The Americas - South and Central

In the Americas, agriculturalist expansion was subject to much more geographical circumscription than in the Old World, especially in the apparent absence of oceangoing sailing vessels. Mesoamerica is a relatively narrow isthmus, and the Americas as a whole are oriented north-south (Diamond 1994). Because of the great extent of land at high latitudes and altitudes, very large areas of North America and southern South America never saw prehistoric agriculture at all. American agriculturalist language families, on average, covered quite small areas compared to their Old World counterparts. Many had very fragmented geographical distributions owing to the spread of European languages in the past few centuries, erasing indigenous languages in many areas with almost no traces. However, this is no cause to give up - American early farmers have many fascinating archaeolinguistic secrets to reveal.

The language families of the Americas that are recognized by the majority of linguists are shown in Figure 1.2. Linguistic estimates of time depth place most of the agriculturalist ones between 6,000 and 3,500 years old. Thus, they have clearly not occupied their present ranges since the Americas were first colonized, but have all spread roughly within the time range for the development of agriculturalist societies. Recently, I surveyed some of the timedepth estimates by linguists for the larger of these American families, and came up with the following average age for each one (Bellwood 2000c):10

As in the Old World, the New World language families have been grouped together into macrofamilies in a bewildering variety of ways. The most celebrated classification is that by Joseph Greenberg (1987), who regarded all American families as belonging to one Amerind macrofamily, apart from the Na-Dene (including Athabaskan) and Eskimo-Aleut languages brought in by Holocene hunter-gatherer immigrants from Siberia. The linguistic literature still waxes hot over Amerind, and in my view it simply reflects widely shared linguistic residues from the initial settlement of the Americas at about 11,500 BC.

South America

In 1915, Herbert Spinden (1915:275) suggested that "The lines of agricultural migration over the greater part of South America may be indicated in the grouping of the various language stocks." This would be a very useful observation, if only we could know how the groupings had come about. Unfortunately, many linguists and ethnographers are clearly of the opinion that present-day language distributions, especially in Amazonia, reflect colonial period disruptions rather than any "pristine" pre-contact situation (Wi.ist 1998; Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999). Terence Kaufman estimates that 50 percent of the South American languages existing at Spanish contact in the 16th century are now extinct, hindering any attempts to identify homelands and dispersal histories from the present extremely fragmented and scattered language family distributions.

Amazonian ethnography and ethnohistory indicate clearly how extensive has been much recent population movement. Napoleon Chagnon (1992), writing of the Yanomama in the Orinoco headwaters of Amazonia, describes an agricultural population living in large villages that fission very frequently owing to a range of social disputes and occasions for violence. Until recently the Yanomama were able to expand freely into virgin lowland rainforest, and Chagnon explicitly compares this situation with that which might have occurred in the early centuries of the spread of agriculture. Social reasons for Yanomama movement include problems with wifeexchange in situations of male polygyny, and also rapid population growth. Yanomama villages have between 40 and 250 inhabitants and are relocated every 3-5 years, with women who survive to age 50 averaging 8.2 births (Merriwether et al. 2000). Gardens tend to be used for only three years before reverting to long-term fallow, a factor which obviously leads to a continual demand for new land, especially amongst peripheral groups. Yanomama population is now growing fast, despite high infant and adult male mortality (the latter due to warfare), perhaps a reflection in part of the acquisition of steel axes and Asian bananas since Spanish contact.

It is unknown how far the Yanomama pattern of expansion can be read back into prehistory, when their ancestors presumably were either hunter-gatherers or

depended on some form of cultivation. What is most interesting here, however, is the situation of continuous "bursting out" into new lands under conditions of very powerful social circumscription. Ernest Migliazza (1985) notes that Yanomama expansion could have been assisted by a retreat of Arawak and Carib-speaking populations, who occupied much of the Yanomama region until about 1800." Exactly how this retreat was encouraged is not clear, but warfare and headhunting could have played major roles.

The broader significance of the high Yanomama rates of fissioning and migration becomes clear when one examines an ethnolinguistic map of the whole of northern South America, east of the Andes. Such a map was prepared by Curt Nimuendaju in 1944, and the version reissued by Brazilian authorities in 1980 (too large and complex to reproduce here) reveals the full nature of the incredible mosaic in and around Amazonia (Mapa 1980). For instance, Tupian languages have moved right around the southeastern highlands of Brazil, to encapsulate the formerly hunter-gatherer Je language family. The Amazon basin incorporates widespread patches of Arawak, Carib, Tupian, Panoan, and Tucanoan languages. Isolates and very small language groupings abound. According to linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald (2002:2), referring to the Amazonian families:

All the major language families are highly discontinuous. For instance, Arawak languages are spoken in over ten locations north of the Amazon, and in over ten south of the Amazon. The language map of Amazonia thus resembles a patchwork quilt where over a dozen colours appear to be interspersed at random. Frequent migrations and language contact bring about extensive borrowing and grammatical change ... This produces a linguistic situation unlike those found in most other parts of the world, creating difficulties for distinguishing between similarities due to genetic retention and those due to areal diffusion.

Obviously, this is not fertile linguistic territory for the farming/ language dispersal hypothesis, not because of historical impossibility but because of the enormous difficulties of tracking the past. How one is to interpret the history behind these Amazonian language distributions is not clear, but there are, scattered through the linguistic literature, observations that allow us at least to

make a try.

The first observation is that a number of major language families have agricultural terms in their proto-vocabularies, especially for maize, and often manioc. According to Esther Matteson and colleagues (1972), such families include Chibchan, Tucanoan, and Arawakan. They reconstruct a widely shared term for corn, derived from a form like *iSi-ki/`im, for Proto-Arawak, ProtoMayan, Proto-Otomanguean, and ProtoPanoan. Payne (1991) also presents widespread Arawak cognates for maize, sweet potato, manioc, and pottery. These observations, if verified (and they have been challenged on methodological grounds), suggest that some of the major Amazonian families could have spread after an acquisition of agriculture.

In terms of actual homelands, the situation is rather diffuse. We have no reason to suspect that the perhaps related early Quechua and Aymara languages were ever spoken anywhere but in the Andes, so presumably we can equate early versions of these with some of the first farmers in Peru and Bolivia almost 5,000 years ago. However, the expansion of Quechua in Inca and Spanish times doubtless erased many minority languages, and it is also unclear what linguistic affiliations existed in the pre-Inca civilizations such as Chavin, Mochica, Nazca, Huari, Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku), and Chimu. One rather interesting reconstruction sources the early Quechua languages to the central Peruvian highlands, roughly from Ayacucho northward to the region south of Cajamarca, and the Aymara languages to southern Peru and Bolivia (Bird et al. 1983-84). The authors suggested that Quechua languages were carried southward with specific varieties of maize to the Cuzco region during the Huari (Wari) Period, dating to about AD 600, where they replaced Aymara languages. The result of this spread in southern Peru was a series of Aymara-influenced Quechua dialects, later to be spread much more widely through Andean South America by the Incas. The Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku) people in Bolivia (ca. AD 800) spoke either Aymara or Puquina (now extinct) languages (Kolata 1993:34), whereas the northern coastal Chimu kingdom of the pre-Inca period perhaps used now extinct languages unrelated to Quechua.

For Amazonia, Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999:17) observe that Arawak, Carib, and Tupian are demonstrably related genetically, and this circumstance alone should be sufficient to suggest a common homeland. Aikhenvald (1999:75) places the Arawak homeland in Upper Amazonia, between the Rio Negro and

the Orinoco. Rodriguez (1999:108) places the Tupian homeland in Rondonia, near the eastern boundary of Bolivia. Both these locations are close to the Andes. Another linguist, Ernest Migliazza (1982), proposed a series of homelands based on lexicostatistical calculations for the Tupian, Carib, Arawak, and Pano-Tacanan (Panoan plus Tacanan) language families. His proposals are shown in Figure 10.10, in which it can be seen that the suggested homelands for Panoan, Tupian, and Arawak are all very close to the eastern edge of the Andes, running along the eastern lowlands of Peru and into northern Bolivia. Migliazza's conclusions for the Proto-Arawak homeland were also reached by Noble (1965).

All the above authors seem to agree upon upstream rather than downstream Amazonian homelands, except for Carib, although Aikhenvald and Migliazza disagree on the precise location for early Arawak. Carib dispersal could relate to a development of manioc cultivation, but this is of course pure guesswork with our present level of knowledge. Carib appears to have spread later than the upper Amazonian families, and it did not spread at all into the Caribbean islands until historic times, owing to the prior presence there of the Arawak languages from which ethnographic Taino culture descended (Villalon 1991). Irving Rouse (1992) suggests a date in the late first millennium ac for the movement of Arawak languages into the West Indies.

It is very difficult to summarize the situation for South America, but the possibility that the very extensive Arawak, Panoan, and Tupian families all commenced their spreads downriver, with the inception of agriculture along the eastern marches of the Andes, prior to 2000 BC, seems to me to be a strong working hypothesis. Gordon Lathrap in 1970 argued differently, deriving most populations from the Middle Amazon, with colonizing movements upriver rather than downriver. The past 30 years of archaeological and linguistic research have not supported this opinion. Beyond this, apart from recognizing Quechua and Aymara as the stay-at-home languages of populations in the Andean farming homeland, we can make little further progress as far as South America is concerned.