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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>On September 26, after a few messages summing
up Jane H. Hill's article "Proto-Uto-Aztecan: a community of cultivators in
Central Mexico?" (American Anthropologist 103:4, 913-934), Richley Crapo asked
"</FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>What's your assessment of how widely she's been
accepted?" and didn't get much of a response, at least not on the list. I meant
to write something then but didn't. I just found a file card with a message I
sent to George Cowgill two years ago about Hill's proposal and thought I'd send
it to the list, with a few clarifications. Here it is:</DIV></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hill's case that the Uto-Aztecans spread form south
to north looks very reasonable. I never liked Manrique's linguistic
maps with the ethnic billiard balls forever knocking one another southward.
Okham's razor cuts the movement of entire linguistic chains from one region to
another right out of the picture.</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The big problem with Hill's paper, and the way it
has been received by the scholarly community, lies in the vagueness of the
geographic terminology, bouncing back and forth between "Mesoamerica" and
"central Mexico", without defining the scope of "central Mexico". When Hill
speaks of the initial Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) expansion on p. 916, "north
through western Mexico" is only slightly more specific. The best we get is that
Corachol and Aztecan speakers descend from "the northwestern quadrant of the
region" (p. 916 again); exactly what region she is quadrisecting is left up to
the reader's imagination. If this "northwest quadrant" means any part
of the Jalisco/Colima/Nayarit region, then I agree with Hill on the
location of the Nahua/Cora/Huichol homeland, as I suggested in an article in
Relaciones (no. 72, 1997) a few years ago. But on pp. 924-925, in the division
"The Homeland of the Aztecans", Hill gets vague again, suggesting a
Proto-Aztecan homeland "within the tropics" (a geographic referent that gives us
only a northern limit, ignoring changes in altitude, rainfall and vegetation).
>From there a Big Leap is taken, suggesting that Nahuas were resposible for Early
Classic Teotihuacan art, with no more evidence than the presence of flower
metaphors in Nahuatl language and Teotihuacan art (probably a human universal,
certainly so in Mesoamerica), a quick invocation of Daken's and Wichmann's
article on the origin of the word "cacao" (without mentioning that these
authors [p. 69] make a cautious division between hard linguistic evidence
and speculative interpretation in their paper), and a citation of a very brief
Web article which attempts to give a Nahua phonetic reading of the Maya Ahau
sign (a very small statistical sampling, leaving open the possibility of
coincidence).</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Floral symbolism at Teotihuacan aside, the last two
lines of reasoning for Nahuas at Teotihuacan can be classified as non sequitur
fallacies, since Nahua linguistic influence in southeastern Mesoamerica wouldn't
necessarily have originated at Teotihuacan, the biggest game in town, but
certainly not the only one. Networks of commercial and cultural interaction
united all regions of Mesoamerica (and beyond).</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I have no problem with Nahuas at Teotihuacan, but
the city clearly emerged from a cultural substratum with deep roots in the
central valleys of Mexico (the valley of Mexico plus bordering valleys all
around), a region that can safely be called (on linguistic evidence, also taking
into account material culture and historical traditions) the Proto-Otopamean
homeland, with some other Otomanguean speakers on its southeastern margins. That
the city was of pan-Mesoamerican significance and welcomed immigrants from
several other regions (including Western Mexico) is evident, but I just
don't see evidence of a major western influx before the Epiclassic. (I am,
however, looking harder at the Preclassic/Protoclassic connections
between the various regions of Western and Central Mexico, and am
willing to accept an early and significant cultural exchange between these
regions, which could well involve Proto-Nahuas.)</FONT></DIV>
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