ANCIENT MAP OFFERS KEY TO MESOAMERICAN HISTORY

[David Wright]

I just skimmed through several chapters in the book *Cave, City, and Eagle's
Nest: An
Interpretive Journey Through the Map of Cuauhtinchan No. 2* and there
doesn't seem to be anything there about Chicomoztoc being in present U.S.
territory. It looks like the reporter took liberties with Carrasco's words
in the article that started this thread.

Anybody who has taken a good look at Yutonahuan linguistics can see that
Nahuatl is part of the southern branch of that language family, located in
Mexico (except for some Pima-Papago who spill over the border into Arizona).
Nahuatl is much closer to related languages in the southern part of the
Southern Yutonahuan territory (basically western Mexico), like Caxcan and
Pochuteco, than to Pima-Papago. The northern branch of Yutonahuan is
entirely in the U.S. The split between these two branches is very ancient,
probably around the third milennium B.C., and the Nahua migrations were
probably much later, after the collapse of the Teotihuacan political system
around A.D. 600. The "Aztec" migrations recorded in 16th century pictorial
and alphabetical documents were the last of a long series of Nahua
migrations and can be dated historically to the 11th and 12th centuries A.D.
All of this points to a Nahua homeland in western Mexico, probably in or
near Jalisco, out of which there were several migrations over a period of
around 600 years (A.D. 600-1200): first to coastal Oaxaca and Guerrero, then
through central Mexico into eastern and southeastern Mesoamerica, and lastly
into central Mexico. This hypothetical reconstruction based on linguistic
migration theory and glottochronology (imprecise, yes, but useful for a
blurry overall vision) seems to hold up when confronted with the
archaeological, bioanthropological, and documental evidence.

When you see a group origin in a cave, especially when this is followed by a
stay in Teotihuacan or Tollan, you're probably looking at a manifestation of
the generic Central Mexican cosmogonical narrative, adopted and adapted by
diverse linguistic groups like the Nahua, the Totonac, and the Otomi. At
some point in each story you can usually detect a blurry border (like Jan
Vansina's "floating gap" in west African oral traditions) between this
symbolic, primordial timescape and a more realistic account of events
unfolding in a recognizable geopolitical landscape.

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