Uto-Aztecan

We now turn to the most widespread Mesoamerican family of all, Uto-Aztecan, socalled because of its very extensive distribution in 1519, ranging from the urbanized Nahua-speaking Aztecs of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) to the nomadic Paiute and Shoshone hunter-gatherers of the Great Basin, over 3,000 kilometers away to the north (Figure 10.12). As noted by Spencer and Jennings (1977:xvi):

One is struck by the military and governmental development of the preColumbian Aztec state in Mexico and yet at the same time must consider that the Indians of the Great Basin ... who by any standard possessed the simplest brand of culture, spoke a related tongue.

Uto-Aztecan was one language family that escaped the circumscription of Mesoamerica since it was on the northwestern edge of the early Mesoamerican agricultural zone. Eventually, the early Uto-Aztecans emerged in the US Southwest as the ultimate inspirers of the Hohokam, Mogollon, and Anasazi pueblo traditions (Figure 8.7).

The Uto-Aztecan-speaking agriculturalist populations evidence some very deepseated and widespread cultural links, especially between the Hopi of northern Arizona, now isolated from their linguistic cousins by Navajo expansion, and many Mexican populations such as the Cora and Huichol of Nayarit, and the Nahuaspeaking (Aztec) populations of central Mexico (Hedrick et al. 1974; Kelley 1974; Kelley and Kelley 1975; Bohrer 1994). These links are mainly of a ritual nature and include the "volador" ritual, the concept of a four-cornered world and the village as a navel, rain gods at the four corners, corn planting in counterclockwise spirals, water serpent myths, a fire god, a corn mother, snake cults, circular kiva-like temples, curing and funerary observances, prayer sticks, corn ear fetishes, smoking to the directions, sand painting, landownership patterns, and use of the true loom (only found in the Southwest in North America). As Ellis (1968:85) noted: "The parallels between the Huicholes and the Pueblos in religious traits are so marked that one can

hardly see how they could exist without direct contact between the two peoples

... Once upon a time, the Utaztecans probably were one people."

The Uto-Aztecan languages today form a number of subgroups. On lexicostatistical grounds, linguist Wick Miller in 1984 recognized a Southern Uto-Aztecan, which included the languages of central and northern Mexico (Sonoran and Aztecan groups, including Cora, Huichol, and Nahuatl), then three coordinate subgroups in the US Southwest - 1) Hopi of northern Arizona, 2) Takic of southeastern California, and 3) Tubatulabal of southeastern California, plus the Numic languages (including Paiute and Shoshone) of the Great Basin (Figure 10.12). The latter two subgroups incorporate traditional hunter-gatherer populations, whereas the Southern Uto-Aztecans and Hopi are maize farmers. Miller noted that these four subgroups are all coordinate, thus drawing attention to an observation made by other linguists, to the effect that the Uto-Aztecan family tree is distinctly rake-like, with no clear root (Lamb 1958; Fowler 1994; Foster 1996:91; Hill 2001). Such a situation makes a homeland rather hard to discern, and the problem has been exacerbated by the incursions of Athabaskan and Yuman speakers into former Uto-Aztecan territories, pushing a geographical discontinuity through much of Arizona and leaving the Hopi isolated far to the north of the other, Southern Uto-Aztecan, maize farmers. Much of the original distribution of Uto-Aztecan languages has thus been lost or masked.

Until recently, the majority of linguists, with archaeologists in close support, regarded the early Uto-Aztecans as foragers who lived somewhere in eastern California or the Great Basin, that is in the USA rather than Mexico (Hopkins 1965; Nichols 1983-84; Lathrap and Troike 1983-84; Miller 1984; Foster 1996). The Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs were believed to have spread into the Valley of Mexico after AD 500, according to ethnohistorical accounts and linguistic data (Fowler 1989; Kaufman 2001; Beekman and Christensen 2003). Miller placed the Uto-Aztecan homeland on lexicostatistical grounds in eastern California, where the Takic subgroup exists today. Groups who moved south into Mesoamerica then adopted maize farming, which according to Miller later spread back into the US Southwest, but not back as far as the Hopi of northern Arizona owing to the intervening expansion of the Yuman languages. Hence, in Miller's view, the Hopi adopted their maize agriculture independently of the Mexican members of the Uto-Aztecan language family.

This forager-focused view of Uto-Aztecan origins has not always held sway without opposition. As early as 1957, Kimball Romney suggested that the early Uto-Aztecans dispersed with maize agriculture from the northern Sierra Madre of Mexico. Some moved southward into Mesoamerica, others northward toward the Great Basin, where the Numic populations eventually converted from farming back to hunting and gathering. In hindsight, Romney's view was remarkably perceptive. A number of other linguists and archaeologists have proposed homelands in the same general region as Romney, particularly in Sonora (Goss 1968; Hale and Harris 1979; Fowler 1983). But almost nobody, apart from Romney, visualized until recently an agricultural as opposed to a forager origin.

In the past few years, the whole picture for Uto-Aztecan origins has been revolutionized. For me, it began during a sabbatical semester in the Anthropology Department at the University of California in Berkeley in 1992. Here, I was given a golden opportunity to read into the American literature and to see if my developing ideas of farming and language dispersal in the Old World could be applied in the New. UtoAztecan intrigued me as a most promising language family in this regard, partly because of its great extent within Mesoamerica (Bellwood 1997c). In 1999, I received an opportunity to visit the University of Arizona in Tucson, where I was taken by Bill Longacre and Jonathan Mabry to visit the Las Capas archaeological site, with its early maize remains and irrigation channels (Figure 8.8). I also gave a seminar at the University of Arizona entitled "Austronesian prehistory and Uto-Aztecan prehistory: similar trajectories?" Sitting in the audience was University of Arizona linguist Jane Hill, who was clearly quite interested in what I had to say.

Exactly what I did say is no longer in the forefront of my memory, but I stressed that, like Austronesian, Uto-Aztecan appeared to have all the makings of a language family that spread from Mexico with maize farming. Using new lexical data recorded for Hopi in northern Arizona, Jane Hill went on to publish a major paper in 2001, in which she offered seven crucial observations about early Uto-Aztecan:

1.Proto-Uto-Aztecan lexical reconstructions do not rule out a Mesoamerican homeland.

2.Uto-Aztecan has a rake-like primary division into five subgroups - Northern

UtoAztecan (Hopi, Numic, Tubatulabal, and Takic), Tepiman, Taracahitan, Tubar, and Corachol-Aztecan (Figure 10.12). These subgroups, based on shared innovations, differ from those recognized by Miller using lexicostatistical criteria.

3.A substantial maize-related vocabulary reconstructs to Proto-Uto-Aztecan, with six probable and three possible terms including corn cob, popcorn, tortilla, and griddle. Terms for beans do not reconstruct back as far as Proto- Uto-Aztecan.

4.The Proto-Uto-Aztecan cultivation vocabulary was not borrowed from another language family such as Mixe-Zoquean, but represents original innovation.

5.The Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland was in Mesoamerica, probably between 2500 and 1500 Bc, perhaps not far from the great Classic Mesoamerican city complex at Teotihuacan in the valley of Mexico (ca. AD 1600), where new epigraphic research suggests that a Uto-Aztecan language might have been in use (Dakin and Wichmann 2000)." If the Uto-Aztecan homeland really was near here, it could have been quite close to the contemporary homelands of the Otomanguean and Mixe-Zoquean families, the latter evidently a major source of loans into early Nahuatl (Kaufman 2001).

6.The archaeological record for the Southwest indicates a spread of maize cultivation from Mesoamerica at about 4,000 years ago, with beans and squash slightly later (chapter 8).

7.Given this reconstruction, it is very likely that the Northern Uto-Aztecan groups recorded as hunter-gatherers in ethnographic times had all converted from farming to foraging at some time in the prehistoric past.

In a subsequent paper, Hill (2003) has expanded discussion of the Northern UtoAztecan "devolution" by pointing out that some of the foraging populations in the Owens Valley of eastern California and the Great Basin practiced cultivation-type activities with wild plants, as already pointed out in chapter 2. She suggests that these Numic populations might have evolved out of a part of the former Fremont complex of maize cultivators and interstitial foragers

located in the better-watered parts of the eastern Great Basin and Colorado Plateau (Figure 8.8), after a 12th-13th-century drought (or was it human overexploitation?) caused the decline of pueblo communities over much of the Southwest. Perhaps the ancestral Numic speakers were the foragers in the Fremont equation, who simply stayed at home while some of the farmer groups moved away." Following this transformation, Numic speakers then radiated with their successful foraging adaptation into those drier parts of the Great Basin that previously were not Uto-Atecan speaking, ultimately into Idaho and Wyoming.

Hill (2002) also suggests that some of the other minor language families of the Southwest, especially Yuman and Kiowa-Tanoan, could have spread with the adoption of maize cultivation, in these cases secondarily by borrowing from Uto-Aztecan populations. Other maize farmers such as the Zuni and Keres of the New Mexico pueblos clearly did not expand very far since their languages are isolates - perhaps they experienced circumscription through being surrounded by other maize farming populations quite early on. The Apache and Navajo are, of course, Athabaskan speakers whose ancestors moved as hunters into the region after the decline of the pueblos, and thus they had no connection with early maize farming at all.

On the issue of the Numic languages within Northern Uto-Aztecan, Jane Hill's account of conversion from farming to foraging in situ as a result of environmental decline in the southeastern Great Basin is at odds with the mainstream view of archaeologists, who have mostly regarded the Numic speakers as eternal foragers located in the Great Basin or somewhere close to it, for instance in southeastern California, since the Archaic. The most celebrated version of such a view is that by Bettinger and Baumhoff (1982; Young and Bettinger 1992), who proposed that Numic speakers migrated into the Great Basin from southeastern California between 1,000 and 650 years ago, as a result of a competitive and successful economic adaptation involving seed processing.

In my view, however, Hill's suggestion of a Numic "devolution" in situ out of a prior Uto-Aztecan population of maize farmers, followed by spread throughout the Great Basin, accords best with the multidisciplinary evidence for the origins of these ethnographic hunter-gatherers. A possible historical trajectory for them is as follows:

1.Uto-Aztecan maize farmers spread into Utah from the south between 2,500 and 2,000 years ago, during a relatively supportive climatic phase," to create the Fremont culture, based on a combination of maize cultivation with hunting and collection.

2.By 650 years ago, Fremont maize agriculture had declined and the Great Basin henceforth could only support foragers. The Numic speakers, as suggested by Hill, were derived from former Fremont and northern Anasazi farmer/foragers who simply stayed in place instead of moving to betterwatered terrain. Eventually they spread out as successful mobile foragers and plant managers, to reach the limits shown in Figure 10.12.