrelated linguistic groups. They can form borrowing relationships with unrelated linguistic groups, or hide in virtual isolation. Some groups can abandon their original languages and adopt others (language shift), just to make the task of historical reconstruction often very difficult. But the fundamental observation that the ancestral languages in a family have somehow spread outward from a source region and then diversified is one of the most significant that can be made in any quest for human cultural origins. Language families are manifestly phenomena of divergence, not convergence.'

The next question is perhaps obvious. How do languages spread over large distances? Do they spread because people who already speak them move into new territories? If this is so, we must explain the reason for their expansionary success, and also explain what has driven/induced them out of their homeland or attracted them to their new utopia. On the other hand, do languages spread because people adopt them, by language shift, with only a minor presence of a native-speaking source population? If this is so, then we must explain why people should abandon their native languages, and often many attached cultural norms.

Many archaeologists and not a few linguists are very blase about language shift, dismissing it as trivial and everyday. Not so the linguist Marianne Mithun (1999:2), writing of the demise of native American languages:

Speakers of these languages and their descendants are acutely aware of what it can mean to lose a language. When a language disappears, the most intimate aspects of culture can disappear as well: fundamental ways of organizing experience into concepts, of relating ideas to each other, of interacting with other people. The more conscious genres of verbal art are usually lost as well: traditional ritual, oratory, myth, legends, and even humor. Speakers commonly remark that when they speak a different language, they say different things and even think different thoughts. The loss of a language represents a definitive separation of a people from its

heritage.

Admittedly, this quote refers to abrupt language death in traumatic circumstances. But even in more gentle circumstances of interaction it is hard to imagine that language loss via shift, even over a period of several generations, would always have been an eagerly embraced outcome of social contact, certainly not on the scale of many of the major language families to be discussed in the next chapter. Multilingualism for many modem societies is a far more attractive alternative to a one-way total shift with language loss.

Other social mechanisms that might explain language spread, all overlapping with population movement and language shift and often involving one or both of them, include trade and a need for lingua francas, "elite dominance" (when an incoming elite tries to impose its language on a larger native population), slavery and forced translocation of population, and population replacement due to disease or war (for discussion see Renfrew 1989, 1992a, 1992b; Nettle 1998, 1999). In my view, these mechanisms taken individually can explain certain situations, but they are not of even validity throughout all circumstances and none of them can.explain the entire distributions of major language families.

Immediate questions that are of especial relevance for prehistory include the following:

•Is it possible to determine the homeland region for a major language family?

•Can comparative linguistic reconstructions of the shapes of "family trees" throw light on how proto-languages once spread from homeland regions?

•Is it possible to reconstruct the culture(s) and lifeway(s) attached to the "protolanguage" or ancestral language network?

•Is it possible to date the proto-language for a major language family, and also the many subsequent regional proto-languages?

•Is it then possible to equate reconstructed linguistic cultures and archaeological cultures in time and space?