Uto-Aztecan Homeland

[David Wright]

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 "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:

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.

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).

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).

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.)
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