Tracing the Connections: Conclusion

Great Kiva at Chetro Ketl in the Snow

This post is mainly just a list of the posts I’ve done in the “Tracing the Connections” series over the past few months. Here they are:

Introduction

The Lay of the Land

The Evidence from Linguistic Relationships

The Evidence from Linguistic Contact

The Evidence from Oral Traditions

The Evidence from Skull Measurements

The Evidence from DNA: Introduction

The Evidence from DNA: Southwest-Specific

Overall, the evidence from all these different sources is very consistent in indicating that the modern Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona are clearly the descendant communities of the ancient Pueblos in a general sense, but that tracing a line of descent between any specific ancient site and any specific modern Pueblo is not currently possible. With further research, however, I think there is a lot of potential for identifying more specific connections using multiple lines of evidence.

Back Wall of Hungo Pavi Showing Two Stories

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The Evidence from DNA in the Southwest

Old Bonito from Above

Having introduced the basics of archaeological use of DNA evidence, and discussed some other applications of DNA studies in archaeology, let’s take a look at the data relevant to the Southwest specifically. For modern populations in North America overall, there are some broad trends that have been identified in mitochondrial haplogroup distribution by region, as first elucidated by Joseph Lorenz and David Glenn Smith of UC Davis in 1996. They only looked at haplogroups A, B, C, and D, since haplogroup X had not yet been identified as a founding haplogroup at that time. Their results showed that there are definite patterns in haplogroup distributions by region. For the Southwest specifically, they found most groups showed very high levels of B and low levels of A, despite the fact that A was the most common haplogroup in their sample overall. The main Southwestern groups that showed high levels of A were the Athabascan-speaking tribes (Navajo and Apache), which is unsurprising since northern Athabascan groups, along with most other groups in the Arctic and Subarctic, are almost exclusively A, and it’s well established that the southern Athabascans immigrated into the Southwest from the north relatively recently. Some other Southwestern groups show some representation of A as well, which Lorenz and Smith attribute to intermixing with the Athabascans (although as I’ll discuss below this doesn’t seem to be the whole story). Similarly, the Navajos and Apaches showed substantial representation of B and C, unlike their northern cousins, and this is probably due to intermixing with the Pueblos and other Southwestern populations.

A subsequent study by Smith, Lorenz, and some of their students at Davis looked specifically at haplogroup X, which had been identified in both modern and ancient Native American samples by then and was established as a founding haplogroup. They found it widely distributed among modern populations speaking a variety of languages but particularly among speakers of Algonquian and Kiowa-Tanoan languages. The Kiowa-Tanoan connection is of particular interest for Southwestern purposes, of course, as this is one of the main language families spoken by the eastern Pueblos in New Mexico. In this case, haplogroup X was found in the Kiowa and Jemez samples. This is very interesting since the Jemez are Pueblo and the Kiowa are not, and the relationship between the Kiowa and the Tanoan-speaking Pueblos is a longstanding mystery. It’s hard to know how to interpret the haplogroup X data in this connection. Since X is so rare overall the fact that it is so concentrated in certain groups seems meaningful somehow, but since it’s still pretty rare in those groups and little follow-up research on this has since been done it remains quite mysterious.

Turning to the ancient evidence, the first work in the Southwest was associated mostly with the University of Utah. In 1996 Ryan Parr, Shawn Carlyle, and Dennis O’Rourke published a paper reporting on aDNA research on the remains of 47 Fremont individuals from the Great Salt Lake area, 30 of which could be assigned to a haplogroup. The Fremont have always been something of a mystery, with many Southwestern cultural features but living on the northern fringes of the Southwest and having some notable differences from Pueblo cultures to the south. What the Utah researchers found, however, seemed to show the Fremont patterning genetically with the Pueblos rather than with other groups in the Great Basin or Plains. Haplogroup A was completely missing from their sample, while B was by far the most common haplogroup and C and D were also present in small numbers. This seems to clearly rule out one theory about the Fremont, which is that they were composed in part of Athabascans on their way south from the Subarctic, and also casts in serious doubt other theories linking them to later cultures on the Plains (where haplogroup A is also very common). It’s true that there is internal cultural variation within the construct “Fremont” and it’s quite possible there was genetic variation as well, but the Great Salt Lake Fremont were the furthest north of the identified subdivisions and the closest to the Plains, so if even they show more genetic similarities to the Southwest that is strong evidence against theories associating them with areas to the north and east.

It’s also noteworthy that the Fremont distribution is in contrast to what Lorenz and Smith found among modern Numic peoples who now occupy the Fremont’s Great Basin home. The Numic Paiute/Shoshone sample that Lorenz and Smith looked at lacked haplogroup A, but it showed a very high proportion of haplogroup D (the highest in their whole study, in fact) and a low proportion of B and C. This doesn’t totally rule out some Fremont contribution to Numic ancestry, but it makes it seem unlikely that there was substantial genetic continuity between Fremont and Numic populations, which supports the “Numic Expansion” hypothesis for the late prehistory of the Great Basin. Smith and his student Frederika Kaestle later published a paper making this exact argument, using not only the Fremont data but additional ancient remains from the western Great Basin to argue that the differences in haplogroup frequencies supported a replacement of the earlier Basin inhabitants by the Numa.

Following up on this research, a subsequent paper by the same Utah researchers added in data from the Anasazi. They successfully assigned 27 Anasazi samples to haplogroups. Of these, 12 were from southeastern Utah, 9 were from Canyon del Muerto, 4 were from Canyon de Chelly, and 2 were from Chaco Canyon. Of the Chaco remains, one came from the debris in Room 56 at Pueblo Bonito, a part of the north burial cluster in Old Bonito which was very crudely worked over by Warren K. Moorehead in the 1890s. The other I can’t seem to find any specific information on. All of the Anasazi remains analyzed in this study were from the collections of the American Museum of Natural History, which makes me surprised that only two Chaco samples were involved. It’s possible that more were analyzed but only these two produced enough DNA to work with. In any case, if in fact there are more Chaco remains at the AMNH that have not yet been analyzed for DNA it would be very helpful to analyze them.

The results of this analysis were consistent with the standard archaeological understanding that the modern Pueblos are the descendants of the Anasazi. B was the most common haplogroup, with smaller levels of A and C. D wasn’t present at all, and two of the specimens didn’t fall into any of the four haplogroups, implying that they might have belonged to X. (The two Chaco samples belonged to haplogroups B and C; the sample from Room 56 belonged to haplogroup B.) Note that A is present here in populations dating well before any likely admixture with Athabascans, which is evidence against Lorenz and Smith’s contention that the presence of A in modern Pueblos can be attributed entirely to mixture with Athabascans.

Based on the dominance of B and low levels of other haplogroups, these researchers concluded that the Anasazi remains they analyzed were not significantly different from the Fremont remains they had analyzed earlier, adding further support to their contention that the Fremont pattern with the Pueblos. Note, however, that the Fremont hadn’t shown haplogroup A at all, while the Anasazi had it at a low but still respectable level (22%). Also, the Fremont showed a low level of haplogroup D, which the Anasazi didn’t have at all. These differences don’t necessarily mean the Fremont and Anasazi weren’t related, of course, but they do show how much that similarity is a judgment call supported by questionable statistics. In this case one big problem with the statistical analysis was treating the haplogroup frequencies as ratio-level data, which implies that they are meaningfully representative of the underlying populations despite the very small and non-random samples. This is highly implausible. This problem means that the authors’ conclusions about whether differences between samples were “significant” or not in a statistical sense is not really meaningful since it can’t reasonably be expected to generalize to the populations, which are what we really care about.

In addition, as Connie Mulligan pointed out in the general paper on aDNA that I discussed previously, the differences that the Davis researchers found between the haplogroup frequencies of the Fremont and Numic samples, which they used as evidence of a lack of population continuity, were actually quite similar statistically to the differences the Utah researchers found between the Fremont and Anasazi, which they interpreted as not being significant! This disconnect goes to show that there’s actually quite a bit of subjective judgment in interpreting results like this, despite the superficial impression of “objective” statistical data.

One way to overcome this confusion would be to increase the number of samples analyzed and try to make them as close to representative of the underlying populations as possible. That would certainly help, but the fundamental problem of defining the ancient population of interest, and the apparent impossibility of analyzing a sample from it that could be assumed to be truly representative, are daunting challenges. A more productive approach, which subsequent research has in fact been following, is to do more in-depth analysis of available samples, so that more detailed data than crude haplogroup assignments are possible.

One way to do more in-depth analysis would be to move away from relying exclusively on haplogroup assignments and look instead at the nuclear genome. Sequencing the whole nuclear genome provides vastly more, and more statistically robust, information than mitochondrial haplogroup assignment, as commenter ohwilleke pointed out in response to my initial DNA post. Most of the studies mentioned in my previous post in other parts of the world have used this methodology, with very informative results. This type of analysis has, however, not been done on ancient remains from the American Southwest to my knowledge. I’m not sure why exactly, but there are various reasons including cost and level of preservation of remains that could account for this lacuna.

Instead, Southwestern researchers have mostly doubled down on mitochondrial haplotype analysis and extended its reach by looking at further mutations within the defined haplogroups to identify sub-haplogroups that can further narrow down genetic relationships. This has been a productive line of investigation, as exemplified by a very interesting paper from 2010 dealing with Chaco-era sites in the area of Farmington, New Mexico.

B-Square Ranch, Farmington, New Mexico

The paper, by Meradeth Snow and David Glenn Smith of Davis and Kathy Durand of Eastern New Mexico University, analyzed human remains from two sites on the B-Square Ranch, a large ranch that includes most of the land south of the San Juan River in Farmington. The ranch is owned by the Bolack family, which has long been prominent in local and statewide affairs. Its patriarch for many years was Tom Bolack, who was governor of New Mexico for a brief period in the 1960s and was also well known for his elaborate produce displays at the State Fair. His son Tommy Bolack, who took over management of the ranch when Tom died, has long had an interest in archaeology and did his own excavations in various of the many archaeological sites on the ranch. In recent years rather than continuing his own excavations he has worked with Linda Wheelbarger, a professional archaeologist who teaches at San Juan College in Farmington, to conduct field schools in the summers for SJC students as well as analyses of artifacts and human remains from both these recent excavations and his own earlier amateur work.

Among these analyses was the aDNA analysis of remains that Bolack excavated from the Tommy and Mine Canyon sites, two small-house sites on the ranch dating to the Chaco era. The Tommy site is slightly earlier, dating to approximately AD 800 to 1100, while the Mine Canyon site dates to approximately AD 1100 to 1300. Since the Tommy site seems to have been abandoned at approximately the same time the Mine Canyon site was founded, one obvious interpretation is that the Mine Canyon site was founded by the same people who had previously lived at the Tommy site. The DNA evidence, however, challenges this interpretation and suggests a more complicated story.

For this study, 73 samples were sent to Davis for aDNA analysis. This included a mix of tooth and bone samples. Of these samples, 48 (65.7%) could be assigned to a mitochondrial haplogroup. Of these, 26 were from the Tommy site and 12 from the Mine Canyon site.

The successfully analyzed samples from the Tommy site showed a typical distribution of haplogroups for a Southwestern population: 3% A, 69% B, 14% C, and 14% D. (This study didn’t look for haplogroup X, and all successfully analyzed samples fell into one of the other founding haplogroups.) The Mine Canyon sample, however, showed a very unusual distribution: 58% A, 33% B, 8% C, and 0% D. This is an exceptionally high proportion of haplogroup A, which is generally fairly rare in the Southwest except in Athabascan groups which are generally thought to have arrived in the region well after these sites were abandoned. Haplogroup A is also very common in Mesoamerica, which makes its dominance in a Chaco-associated site particularly intriguing given the evidence for contact with Mexico seen at Chaco Canyon itself and some outlying Chacoan sites.

The authors are careful to note that these are very small sample sizes, which makes sampling bias a very real possibility to account for this sort of striking result. They compare these distributions to several other ancient and modern Southwestern and Mesoamerican populations using Fisher’s exact test and find, unsurprisingly, that the Tommy site sample isn’t significantly different from other ancient Southwestern populations but is significantly different from all the modern populations as well as the ancient Mesoamerican ones. The Mine Canyon sample, on the other hand, was found to be significantly different from all the ancient Southwestern samples as well as all the modern Southwestern ones except the Athabascan Navajo and Apache, while it wasn’t significantly different from any of the ancient or modern Mesoamerican samples. This result is clearly driven primarily by the unusually high proportion of haplogroup A at Mine Canyon, which means it doesn’t really add much to the paper. Although Fisher’s exact test does take into account the small sample sizes, it doesn’t address the more fundamental problem with this sort of use of statistics on this type of data which can’t really be trusted to be representative of the underlying population of interest. This is the sort of thing I was talking about in the earlier post under the somewhat tongue-in-cheek label of “elaborate statistical techniques” on data that don’t necessarily fit the necessary requirements for their use. This sort of technique is not actually very elaborate compared to more sophisticated statistical analyses used for studies of whole genomes, where the number of data points is immense and they can actually be assumed to be representative of the analyzed individual’s full ancestry. Calculating P-values for differences between two samples based on four data points for each, when neither sample is necessarily representative of its underlying population of interest, is not very useful, but very common in mtDNA studies at least in the Southwest. To their credit, the authors of this paper are well aware of the weaknesses of this part of it and are careful to downplay the significance of the statistical analysis.

With these intriguing preliminary results, the researchers attempted further sequencing to identify more specific mutations that might define sub-haplogroups and clarify relationships on a more granular scale. Of the 48 samples that could be assigned to haplogroups, 23 were successfully sequenced for mutations in a region of the mitochondrial genome known to be highly variable. (Note how small the sample gets with subsequent levels of analysis.) Poor preservation was a major problem at this point, and there wasn’t enough genetic material remaining to construct the sort of network diagram that is often included in papers like this, showing specific mutations and the relationships they imply between specific ancient and modern samples.

The most interesting results from this further sequencing were with haplogroup A. Of the 8 samples initially identified as belonging to this haplogroup, 6 samples from the Mine Canyon site showed two distinctive mutations that are otherwise known only from 3 modern Zuni samples, along with one Tohono O’odham and one Chumash sample. Importantly, this set of mutations is unknown from both Mesoamerican and Athabascan groups. This is strong evidence that the dominance of haplogroup A at the Mine Canyon site does not indicate either migration from Mesoamerica or an early Athabascan presence in the Southwest; instead, it seems that this site just happens to have had an unusually high proportion of a rare but natively Southwestern lineage which survived into modern times at Zuni (and may have had some connections further west). The samples belonging to haplogroup B similarly showed the dominance of a sub-haplogroup distinctive to the Southwest and unknown in Mesoamerica.

The differences between the Tommy site and the Mine Canyon site in haplogroup frequencies, while they may well be a function in part of the small sample sizes, may also provide evidence for complex population movements within the late prehistoric Southwest. The exact parameters of these movements can’t be defined until more evidence is available from other areas, however, especially Chaco Canyon and the Mesa Verde region.

Overall, despite the poor preservation of the samples involved, this study provides important support for a finding that has come out consistently across all lines of evidence relating ancient to modern Pueblo people: there is a lot of evidence for continuity over time on a regional scale with complex movements within the Southwest, but little to no evidence of significant population movement into or out of the Southwest in recent centuries. (There is a whole other debate about the extent of population movement into the Southwest much earlier, at the time when agriculture was first introduced, which I haven’t discussed much in these posts and which isn’t of much importance for the specific issue I’m addressing here.) I think there is a lot of potential for more detailed reconstruction of movement within the Southwest based on a combination of lines of evidence, but we’re certainly not there yet.

I’ve gotten some questions about how the DNA evidence relates to the issue of hierarchy at Chaco. I’ll have a more extensive post on the evidence for social hierarchy, which I think is extensive, but the short answer is that DNA doesn’t really provide any evidence one way or the other on this point. Since all evidence points to a general pattern of population continuity in the Southwest at least since the introduction of agriculture, the genetic patterns of any elites that arose wouldn’t be likely to differ in any noticeable way from those of the commoners they rose from. Indeed, the one sample to be analyzed for mitochondrial DNA that is very likely to come from an elite Chacoan context, the sample from Room 56 at Pueblo Bonito, belonged to haplogroup B, the most common in both ancient and modern Southwestern populations. It’s theoretically possible to imagine an elite group immigrating into the Southwest from Mesoamerica, and theories have been proposed along these lines, but the DNA evidence doesn’t particularly support this, and it’s much more likely based on all lines of evidence that the rise of an elite at Chaco was a primarily indigenous development involving some indirect influence from Mexico but little to no permanent population movement over that distance.

This is the last substantive post in my series about “tracing the connections” between the ancient and modern Southwest, although I will probably do a follow-up post linking to all the others for the convenience of readers. Overall, I think these posts have shown that we have substantial evidence from various perspectives that the modern Pueblos are the descendants of the ancient Anasazi (and other prehistoric Southwestern groups), but the evidence we have so far is not sufficient to connect any specific ancient sites with any specific modern pueblos. I am hopeful, however, that that may change as more evidence comes in and we are able to tie together new data with the evidence we already have to make some more specific connections.

Carlyle SW, Parr RL, Hayes MG, & O’Rourke DH (2000). Context of maternal lineages in the Greater Southwest. American journal of physical anthropology, 113 (1), 85-101 PMID: 10954622

Kaestle FA, & Smith DG (2001). Ancient mitochondrial DNA evidence for prehistoric population movement: the Numic expansion. American journal of physical anthropology, 115 (1), 1-12 PMID: 11309745

Lorenz JG, & Smith DG (1996). Distribution of four founding mtDNA haplogroups among Native North Americans. American journal of physical anthropology, 101 (3), 307-23 PMID: 8922178

Smith DG, Malhi RS, Eshleman J, Lorenz JG, & Kaestle FA (1999). Distribution of mtDNA haplogroup X among Native North Americans. American journal of physical anthropology, 110 (3), 271-84 PMID: 10516561

Snow, M., Durand, K., & Smith, D. (2010). Ancestral Puebloan mtDNA in context of the greater southwest Journal of Archaeological Science, 37 (7), 1635-1645 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2010.01.024

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The Evidence from DNA

Dorset Culture Exhibit, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

To wrap up my series on tracing the connections between ancient Pueblo sites like Chaco Canyon and the modern Pueblos, I’d like to discuss a type of evidence I haven’t discussed much but that people often ask about: DNA evidence. This is the most direct way to tie one population to another, at least in theory, but it’s actually quite difficult to draw any specific conclusions from the work that has been done so far, and that’s not necessarily going to improve as more research is done. Which is not to say that research along these lines has been worthless; it hasn’t revealed anything inconsistent with data from other sources so far, but that in itself is interesting and provides support for the other approaches that have been tried. Because this is such a huge and important topic, I’ve decided to break my discussion of it into two posts, one on the archaeological study of DNA in general, and another on the application of these techniques to the Southwest in particular.

There are many different types of DNA analyses that can in theory be done, but when it comes to archaeological questions, especially those involving connections between ancient sites and modern people, it is generally necessary to analyze remains excavated by archaeologists. This involves studying what is known as “ancient DNA” (or “aDNA” for short), in addition to the DNA of modern populations. As Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida noted in an article published in American Antiquity in 2006, aDNA studies have a lot of potential but also a lot of challenges. Some of the major issues involved in aDNA research are preservation of the DNA, without which any study has no chance of success, and interpretation of the results of a successful analysis of ancient material.

Because DNA, like any other organic material, decays over time, aDNA studies are more difficult and expensive than DNA studies of modern populations, and in some cases there is simply not enough DNA left in archaeological material to do any analysis at all. Preservation is a function, in part, of local environmental conditions, which in the arid Southwest tend to be favorable for preserving organic material, so this is less of a concern in this area than in many others.

Another major consideration in doing aDNA analysis is contamination. The technique that makes aDNA analysis possible is called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), which involves taking a small amount of DNA and exposing it to a chemical reaction that creates billions of copies which can then be analyzed. This can be enormously useful, but the reaction is very sensitive and if any extraneous organic material is introduced it is likely to reproduce its DNA instead of the ancient DNA, which can totally destroy the validity of the analysis. The main concern with aDNA analyses of human remains is modern human DNA from the researchers themselves, and this has been an issue with many studies. These days the major laboratories that do aDNA analysis have elaborate procedures to ensure that modern human DNA doesn’t contaminate their samples, and these are typically spelled out in the papers resulting from this research.

Furthermore, as Mulligan discusses, it’s important that researchers have a clear sense of what questions they are asking and how successful aDNA analyses are likely to be in answering them. For example, DNA analysis is unlikely to be able to unambiguously identify a given set of ancient remains as belonging (or ancestral) to a specific tribal group, since genetic affiliation doesn’t correlate with cultural identity at anything close to that level of specificity. In other words, aDNA analysis can potentially identify remains as being of Native American rather than European origin, but it can’t unambiguously identify remains with any particular modern tribe. On the other hand, it is potentially possible to use aDNA studies to identify migrations and population replacement in the past, if the groups in question are sufficiently distinct genetically. Mulligan actually uses an example from the prehistoric Southwest, which I’ll discuss further in the next post, to illustrate how it can be tricky to interpret differences in genetic characteristics between populations, especially at the level of detail at which these analyses are often conducted.

These concerns aside, DNA analysis can certainly be a  powerful tool for understanding the past, especially when aDNA studies can be integrated with studies of modern DNA. A great example of this is a study that was recently published in Science about the prehistory of the North American Arctic. In this paper, which is available free on the Science website, the researchers report on a combination of aDNA and modern DNA analyses that demonstrate clearly that the people of the mysterious Dorset culture that inhabited Arctic Canada and Greenland from about 800 BC to AD 1300 are not ancestral to the modern Inuit inhabiting the same area, who are instead descended from the people of the Thule culture who immigrated into Canada from northern Alaska around AD 1200. This is solid, careful research that shows what DNA studies can reveal about the human past.

Much of the aDNA research in the Americas has focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is contained in the mitochondria of each cell, as opposed to nuclear DNA, which is contained in the cell nucleus. There are two main reasons for this.

One is that mitochondrial DNA is passed on (generally) unchanged through the maternal line, as opposed to nuclear DNA which undergoes meiosis, the process by which DNA from the mother and father is recombined in the course of creating a new embryo, meaning that any part of the genome that has gone through it cannot be easily traced from generation to generation. Mitochondrial DNA, in contrast, is passed on directly from mother to child, and the only changes are whatever mutations develop over time, which can be used to define specific haplogroups, or genetic groupings sharing certain distinctive mutations that are interpreted as indicating shared descent. Within each haplogroup, further mutations can be used to define various sub-haplogroups, which indicate closer relationship among the haplotypes (individual genetic profiles) that comprise them. The Y chromosome, which is passed on directly from father to son, isn’t affected by recombination during meiosis and can be used to trace descent in a similar fashion. However, mtDNA is more widely used for aDNA studies than Y-chromosome DNA, due to an additional difference between mtDNA and nuclear DNA.  Due to the structure of mitochondria, each cell contains many more copies of its mtDNA than of its nuclear DNA, so mtDNA is much more likely to survive in ancient samples than nuclear DNA. This means there is much greater probability that studies of mtDNA using PCR will identify DNA to be replicated, and the result is that the existing database of mtDNA available for statistical analysis is much larger than that for nuclear DNA, including  Y-chromosome DNA. Most aDNA studies in North America, at least, have therefore used mtDNA as a primary focus for research.

Early research on both ancient and modern DNA identified four main mitochondrial haplogroups among Native American populations. These were labeled A, B, C, and D. (Haplogroups are conventionally identified by capital letters, with more specific sub-haplogroups indicated by sequences of numbers and lowercase letters following the haplogroup letter.) These haplogroups all arose from earlier East Asian haplogroups, which agrees with the traditional interpretation that Native Americans descend from Asian groups that migrated across the Bering Strait. Some modern populations in these early studies showed low levels of an additional haplogroup, X, which had previously only been documented in Europeans. There was some question at first about whether this indicated post-Contact admixture with Europeans or an additional “founding” haplogroup, but it was later found in aDNA, showing clearly that it was indeed ancient in the Americas. The implications of this finding are hard to understand, but the general consensus at this point seems to be that the American examples descend from a very ancient and otherwise unknown Central Asian offshoot of the European X haplogroup. Wherever it came from, however, it is now quite clear that X is one of the founding haplogroups in the Americas.

Much aDNA research in North America, then, has focused on identifying the haplogroups of ancient remains and comparing them to those of other populations, both ancient and modern. Much of this research has involved treating assemblages of ancient remains (either from single sites or across a whole archaeological “culture”) as samples that can be compared statistically to samples from modern tribes. I find this dubious, since the ancient samples are typically small and there’s no way to tell how representative they are of the actual underlying population (however it’s defined). The statistical procedures often used to analyze haplogroup frequencies implicitly assume that these are random samples representative of the population, but there’s no real way to know if this is true and in most cases no particular reason to think it is. In theory it’s possible that the modern samples, at least, are representative of their populations, but I suspect it’s often not the case in practice here either. For both modern and ancient samples, it’s likely that other factors, such as level of preservation and willingness to provide samples, have strongly affected the composition of the samples. These factors may or may not have skewed the representativeness of the samples; the point is that there’s no real way to tell.

Given this sampling issue, I think the most conservative and defensible approach is to treat haplogroup distributions as nominal-level data: the most we can really say about a given haplogroup in a given sample is whether it is present or absent. That’s not very helpful, though, and it may be reasonable to take a further leap and treat the distributions as ordinal-level data: this allows us to make use of the fact that some haplogroups are much more common in a given sample than others to make some broad conclusions about haplogroup distributions on a larger scale. What isn’t justified, however, is treating the frequencies of haplogroups in a sample as interval/ratio-level data: using the actual numbers as if they are meaningfully representative of the underlying population, and plugging them into elaborate statistical formulas to compare them to other samples/populations. Not all aDNA studies do this sort of thing, but it’s common enough that I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s a problematic approach at best, and that any conclusions regarding probable relationships between populations based on this method shouldn’t be taken very seriously.

A better way to go beyond the crude data of haplogroup assignment is to sequence additional portions of the mitochondrial genome that are known to contain mutations that define sub-haplogroups within the assigned overall haplogroup. Enough research has been done at this point that quite a few sub-haplogroups are known, and when they show up in multiple samples, either ancient or modern, that provides a much firmer basis for hypothesizing meaningfully close relationships than statistical comparisons of haplogroup distributions among whole samples. Furthermore, since the mutations that define sub-haplogroups can be grouped hierarchically, it’s possible to construct trees showing how individuals in a given sample, or even across samples, that belong to the same haplogroup relate to each other. (Note that this isn’t quite the same as showing how the people were actually related, since we don’t know when the mutations that define these groups actually occurred or how the people whose remains were sampled were related to the people in whom the mutations originally occurred.) There’s a probabilistic aspect to this type of evidence, since there are multiple ways a particular set of mutations could have ended up together in the same haplotype, and determining the most likely sequence of events can require modeling and simulation. The more samples are analyzed, the larger the database of known mutations and sub-haplogroups becomes, and the more reliable the conclusions that can be drawn about relationships are.

So that’s the basic outline of how ancient DNA analysis works and the methodological concerns that need to be kept in mind when evaluating it. In the next post, we’ll look at some of the specific studies that have applied these methods to the Southwest, and what their results can and can’t tell us about Southwestern prehistory.

Mulligan, C. (2006). Anthropological Applications of Ancient DNA: Problems and Prospects American Antiquity, 71 (2) DOI: 10.2307/40035909

Raghavan, M., DeGiorgio, M., Albrechtsen, A., Moltke, I., Skoglund, P., Korneliussen, T., Gronnow, B., Appelt, M., Gullov, H., Friesen, T., Fitzhugh, W., Malmstrom, H., Rasmussen, S., Olsen, J., Melchior, L., Fuller, B., Fahrni, S., Stafford, T., Grimes, V., Renouf, M., Cybulski, J., Lynnerup, N., Lahr, M., Britton, K., Knecht, R., Arneborg, J., Metspalu, M., Cornejo, O., Malaspinas, A., Wang, Y., Rasmussen, M., Raghavan, V., Hansen, T., Khusnutdinova, E., Pierre, T., Dneprovsky, K., Andreasen, C., Lange, H., Hayes, M., Coltrain, J., Spitsyn, V., Gotherstrom, A., Orlando, L., Kivisild, T., Villems, R., Crawford, M., Nielsen, F., Dissing, J., Heinemeier, J., Meldgaard, M., Bustamante, C., O’Rourke, D., Jakobsson, M., Gilbert, M., Nielsen, R., & Willerslev, E. (2014). The genetic prehistory of the New World Arctic Science, 345 (6200), 1255832-1255832 DOI: 10.1126/science.1255832

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The Evidence from Skull Measurements

Old Bonito from Above, Including Northern Burial Rooms

So far in this series of posts on “tracing the connections” between ancient Pueblo sites like Chaco Canyon and modern Pueblos, I’ve discussed evidence from linguistics and folklore, but of course if the issue is determining which modern groups are physically descended from which ancient ones it’s hard to beat evidence from actual physical remains. Physical anthropology has been somewhat less emphasized in the history of Southwestern anthropology, especially compared to archaeology and ethnography, but there has been a fair amount of this kind of research over the years and it is clearly at least potentially useful in answering these questions.

These days when people talk about physical evidence of genetic connections they often mean DNA, and there have been several interesting recent studies of the DNA of both ancient and modern Southwestern populations that are relevant to my present concern. That topic deserves its own post, however (which I am working on), so for now I’m going to focus on a more “traditional” type of physical anthropological study: the statistical comparison of skull features and measurements.

This sort of study generally takes the form of measuring various attributes of skulls from different archaeological excavations and comparing them statistically to see which ones pattern together. (There are also studies of non-metric features that work somewhat differently, but here I’m going to focus on studies of metric features.) I’m always a bit dubious about the relevance of these studies, since I’m not sure how clear it is that the traits they’re measuring really do correlate with genetic relatedness, but this is a well-established and longstanding field of inquiry so for now I’ll take it as given that the underlying theoretical assumptions are well-founded.

Old Bonito from West Plaza Showing Plaza Kivas in Foreground

Turning to Chaco specifically, the most influential studies along these lines are those done by Nancy Akins as part of the Chaco Project in the 1970s and 1980s. It was her work that famously concluded that the two main burial populations in Pueblo Bonito, in the northern and western parts of the site, were most similar not to each other but to two different small house sites elsewhere in the canyon. This was an important finding, in that it implied that the population inhabiting the canyon in its heyday was physically diverse in ways that didn’t necessarily pattern with geographical settlement patterns. This in turn implies that there may have substantial diversity in ethnic and linguistic backgrounds among different Chaco residents as well, an implication that some other lines of evidence also support.

Akins only compared populations from within Chaco Canyon, however. To evaluate the connections between Chaco and later Pueblo sites, comparable measurements needed to be made of remains from later Pueblo sites and compared to Akins’s Chaco data. The most extensive study along these lines that I know of is in a short article by Michael Schillaci and Christopher Stojanowski published in 2002. Interestingly, this article was actually a comment on an earlier article by Peter Peregrine arguing that Chacoan society was matrilocal based in part on the fact that some modern Pueblo groups, such as the Hopis and Zunis, are matrilocal. (Matrilocality is the practice of newly married couples living with the wife’s parents, and it is apparently very uncommon cross-culturally compared to patrilocality, where couples live with the husband’s parents.)

Schillaci and Stojanowski argue that while it’s certainly possible that the matrilocal western Pueblos of Hopi and Zuni are descended in part from the Chacoans, it’s not at all obvious that they have a better claim to such descent than the eastern Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, which are generally either patrilocal or bilocal (couples live with either set of parents). To test this idea, they take Akins’s data from Chaco and compare it to measurements made according to the same protocol on several other contemporaneous and later Pueblo populations. These include Village of the Great Kivas, a Chacoan outlier in the Zuni area, as well as Hawikku, a much later ancestral Zuni site. They also include several samples from the Rio Grande area, both contemporary with Chaco and later.

As expected from Akins’s results, Schillaci and Stojanowski found that the different samples from Chaco don’t particularly pattern with each other. Interestingly, in their analysis the northern burials at Pueblo Bonito stand somewhat apart from all the other samples. This could potentially be evidence that these, the richest burials ever found in the Pueblo Southwest, represent a group that was genetically distinct from most other Southwestern populations, but it’s important to keep in mind that the number of samples being compared here is relatively small and there’s no way to know how representative it is, so sampling error is always a strong possibility when patterns like this show up. (Other studies have found that these remains are well within the range of variation typical of Southwestern populations, so the fact that they stand apart from the other groups in this study probably doesn’t imply that they were immigrants from outside the region or anything.)

Western Burial Rooms in Old Bonito

Of the other Chaco samples, the western burials at Pueblo Bonito cluster most closely with those from both Hawikku and the ancestral Tewa site of Puye in the Rio Grande Valley. The burials from the small sites in the Fajada Butte area at Chaco pattern most closely with the ancestral Tewa site of Tsankawi, and in fact these two form a somewhat distinct group compared to most of the other samples. Finally, the burials from the small sites of Bc 51 and Bc 53, on the south side of the canyon across from Pueblo Bonito, pattern closely with those from Picuris, a Northern Tiwa Pueblo which is still occupied, as well as with those from the ancestral Tewa sites of Sapawe and Pindi.

Schillaci and Stojanowski conclude from this that there is no good reason to conclude that Chacoan society was matrilocal based on the practices of the likely descendants of the Chacoans, among whom they have identified both eastern and western Pueblos practicing various forms of postmarital residence. They do acknowledge that they weren’t able to include any Hopi samples in the analysis, so the western Pueblos are represented only by the two Zuni-area sites, which leaves open the possibility that the Hopis are closely connected to Chaco, which would strengthen Peregrine’s position and weaken theirs. On the other hand, other lines of evidence suggested somewhat weaker ties to Chaco among the Hopis than among most other modern Pueblos, so this probably isn’t a major problem. In his response, Peregrine notes the possibility that bilocality among the eastern Pueblos is a post-contact development related to declining population and therefore not necessarily relevant to the prehistoric evidence. He doesn’t challenge the overall validity of the analysis, however, which is our main concern here.

This is an interesting study, and it identifies some later sites with at least a high probability of including people descended from the Chacoans, but the facts that these sites don’t particularly pattern with each other and that there was considerable diversity within Chaco itself point to how complicated the picture seems to be. Overall, this evidence seems to support the idea that most of the modern Pueblos include at least some people who are descended from the Chacoans, and it provides particular support for such ties among the Zuni, Tewa, and Northern Tiwa. It also supports the previously existing evidence for considerable population diversity at Chaco itself. As we’ll see in the next post, this is not very different from where the DNA evidence leads.

Schillaci, M., & Stojanowski, C. (2002). A Reassessment of Matrilocality in Chacoan Culture American Antiquity, 67 (2) DOI: 10.2307/2694571

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The Evidence from Oral Traditions

Original Plaster and Whitewash at Chetro Ketl

Given the obvious continuity in material culture between ancient and modern Pueblos, one potential source of information on the connections between prehistory and history in the region is the traditions of the modern Pueblos themselves. The florescence of Chaco was about 1000 years ago, so the events since then that led to the modern distribution of Pueblos are more recent than that, and potentially within the time depth for which the accuracy of oral traditions has been demonstrated in other parts of the world. Furthermore, the Pueblos do indeed have extensive oral traditions documenting how the various groups now residing in a given Pueblo got there, where they lived before, and what made them move. This seems on the face of it like an ideal situations, and indeed anthropologists at various points in the past hundred years or so have tried to match up the events in the oral traditions with what the archaeology shows. The efforts of Jesse Walter Fewkes with the Hopis in the early twentieth century, Florence Hawley Ellis with the Rio Grande Pueblos in the 1950s and 1960s, and various archaeologists associated with the Center for Desert Archaeology (now known as Archaeology Southwest) in the past few years with the western Pueblos are particularly noteworthy along these lines.

However, there are some big challenges to this type of work. First, it’s not clear how accurate the oral traditions are, and many anthropologists have distrusted them. Elsie Clews Parsons in the 1920s and 1930s pushed back strongly against the approach taken by Fewkes and others, pointing out that the traditions include many obviously mythical or legendary elements that must be brushed aside to treat them as “history” in the Western sense. Similarly, the rise of the “New Archaeology” in the 1960s and 1970s led to a tendency to downplay this kind of research on the archaeological side in favor of more “scientific” types of research focused on ecological factors. Lately the pendulum seems to be swinging back again, and many archaeologists as well as sociocultural anthropologists have begun to take oral traditions seriously as a source of information that can bridge the gap between prehistoric archaeology and the ethnographic present. Personally, I think these researchers are on the right track; the difficulties pointed out by Parsons and others are real, and the traditions can’t be accepted uncritically as fact, but they do very likely contain much information that is useful for historical reconstructions when interpreted carefully in context.

Pueblo Display at Chaco Visitor Center

That more general issue aside, there are a lot of specific characteristics of the existing narratives that make them hard to work with, especially in the case of Chaco. For one thing, there aren’t that many of them that have been documented, and those that have overwhelmingly come from the western Pueblos of Hopi and, to a lesser extent, Zuni. The eastern Pueblos, which on geographical and other grounds are the ones most likely to have close ties to Chaco, have produced far fewer narratives, and those that are available are much less detailed and relevant. There are two main reasons for this, both stemming from the much more intense experience of Spanish colonization in these areas versus Hopi and Zuni:

1. The Rio Grande Pueblos, especially, have been in such close contact with Spanish colonists that many traditions have been lost due to population loss and cultural change, and those that have been preserved have been influenced to some extent by European folklore elements. This is probably less of a concern with origin and migration stories than with more “informal” folktales.
2. Due to the extreme repression of Native religion and culture by the Spanish missionaries, the eastern Pueblos are much more reluctant to share whatever traditions they have with white anthropologists than the western Pueblos are. This is probably the biggest reason for the lack of eastern Pueblo data, but its scale is impossible to estimate because we just don’t know how many traditions there are that have never been shared.

As a result of these two factors, we don’t have anything comparable to the extensive and detailed accounts of Hopi clan migrations that have been collected by numerous researchers, starting with Fewkes. There are a fair number of general creation stories from the eastern Pueblos, including those collected from the Tewa by Parsons and from Keresan Pueblos of Acoma and San Felipe by C. Daryll Forde and Ruth Bunzel respectively. These tend to be somewhat abbreviated, and sometimes also confusing in a way that suggests important parts have been omitted. Migration stories are much rarer, but a few have been recorded at least in a general fashion. George Pradt gave a brief overview of a western Keres migration tradition in introducing a story about Acoma:

THE oldest tradition of the people of Acoma and Laguna indicates that they lived on some island; that their homes were destroyed by tidal waves, earthquakes, and red-hot stones from the sky. They fled and landed on a low, swampy coast. From here they migrated to the northwest, and wherever they made a long stay they built a “White City” (Kush-kut-ret).

The fifth White City was built somewhere in southern Colorado or northern New Mexico. The people were obliged to leave it on account of cold, drought, and famine.

Now this is of obvious interest in discussing Chaco and Mesa Verde connections to modern Pueblos! The first part is of unclear relevance and likely has little or no historical content, but the part about moving around and building a series of communities, the last of which was in “southern Colorado or northern New Mexico” (i.e., north of Acoma and Laguna and in the general area of Chaco, Mesa Verde, and other important late prehistoric Pueblo sites), matches up pretty well with what is now known of the archaeological record. Furthermore, the “White City” or “White House” concept recurs in other Keres-speaking Pueblos as well. Here’s the San Felipe version recorded by Bunzel, starting just after the Emergence:

Then the people came out and walked towards the southwest. There they built a little town, Kackatrik (White House). This was their first village. Then from there came every nation. All the different kinds of Indians had their language and their songs and their ceremonies. There were many people there. Then the people were starving. There was no food to eat at this time. Then they had a meeting to talk about it. “Why are we starving?” all the head men said, “We have stayed here a long time. We should move on to some other place.” So then they started to move again. There were all different kinds of people, and they had all different kinds of languages. So then from there they scattered. Some went to the east and some went to the west, and some came through the middle.

Again, this is pretty consistent with the archaeology of Chaco, and to some extent of Mesa Verde as well. The “White House” story seems to be specific to the Keres, which implies a particularly strong connection between that groups and the ancient sites of the Four Corners, as many anthropologists have concluded. That’s not to say they were the only ones up there, however. There’s also evidence among some of the other groups’ traditions indicating an origin in this area.

White House/Black Market, Santa Fe, New Mexico

For the Tewa, Scott Ortman has done extensive research using several lines of evidence, including what little is known of Tewa migration traditions, to conclude that Tewa-speakers migrated to the Rio Grande Valley from the Mesa Verde region. He has a new book, which I have not yet read, making this argument in detail. He could well be right, in which case there may have been both Keres- and Tewa-speakers in the Mesa Verde region, and perhaps at Chaco as well given the close but complicated ties between the two areas. This would be similar to the modern situation in the central part of the Rio Grande Valley, which is also divided between Keres- and Tewa-speaking Pueblos.There are also clear ties between Chaco and the Zuni area, which has an unusual degree of settlement continuity extending to modern times compared to other Pueblo areas, which may imply that Zuni-speakers were involved in Chaco as well. Ties to the Hopis are more tenuous despite the larger corpus of Hopi traditions, which tends to trace most Hopi clans to the south or west rather than the east (with the exception of clans from other Pueblo regions that moved to Hopi and became assimilated to Hopi culture fairly recently).

So, tentatively, the limited information available from oral traditions suggests particularly strong ties to the Four Corners among the Keres, which makes sense since they are still the closest Pueblos to the area geographically. There is some evidence for connections to the area among the Tewa and Zuni as well. Little is known about Tiwa or Towa (Jemez) traditions, but it is noteworthy that Jemez is the only Pueblo that has not claimed cultural affiliation with Chaco under NAGPRA, which implies strongly that Jemez traditions point to a different history. The Hopi connection seems to be more distant, and primarily through groups that were not originally Hopi-speaking but immigrated to Hopi from other areas further east in recent centuries and became assimilated over time.

I think there’s a lot of potential for further research along these lines, mostly using the scattered and fragmented eastern Pueblo traditions collected decades ago. Individually each of these may not be very enlightening, but piecing them together may reveal some useful connections. It’s very unlikely that any of these groups will reveal any more of their traditions to outsiders; many are still angry at the early anthropologists who recorded and published traditions revealed surreptitiously by individual community members at considerable personal risk. Parsons comes in for particularly harsh criticism for publishing the names of her informants in some of her early work. It’s possible that in the future the relationship between anthropologists and the eastern Pueblos will improve to the point where the Pueblos are more comfortable revealing information, but we’ve got a long way to go.

Pradt, G. (1902). Shakok and Miochin: Origin of Summer and Winter The Journal of American Folklore, 15 (57) DOI: 10.2307/533476

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The Evidence from Linguistic Contact

Kachina Fast Tax, Winslow, Arizona

As I mentioned in the last post, I don’t think the linguistic relationships among the modern Pueblo languages shed much light on the details of the relationships between ancient and modern Pueblo groups. However, that’s not to say that linguistics is totally useless in addressing this issue. There’s another type of linguistic evidence which has received less attention from researchers but has a lot of potential here: contact linguistics, especially loanword studies.

Due to the close historical connections and cultural similarities among the Pueblos, they form what linguists call a “Sprachbund”: a linguistic area where borrowing of both words and other linguistic features is common among unrelated (or distantly related) languages. Oddly, however, there hasn’t been a whole lot of study of this phenomenon among the Pueblos. Individual loanwords from one Pueblo language to another have been pointed out in descriptive accounts of the specific languages, and instances of unusual lexical or grammatical influence from one Pueblo language to another have been noted. There has been some research on loanwords from Spanish and English into various Pueblo languages (e.g., Hopi), mostly in the 1950s and 1960s when the process of acculturation was a major topic of anthropological interest. Nevertheless, there has still never been a systematic, comprehensive study of linguistic contact between Pueblo languages. My discussion here will therefore have to be limited to pointing out individual instances of contact that have been noted in the literature and suggesting possible implications for prehistoric relationships.

Known examples of loanwords tend to relate to ceremonial  concepts, and often are from Keres into other languages. For example, and of interest for the question of the origins of the kachina cult, the word kachina itself is apparently a loan from Keres into Hopi. That’s not necessarily evidence that the Keres originated the kachina cult, but it could be interpreted as evidence that they transmitted it to the Hopi, which would argue for an eastern rather than western origin for the cult. On the other hand, the Zuni word for “kachina,” koko, is apparently a loanword from a Piman language, which would seem to argue for a western origin of the cult, possibly even outside the Pueblo world itself. Teasing apart the implications of the various terms associated with the kachina cult in different languages would be a promising way to try to address the issue of origins, but it would be a huge and difficult task, and as far as I know no one has attempted it yet.

Similarly, I’ve previously mentioned Jane Hill’s argument from alleged Uto-Aztecan loanwords in Proto-Kiowa Tanoan that agriculture was introduced to the Southwest by migrants from the south speaking a Uto-Aztecan language. In that case the evidence for borrowing is more tenuous and less widely accepted than in the kachina case, but it’s still an interesting approach that could be fruitful if applied more broadly to both this and other puzzles of Southwestern prehistory.

It’s not clear if either of these examples sheds much light on Chaco or its relationship to the modern Pueblos, however. The introduction of agriculture, however it happened, was thousands of years before the era of the Chaco Phenomenon (although recent evidence has shown that agriculture at Chaco itself began much earlier than previously thought). The kachina cult, on the other hand, is generally thought to have originated in the post-Chacoan era, perhaps as one of many societal responses to the chaotic conditions in the aftermath of the decline of Chaco. There are some archaeologists who see some form of the kachina cult as having existed at Chaco, in which case the linguistic evidence about kachinas would be more important for understanding it, but I haven’t been convinced by their arguments.

So what can loanword and other linguistic contact evidence tell us about the relationship between Chaco and other prehistoric sites and the modern Pueblos? Given the limited research along these lines so far, not much. As I said above, though, there is still a lot of potential for studies of this issue, so I wanted to highlight it as a separate line of evidence from the more commonly used evidence from linguistic relationships.

Dockstader, F. (1955). Spanish Loanwords in Hopi; A Preliminary Checklist International Journal of American Linguistics, 21 (2) DOI: 10.1086/464324

Hill, J. (2008). Northern Uto‐Aztecan and Kiowa‐Tanoan: Evidence of Contact between the Proto‐Languages? International Journal of American Linguistics, 74 (2), 155-188 DOI: 10.1086/587703

Shaul, D., & Hill, J. (1998). Tepimans, Yumans, and Other Hohokam American Antiquity, 63 (3) DOI: 10.2307/2694626

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The Evidence from Linguistic Relationships

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

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The Lay of the Land

Northwest Corner of Pueblo del Arroyo

As a first step in evaluating the connections between prehistoric and modern Pueblo societies, it’s necessary to define exactly which societies we’re talking about here. This post is a brief overview of the prehistoric cultures and modern ethnolinguistic groups in question. As noted below, these are not necessarily equivalent units, and failing to recognize this has been a frequent problem with previous reconstructions of Southwestern culture history.

On the ancient side, we are primarily dealing here with  a handful of “branches” within the overall Anasazi “root.” (See my previous post on lesser-known prehistoric Southwestern societies for more on the “root and branch” system that has traditionally been used to organize Southwestern prehistory.) These branches inhabited various parts of the drainage of the San Juan River prior to AD 1300; how far back they go before that is unclear. These are the traditional branches:

• Chaco Branch: The primary center of this branch is of course Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, but it extended over the entirety of the southern San Juan Basin and further south into the drainage of the Rio Puerco of the West. There are various distinctive characteristics of this branch prior to about AD 1200, when it seems to converge with the Mesa Verde branch before disappearing entirely.
• Mesa Verde Branch: While Mesa Verde proper is historically the area of main research focus for this branch, recent research has shown that it was much more widespread, extending thoughout much of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. The exact nature of its relationship with the Chaco branch is still unclear, but there has been increasing evidence for cultural similarity and historical connections between the two. There is a clear pattern of alternating population concentration implying migration between north and south on a scale of centuries prior to the depopulation of the entire area before AD 1300.
• Kayenta Branch: Located in northeastern Arizona, this branch shows some clear cultural differences from Chaco and Mesa Verde, but certain sites do show evidence of influence from Mesa Verde especially during the Tsegi Phase from AD 1250 to 1300. The cliff dwellings of Navajo National Monument and Canyon de Chelly are probably the best known Kayenta sites.

On the modern side, there are 19 Pueblos in New Mexico, plus several on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona and a few communities of Pueblo ancestry in the vicinity of El Paso, Texas. They belong to six known linguistic groups, listed below.

• Hopi: This language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family, one of the more widespread and well-documented families of North and Central America. As the name implies, the family includes both the Great Basin hunter-gatherers of the Numic subfamily (Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone) and the complex agricultural Aztecs of the Basin of Mexico, as well as many groups in between. As a result, this family is among the best examples in the world of a lack of correlation between language family and economic orientation. The Hopis fall in between the extremes of the Numa and the Aztecs, and their language forms its own branch of Uto-Aztecan sufficiently different from the others to make it very difficult to draw any culture-historical conclusions. The three Hopi mesas (unimaginatively named “First,” “Second,” and “Third” in English) have distinctive dialects that further complicate the situation.
• Zuni: Today this is just a single pueblo, speaking a language generally considered an isolate unrelated to any other. Prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 there were several Zuni pueblos, however. In addition to language, there are several other aspects of Zuni culture that tend to distinguish it from the other pueblos, although there are also enough similarities to Hopi to distinguish the two as “western” pueblos in contrast to those further east.
• Keres: This is another language isolate, but spoken by several historically autonomous pueblos that still retain separate identities and speak slightly different dialects of a single mutually intelligible language. The Keres pueblos form a “bridge” in some respects between the western and eastern pueblos. Acoma and Laguna tend to pattern more with Hopi and Zuni, while Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Cochiti, and Santo Domingo are located further east and tend to have more similarities to the Rio Grande Pueblos.
• Tanoan: This (sub)family is located entirely in the Rio Grande Valley and is divided into three languages/subfamilies, which are in turn related to a fourth language, Kiowa, spoken on the Great Plains. The Tanoan subfamilies are:
  • Tiwa: This subfamily is in turn divided into Northern and Southern divisions, which occupy the extreme north and south portions of the modern Pueblo domain. Northern Tiwa is spoken in Taos and Picuris, while Southern Tiwa is spoken at Sandia and Isleta in the vicinity of modern Albuquerque. Tiwa was also spoken historically at Ysleta del Sur near El Paso, Texas, which was founded by Southern Tiwas displaced during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. There is some evidence that the Piro pueblos south of the Southern Tiwa also spoke a language closely related to Tiwa, although this language is poorly documented and is now extinct.
  • Tewa: This subfamily occupies the portions of the northern Rio Grande valley near modern Santa Fe, in the pueblos of San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambe, Tesuque, Pojoaque. A closely related dialect was also spoken further south in the Galisteo Basin until approximately 1700, when the remaining residents of that area moved to the Hopi area of Arizona and founded the pueblo on First Mesa known as Hano (or Tewa), which continues to speak a dialect of the Tewa language to this day.
  • Towa: Today this language is spoken only at Jemez Pueblo on the western edge of the Rio Grande region, but until the 1830s it was also spoken at Pecos on the eastern edge. When the pueblo of Pecos was abandoned its remaining inhabitants moved to Jemez, where their descendants still form a distinctive segment of the population.

So that’s the present situation. The picture is complicated, and it’s hard to figure out what the historical events that resulted in this arrangement would have been. The fact that Tiwa occupies both the northern and southern ends of the Rio Grande culture area, while Towa occupies the eastern and western peripheries and Keres occupies both a core part of the center of the region and an area further west that is more similar culturally to Hopi and Zuni, makes it difficult to fit the known facts into a simple scheme of migration or cultural diffusion. Clearly the story must be more complicated, and digging into those complexities will be the purpose of the following posts in this series.

Kuaua Pueblo, Coronado State Monument, Bernalillo, New Mexico

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Tracing the Connections

Kivas in East Plaza, Pueblo Bonito

It’s quite clear that, in a general sense, the modern Pueblo people of New Mexico and Arizona are the cultural descendants of the ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) groups of Chaco Canyon and other parts of the northern Southwest no longer occupied by people of Puebloan culture. Indeed, as the previous post explains, the descendants of the Chacoans are much easier to identify than those of pretty much any other prehistoric society in the Southwest. Nevertheless, the modern Pueblos are quite diverse in many ways. While they all have similar material culture, which is what most clearly shows their relationship to prehistoric sites like Chaco, the Pueblos speak six different languages belonging to four completely unrelated language families, and the linguistic divisions correspond generally (but not perfectly) to differences in other aspects of culture, such as kinship systems, sociopolitical structures, and religious practices.

With so much diversity, it’s reasonable to hypothesize that some modern Pueblo groups have closer connections to particular ancient sites than others. Demonstrating any specific connections has been frustratingly difficult for scholars so far, however. The immense upheavals of the Spanish colonial period led to significant changes in many Pueblos that make it difficult to trace their histories back into the prehistoric period, and archaeology has demonstrated considerable evidence for prehistoric upheavals that similarly obscure continuities of culture and population. Adding to the difficulty are the facts that the Pueblos have long had very similar material culture to each other, which makes it difficult to tell different ethnolinguistic groups apart archaeologically, and that the extensive migrations of the late prehistoric period seem to have involved rapid change in material culture as well, obscure whatever small differences had existed among different Pueblo groups.

On account of these difficulties, for a long time Southwestern archaeologists and anthropologists were often reluctant to try to reconstruct culture history in enough detail to connect specific ancient sites with specific modern Pueblos. In recent years this reluctance has decreased, however, and there is now a fair amount of interest in these questions, spurred in part by the requirements under NAGPRA for demonstrating cultural affiliation of modern groups in ancient sites. It’s interesting to compare this trend to the last period of considerable interest in this topic, which was similarly spurred by the effort in the 1950s to settle Indian land claims. In any case, archaeologists today have proposed various models of Southwestern prehistory to account for the distribution of modern Pueblo peoples.

With this context, and inspired in part by some interesting questions asked by commenter J. R. Barnett, I’ve decided to do a series of posts addressing this issue and the types of evidence available to address it. I’ll be focusing heavily on linguistic evidence, which is of particular interest to me personally as well as being of considerable importance in defining cultural differences among the Pueblos. I will, however, also discuss the evidence from archaeology, physical anthropology (including DNA studies), sociocultural anthropology, and oral traditions. In doing some reading on these topics recently, it’s been apparent that there really is quite a lot of relevant evidence out there. While we will surely never be able to recover every detail of the story, it’s worth taking a serious look at the available evidence to see what we can find out.

Apparent Kiva at Abo Pueblo, Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

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