Sandia Mountains from Kuaua Pueblo, Bernalillo, New Mexico
Given the diversity of languages spoken by the modern Pueblos, and the diverse archaeological “cultures” of Pueblo prehistory (as described in the previous post), one obvious line of inquiry in making connections between past and present focuses on language. Specifically, the fact that some Pueblo languages are part of larger families and others are not seems to open the possibility of some Pueblo groups being relative newcomers to the Pueblo lifestyle, which leaves others as more likely to be the direct descendants of the prehistoric groups who inhabited sites like Chaco and Mesa Verde.
There have been several attempts to reconstruct Pueblo culture history along these lines, but I’m not going to discuss them in detail because I think the whole approach is unlikely to work. A closer look at the specifics of the relationships involved shows why.
There are two Pueblo language groups whose languages are part of larger families: Hopi and Tanoan. The Hopi language belongs to the very large Uto-Aztecan family, stretching from the Great Basin south into Mexico and beyond. The Tanoan family is part of the Kiowa-Tanoan family, along with the single language Kiowa, spoken on the Great Plains. The other two Pueblo languages, Keres and Zuni, are isolates not known to be related to any other language (including each other).
Starting with Hopi, at first glance this seems like a good candidate for a language spoken by a mobile hunter-gatherer group, like the modern Numic speakers of the Great Basin, who only settled down to a sedentary agricultural lifestyle relatively recently. However, it’s important to note that Hopi forms its own branch of the Uto-Aztecan family (or possibly of the Northern Uto-Aztecan subfamily, the existence of which is a matter of dispute). It is no more closely related to Numic than it is to, say, the Piman languages spoken by the O’odham agriculturalists of southern Arizona. Depending on how the overall Uto-Aztecan family is reconstructed, it may even be equally close to Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. It’s not possible to assign specific dates to divisions of language families, but on a qualitative level, Hopi is sufficiently divergent from the rest of its family that it is very unlikely that its speakers entered the Pueblo culture area in the past few centuries. Archaeologically, there is abundant evidence that modern Hopi society emerged from the amalgamation of many different groups from different parts of the Southwest who migrated to the Hopi mesas in the post-Chacoan period, and the same impression is given by Hopi oral history. Which of these groups spoke the language ancestral to modern Hopi is impossible to determine from archaeological evidence, of course, but it’s reasonable to think at least one of them did, and had been speaking it while practicing a basically Pueblo lifestyle for many centuries before that.
Turning to Tanoan, the archaeology is a lot murkier but the general point still stands. The relationship to Kiowa suggests the possibility that the Tanoan-speakers only entered the Southwest fairly recently, presumably from the Plains. In a small language like this is it is even harder to quantify divergence than it is in large language like Uto-Aztecan, but again, the Tanoan languages are quite different from Kiowa. They are so different, in fact, that it wasn’t until the 1950s that the relationship between the two was established to the general satisfaction of historical linguists. The oral history of these groups is also murky, but what is known of Tanoan traditions doesn’t seem to point to origins outside the Southwest, and Kiowa traditions also don’t seem to record any knowledge of a relationship to any of the Pueblos. Who moved where when is hard to determine in this case, but nothing about the linguistic evidence points to a particularly recent adoption of Pueblo culture by Tanoan speakers. The eastern Pueblos, including the Tanoans, do show a lot of evidence of Plains cultural traits, but this is most likely a result of close contact with the Plains during the late prehistoric and early historic period, for which there is plenty of evidence.
That leaves Keres and Zuni, about which nothing can be said about external relationships. It is likely that both groups have been culturally Pueblo for a very long time, but there is no way to tell based on the linguistic evidence whether they have been so for longer than their neighbors to the east (Tanoan) and west (Hopi).
So basically, I think linguistic relationship is a dead end in determining historical connections between ancient sites and modern Pueblos. That’s not to say that linguistics is entirely useless, however. There are other, more subtle aspects of the linguistic relationships among Pueblo groups that may well have historical value. That’s a topic for another post, however.
Hopi Buttes from Homol’ovi Ruins State Park
Thanks for delving the language family/origins angle.
It’s not too surprising that linguistics alone aren’t all that helpful in illuminating prehistoric human migrations. Rarely do those swoopy-arrow language evolution graphics include dates for divergences/branches. If we think about historic migrations and the relationship of language to them, language alone wouldn’t be all that useful in answering the “when” question. Imagine you were dropped into Saxon Britain around 750. You hear dozens of languages – Latin, various Germanic languages, Celtic languages and others. That gives you clues about “who” is or has been there, but not “when” each arrived.
But as we amass other information that has a more definitive timeline than language, we may find enough evidence to link culture and language with a particular artifact-based chronology, in which case language may have corroborative value.
As always, a great read Teofilo.
As usually great work Teofilo. If possible please publicize your point of view on social infrastructure of Chaco civic society. Relation between an elite and “commoners” (ownership of properties, family relations specifically in agricultural field). It is known what was type of agricultural products, but it is unknown who organize all rather complex enterprise. One doubt that “dancing crowd beating drums” was able to administer such an activities without essential administration knowledge. Same is situation with construction of monumental structures in the region.
While the linguistic evidence doesn’t affirmatively give you all that many definitive answers, I think that overall take that it isn’t very useful is overstated. I’d summarize the conclusions as follows:
1. When you see what is at a gross forest rather than trees level coherent civilization in pre-history in the same geographic area, the null hypothesis is that this is a result of the expansion of a single linguistically and culturally unified culture from a common point of origin, even if that common origin is too remote to be preserved in oral history. The linguistic evidence very strong disfavors this view, and instead, favors a mixing pot or salad bowl model in which Pueblo society is more of an areal cultural influence absorbed by multiple ethnic peoples that were separated from each other at quite deep time depths.
2. The fact that two of the languages are isolates, that one has only links to one, non-Na-Dene plain population, and that only one of the four is part of the large Uto-Aztecian language family rules out connections to lots of other pre-Columbian civilizations. For example, we can be quite secure in knowing that Puebloan society is not derived in any direct way from Mississipian populations or the societies of the Pacific Northwest.
Lots of places we could have imagine as part of the Puebloan origins story are already spoken for and the linguistic evidence gives us a fair amount of comfort that all of those other places aren’t part of their story, and that greatly narrows the range of peoples and places that can be a part of their story.
3. The presence of two linguistic isolates in a society with only four language families in a not terribly huge geographic region tells us:
(a) This area was probably never united in a monolithic empire like that of the Mayans, or Incas, or Aztecs or that of the Mississipians at their respective peaks.
This tells us that their economies and technologies probably didn’t favor that kind of large scale and that we should look for anthropological analogies in places that have large numbers of linguistic isolates and language families, rather than in places like Europe, most of South Asia and most of East Asia, where just a tiny number of language families are dominant over large geographic regions. Instead, we would want to look for analogies in places like parts of Central Africa, the Himalayas, Melanesia, the Amazon and the Caucasus, where there is great linguistic diversity in small geographic areas.
It may be helpful to think of this areal cultural region as more of a cross-roads or borderlands not controlled by any of its neighbors and home to relict populations than as a core source region of a unitary culture. For example, one of the places in Africa where you had this degree of pre-European colonial linguistic diversity was the Nuba Mountains of Sudan.
(b) It is reasonable to assume that the number of entire language families that are lost to us entirely is on the high end rather than the low end of the range of possibilities since the number of language families that co-existed is a pretty modest area for a pretty long time was pretty large.
cehona: I’ll have a more detailed post on the evidence for hierarchy at Chaco, but for now I’ll say that I agree with the general spirit of what you say. I think it’s a near certainty that there was some sort of complex hierarchical structure to Chacoan society, but the exact nature of that hierarchy and the mechanics of decisionmaking remain mysterious.
ohwilleke: All good points, and well taken. My conclusion that the linguistic relationships don’t tell us much comes from the perspective of the Southwestern anthropological tradition, in which the alternative hypotheses you mention are already generally considered farfetched and not taken seriously, but the linguistic relationship evidence certainly does rule them out and that’s important to note for the benefit of people looking at the issue from outside of that tradition.
Also, thanks to J. R. for the kind words and perceptive take, with which I also agree.
Teofilo thank you for your replay. Few of us “world wanderers” have strong feeling that in Chaco region existed other tribes – group able to manage society which build that time superior infrastructure as “grand houses, logistic and agriculture”. Please publish as much you can. (BTW does pictographs in Barrier Canyon have any relation to Chaco civic?)
Not much is known about the culture that created the Barrier Canyon Style pictographs, but there’s no evidence that it has any close relationship to Chaco. They’re generally thought to be much older.
I know there definitely is a common perception that the scale of Chaco sets it sufficiently apart from the rest of the Pueblo world as to imply a different cultural group, but there’s really no evidence for that. Everything else about Chaco fits very well into the general Pueblo cultural tradition, and even the monumental buildings are clearly part of the same traditions of design and construction as smaller Pueblo sites of the same and earlier periods. You can even trace a pretty clear progression of increasingly monumental architecture within that tradition from Alkali Ridge Site 13 to McPhee village to Chaco. After that it basically disappears from the Pueblo tradition and the modern Pueblos show little trace of it, but in other ways there are plenty of cultural continuities.
thank you Teofilo for your reply .We are aware about late age of Barrier Cyn. Just trying to be oriented within regional human activities. We will if situation permit contact you directly via e-mail.
No problem, and feel free to e-mail.
While the linguistic evidence and apparent relationships are interesting and may prove useful, I think that I will await genetic evidence before making conclusions about the relationships among the various peoples who lived in the Southwest. I feel work in that area, once it is done on a large scale, will reveal much about the origins of the various groups in the Southwest as well as their migrations.