Ancient Cultural Interplay of the American Southwest in the Mexican Northwest

Ancient Cultural Interplay of the American Southwest in the Mexican Northwest DAVID R. WILCOX, PHIL C. WIEGAND, J. SCOTT WOOD AND JERRY B. HOWARD A basic question in Southwestern archaeology concerns the cultural connectivity of its prehispanic populations with their neighbors in México. Were Southwestern populations culturally “autochthonous” after the introduction of cultigens and pottery, as A. V. Kidder (1924) famously argued, or were there far more complex and continuing relationships (Bandelier 1892; Haury 1945)? To what extent were their historical trajectories interlinked or interdependent? What were the parameters of their cultural connectivity? What is the status of these questions today? In an analysis of the history of debate about these questions, Wilcox (1986a) found that the strongest empirical support for cultural connectivity lies in the relationship of the southern Southwest and West México.1 He also proposed a model, the “Tepiman connection,” that postulated a continuous dialect chain of Tepiman speakers linking the Hohokam area in southern Arizona with the Chalchihuites and Teuchitlán regions in the south (Wilcox 1986b, 2000a, 2000b; figure 1; see also Weigand 1985, 2004; and Riley and Winters 1965). Subsequently, Don Fowler and David Wilcox (1999; Fowler 2000; Wilcox and Fowler 2002) added more time depth to the historical analysis, pointing to the fundamental importance of contributions by Francesco Clavigero (1787), Alexander von Humboldt (1811), and Albert Gallatin (1845, 1848a, 1848b). Clavigero, later supported by von Humboldt, interpreted Aztec oral traditions to mean they had migrated to central México from north of the Colorado River via the DAVID R. WILCOX is senior research anthropologist at the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, Arizona. PHIL C. WEIGAND is research professor at the Centro de Estudios Arqueológicos of the Colegio de Michoacán, and a senior (level III) member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigación in Mexico. J. SCOTT WOOD is forest archaeologist and Heritage Program manager at the Tonto National Forest. JERRY B. HOWARD is curator of anthropology at the Arizona Museum of Natural History, Mesa Arizona. Journal of the Southwest 50, 2 (Summer 2008) : 103–206 104 ✜ JOURNAL OF THE SOUTHWEST Casa Grande in Arizona (seen by Eusebio Kino in 1694 and 1697 [Burrus 1971]) and the Casas Grandes (Paquimé) in Chihuahua (seen by Francisco Ibarra in the middle 1560s [Hammond and Rey 1928]). Gallatin, on the eve of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (in 1848), by which the northern half of México was ceded to the United States and the “American Southwest” was born, argued that there was no hard evidence for linguistic connections to support this theory. The discovery of the Uto-Aztecan language family by the German linguist Johann Karl Buschmann (1853)—a discovery that one of the three fathers of American anthropology, Daniel Brinton (1891),2 soon accepted—was cited by von Humboldt (1858) as support for his theory. Later scholarship held, however, that the Aztecs originated much closer to the Valley of México (see, for example, M. Weaver 1981:418–21), though popular belief keeps Clavigero’s hypothesis alive even today (Fields and Zamudio-Taylor 2001). Carroll Riley (2005) has even rather whimsically picked up on this to suggest the label “Aztlan” for the area of the North American Southwest that he argues was “Mesoamericanized” in the period 1200–1450 Ce.3 In a stunning reversal of the Clavigero–von Humboldt model, Jane Hill (2001, 2002, 2006) argues on linguistic grounds for the sudden migration northward of Uto-Aztecan speakers ca. 4,000 years ago. Against both views, Gregory and Wilcox (2007) argue that Uto-Aztecan differentiated largely in place, as a remnant of the hemisphere-wide Amerind language (Greenberg 1987, 1996; Ruhlen 1991), during Paleo-Indian times when what are today linguistic isolates like Zuni (Hill 2007) and small compact languages like Keresan and Tanoan first became distinct languages.4 According to this perspective, for ecological and historical reasons yet to be fully elucidated, communication links were maintained from north to south in the Uto-Aztecan dialect chain (see Miller 1984; Cortina-Borja and Valiñas C. 1989).5 This would have facilitated the northward diffusion of cultigen seeds and knowledge of their use, integrating them into what are postulated to be...