A Prehistory of Western North America: The Impact of Uto-Aztecan Languages

Preface

xi foreword When anthropology first developed in the nineteenth century, testimonial evidence was the primary means by which researchers reconstructed the histories of indigenous peoples. For the recent past, oral tradition was used, but for deep-time perspective, comparative linguistic data and analyses were the primary source. Thus, historical linguistics exerted a strong influence on early reconstructions of North American prehistory. Since languages preserve evidence of shared ancestry fairly well, these reconstructions tended to emphasize the diversification of languages and their associated speech communities over time, paying special attention to the population movements needed to produce the historically observed distributions of related languages. Since that time, archaeology and population genetics have expanded dramatically , to the point that many aspects of prehistory can now be reconstructed by other means. For example, people can learn new languages but they cannot alter their genes, so biological evidence is intrinsically superior for reconstructing population history. Also, languages tend to preserve only the dominant, habitual modes of speech in various communities, whereas the archaeological record preserves behavioral variation as well as central tendencies. Given these developments, it is not unreasonable to ask whether linguistic evidence still offers anything unique to North American prehistory. In my view, linguistic evidence remains essential, regardless of developments in related fields, because it provides a direct entrée into past human thoughtworlds . Indeed, one only has to consider the great leaps in understanding that have accompanied the decipherment of ancient scripts in other contexts to recognize that one can obtain a much deeper understanding of the cultures that created the archaeological record by integrating the precise spatial, chronological, and behavioral data of archaeology with the rich conceptual data embedded in language. FOREWORD xii So if we are to ever understand the role of culture in long-term history, we cannot do without language; and for ancient North America, historical linguistic evidence is the best proxy for written texts that researchers will ever have. Thus, the task of relating historical linguistic reconstructions to the archaeological record occupies the same intellectual space, and has the same ultimate purpose, as the decipherment of ancient scripts. It is in this context that the true value of this book emerges: it is the most comprehensive effort to relate Uto-Aztecan language history to the archaeological record yet produced, and it is thus of great importance as a step in the “decipherment” of North American culture history. The promise of decipherment cannot be realized, however, until there is a clear mapping of proto-languages onto archaeological complexes, so although Shaul does begin the task of cultural decipherment here, the main focus of his book is the mapping process itself. With respect to this central thrust, I find three aspects to be especially exciting. First, Shaul guides readers through the weeds of Uto-Aztecan studies, and I mean this in a positive way. Many models of linguistic prehistory have appeared in short pieces that only present supportive data. Such works spare readers the burden of wading through larger masses of material, but they can also leave the impression that the evidence is much clearer and cleaner than it often is. Thus, this book will help counter the tendency of archaeologists and human biologists to take linguistics models uncritically; and in this way it will strengthen dialogues across the traditional subdisciplines of anthropology. The second exciting aspect is that Shaul makes a serious attempt to integrate archaeological and genetic evidence into his arguments without assumingthatgenes ,culture,andlanguageshouldcorrelateperfectly.Asaresearcher trained primarily in archaeology, I have often been disappointed by linguists’ somewhat cavalier treatment of the archaeological evidence. Indeed, the same critique linguists might levy against archaeologists—that of uncritical acceptance of the most recent linguistic model—can be levied equally well in the opposite direction with respect to the archaeology. Fortunately, Shaul does not share this problem. Here again, the care with which Shaul treats the archaeological and genetic evidence will strengthen cross-subdisciplinary conversations. Finally, the aspect of Shaul’s book that I find most exciting is that researchers must take this form of historical linguistic evidence just as seriously as the more commonly cited evidence of language trees and branching events if FOREWORD xiii we are to truly develop an integrated historical anthropology of native North America. Here again, Shaul leads the way. For these and a variety of other reasons that readers will appreciate from their own perspectives, David Shaul is to be commended...