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

1: Who’s Chasing the Uto-Aztecans?

xv preface One of the titles I considered for this book was “Chasing the Uto-Aztecans: Alternatives in the Prehistory of Western North America.” This title referred to the interest in Uto-Aztecan as the single language family that straddles Mesoamerica and the western United States, and as a possible conduit for corn-complex agriculture from Mexico into the southwestern United States. It also referred more generally to the role that the language family must have played in the prehistory of western North America, given its widespread geographical distribution. (By “western North America” I am referring to the following parameters: the Rocky Mountains as the eastern boundary, the Pacific Ocean as the western boundary, from the subarctic south to northern Mexico.) The change to the present title was felt to reflect the general contribution of this work. However, the theme of pursuit is still very present in the revised and edited chapters. In the course of this book, we will pursue more exact outlines of the recent prehistory of western North America, as well as pursue a theory and method for a prehistoric sociolinguistics. Some consideration is given to the Tanoan languages not because of intense interaction with Uto-Aztecan (or a distant relation to Uto-Aztecan), but because Tanoan interacted with other languages (Keresan, Zuni) that did interact with Uto-Aztecan (primarily Hopi). In a similar vein, the intrusion of Athapaskan (as Apachean) languages into the American Southwest is covered because Apachean is a key part of the linguistic prehistory of the region (as is Uto-Aztecan). This seeking of prehistoric sociolinguistics follows from the pursuit of how Uto-Aztecan speech interacted with speech communities in the recent prehistory of western North America, from roughly 3500 BC until the intrusions of European-derived cultures in the 1500s. From the study of ideographic (culture-specific) information, I am seeking nomothetic (lawlike) principles about the main ways in which speech communities interacted in the past. PREFACE xvi Early in chapter 1, I warn about the danger of equating language, culture, and populations/social groups. Although these sometimes correlate, sometimestheydonot .However,bycorroboratinglinguisticartifactswitharchaeological markers and/or genetic markers, it is possible to check conclusions drawn from linguistic prehistory. Also, languages imply a speech community, and speech communities in a geographic area interact, thus producing linguistic borrowing that is independent of nonlinguistic things. Another factor concerns language families. Languages in a language family have regular correspondences in all kinds of linguistic artifacts (sounds; roots and words; sentence patterns, etc.). They also often have inherited irregular forms (like the English verbs sing/sang/sung) that guarantee the status of a language family. Regular correspondences and inherited irregular forms provide a check on the direction of linguistic borrowing and on the internal diversity of the family. These considerations are valid without reference to nonlinguistic things as well. At the same time, the commonly inherited words (cognate words) of a language family may refer to biological (flora, fauna) and cultural items that the ancestral speech community must have known. This provides an automatic correlation between linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena. I must also say something about the terms ethnicity and ethnic group. Ana Alonso (pers. comm.) reminded me that these are semantically “loaded” terms in recent cultural and other anthropology, particularly in the context of postmodern and postcolonial discourse. An ethnic group in recent theory is a self-defined and other-defined group. The name of a given ethnic group is thus dynamically negotiated as group members assert their identity symbolically , and members of other groups respond. However, one of the attributes of an ethnic group that is used symbolically is language. Every ethnic group has at least one language, often one that is distinctive. Thus, when I speak of Keresan, for example, in this book, I imply that in the past there must have been a Keresan speech community, and that its language was distinct from neighboring speech communities (Hopi, Zuni, Tanoan, Athapaskan). This linguistic (but also cultural) distinction between speech communities implies a sort of ethnic group, even under a dynamic definition of the term. When I use the term ethnic or ethnic group in this book, I am not negating the self-assertion or other-response aspects of such usage; it is impossible to recover conversations that negotiate ethnic identity from the prehistoric past. PREFACE xvii The use of these two related terms is thus warranted, indeed, because of the survival of Keresan...