Middle America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwest

Middle America is a little easier to handle than South America, owing in part to smallness of scale and to the unequivocally agricultural nature of the relevant protolanguages. Only four language families need concern us - these being Otomanguean (a large grouping that includes Zapotec and Mixtec of Oaxaca); Mayan of Chiapas, Guatemala, and the Yucatan Peninsula; Mixe-Zoquean of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; and the remarkable Uto-Aztecan, which records one of the clearest cases of agricultural expansion in the Americas. One could perhaps add Chibchan of eastern Middle America; Lyle Campbell (1997) notes that Proto-Chibchan had terms for maize and manioc, and suggests a homeland in Costa Rica or Panama at about 3000 Bc.

Commencing with Otomanguean, a reconstruction of Proto-Otomanguean lexical items by Rensch (1976) gave terms for maize and tortilla, chili, squash/gourd, sweet potato, cotton, tobacco, turkey, pottery, and weaving. Terence Kaufman (1990b) offered similar semantic reconstructions to Rensch (albeit with some differences in the actual proto-forms), and placed the Otomanguean homeland at about 4000 BC between the Valley of Mexico and Oaxaca. Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus (1983) suggested that the separation of the Zapotec and Mixtec branches of the family occurred after the Coxcatlan phase (ca. 3500 BC) in the Tehuacan Valley of Puebla, with its early domesticated maize. A specific claim for a Tehuacan homeland was also presented by Josserand et al. (1984).

Whatever the exact homeland, the viewpoint that the early Otomanguean languages spread in central Mexico with the inception of maize agriculture seems hard to refute. However, the Otomangueans were not alone in this process. Circumscription, in the form of adjacent but linguistically different early farming populations, also commencing their own expansions, rapidly hemmed them in. Immediately to the east, even more circumscribed in the long run, were the Mixe-Zoquean speakers, a group who appear to have been intimately associated with the genesis of the Olmec horizon of Middle Formative Mesoamerica. Campbell and Kaufman (1976) suggested a glottochronological date of 1500 BC for the break-up of Proto-Mixe-Zoquean,

considerably later than that offered for Proto-Otomanguean. This

perhaps reflects a maintenance of linguistic unity for a relatively long

period in a constrained area, since we clearly have no good reason from

the archaeological record to assume that the Mixe-Zoqueans adopted

farming any later than the Otomangueans. Soeren Wichmann (1998)

reconstructs a large agricultural vocabulary for Proto-Mixe-Zoquean, with terms for manioc, squash, sweet potato, and bean.

It is interesting to reflect also on the observation by Wichmann that

Mixe-Zoquean and Uto-Aztecan could be genetically related. If this is

not a reflection of shared inheritance from Palaeoindian or Archaic

linguistic substrata, it could indicate that the early forms of these two

language families were once adjacent, presumably somewhere in central

Mexico. The glimmerings of a scenario for this are presented in Figure 10.11.

The Mayan language family, according to Kaufman (1976) and

Campbell (1997), originated in the Highlands of Chiapas or Guatemala

at about 2000 BC, again with a large agricultural vocabulary including

terms for maize, manioc, sweet potato, bean, chili, and squash. Did it

relate genetically or via borrowing to any of the other families? The

Mesoamerican linguistic literature has been peppered for many years

with debates about deeper-level relationships, for instance between

Mixe-Zoquean and Mayan, or Mixe-Zoquean and Uto-Aztecan. There

seems little reason to become deeply involved in these debates, but I

would suggest, as with all the confusing and cross-cutting claims for

macrofamily affiliations in East Asia, that we might be witnessing a situation where all the major proto-languages were to some degree in contact, or at least at one time located within a zone characterized by a fair amount of areal diffusion. Such a possibility was raised in 1978 by Witkowski and Brown, who placed Mayan, Otomanguean, Mixe-Zoquean, and others in a

Proto-Mesoamerican macrofamily, adding the comment (1978:942):

Plausibly, plant domestication, which was beginning about the time ProtoMesoamerican was spoken, triggered a vast population increase leading to the linguistic diversity that presently characterizes these languages.

This suggestion was attacked strongly by Campbell and Kaufman on the grounds that the claimed relationships could be due to chance vocabulary resemblances,12 and the situation seems to have languished unresolved since. But I remain highly intrigued by the possibilities.

Figure 10.12 The distribution of the Uto-Aztecan language family. From Miller 1983.