Shelf Life 07: The Language Detectives
I became fascinated by the idea of [molecular systematics] as a means for explaining the evolution of languages.
-Peter Whiteley, Curator, Division of Anthropology
From A(ztec) to Yaqui
This month’s Shelf Life details how Museum curators Peter Whiteley, an anthropologist, and Ward Wheeler, a computational biologist, joined forces to trace the evolution of Native American languages by applying gene-sequencing methods to historical linguistics.
The researchers focused on the Uto-Aztecan family of languages, which have been spoken in Central and North America for millennia. Languages from this group were used in the bustling streets of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan—a city larger than 16th-century London—and spoken by nomadic groups tracking herds of bison across the plains of North America. Some Uto-Aztecan languages disappeared long ago while others, like Hopi, which Dr. Whiteley has studied for decades, are still spoken today.
For a glimpse at the variety of cultures in which these languages arose, Whiteley picked 12 objects from the Museum’s vast North American ethnological collection.
The journey begins in what is now Idaho, the northernmost point where Uto-Aztecan languages were historically spoken, and, some think, the farthest point to which this language family spread from its origins in the south—a hypothesis that’s consistent with Whiteley and Wheeler’s analysis.
This pair of beaded leather moccasins (below) from what is now Idaho represent the northernmost reach of the Uto-Aztecan languages. The style and craftsmanship are fairly typical of peoples from the Plateau culture area, who lived a nomadic lifestyle and hunted animals like deer and bison. They were likely made by members of either the Bannock nation, a Northern Paiute people, or the Northern Shoshone nation.
The medicine bag below (left) was crafted by the Ute people of the of the Great Basin region, which lies to the south of Idaho between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, encompassing parts of southern Utah, northern Arizona, southern Nevada, and southeastern California. After horses were introduced to the Americas by the Spanish and French, says Whiteley, the Utes became a formidable military force and dominated large swathes of the American Southwest.
A hide medicine bag from the Ute culture. Catalog Number 50/1276 © AMNH/Division of Anthropology
Ute Chief Sevara and his family. Photochrom print, 1885 Library of Congress/96501843
The Great Basin was also home to the Southern Paiute, historically a nomadic culture of hunter-gatherers who lived in small groups. “Southern Paiute social organization would embrace maybe 40 or 50 people in a band,” says Whiteley. “To adapt to the environment, they lived in grass shelters that were very easy to transport.”
The war bonnet case pictured below would have held the headdress of a member of the Comanche people, a Plains group that followed bison herds throughout the year. Moving east across the Rocky Mountains in the early 18th century, the Comanches were known as the "Lords of the South Plains." By the 19th century, they had acquired many horses and wielded impressive political and military power.
The noted Hopi artist Nampeyo crafted the pot pictured below in the late 19th or early 20th century. In contrast to some of their neighbors who lived by hunting and gathering, the Hopi have long been farmers who live in stone houses and stay on the same land for generations. Hopi agricultural practices go back “at least a millennium and a half, and maybe longer than that,” says Whiteley, who has conducted fieldwork among the Hopi since 1980.
This basket, collected in 1901, originated with the Cahuilla people in California. This group was traditionally semi-nomadic, hunting and fishing but also traveling throughout the region to gather the acorns that formed a staple of their diet.
The effigy pot below, which depicts a person or figure, is from the Tohono O’odham, a Piman people once known as the Papago who practiced a mixed economy of foraging and agriculture, cultivating crops including maize, beans, squash, and melons in the Sonoran Desert. Pots like this one were particularly common at the prehistoric ruin of Paquimé (Casas Grandes) in Mexico. Whether the Tohono O’odham continued that tradition or independently developed their own is not known.
This item originated with the Yaqui people, whose historic homeland is along today's border between the U.S. and Mexico. It would have been used in Matachines performances, spectacular masked dances that were adopted from Spanish colonists and are still performed in some villages today.
This seed necklace was crafted by the Tarahumara (also known as the Raramuri) people, who live near Chihuahua, Mexico. Unlike other Uto-Aztecan-speaking groups, the Tarahumara did not have much contact with the outside world until the middle of the 20th century. Today they maintain more aspects of their indigenous culture than other contemporary Uto-Aztecan groups.
This beaded deer comes from the Museum’s large collection of Huichol artifacts. Native to the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains of central Mexico, the Huichol are an agricultural society perhaps best known for their “peyote hunts.” When collecting the fruits of the peyote cactus, which the Huichol consider a sacrament, the Huichol shoot the first cactus with an arrow, the same way they would hunt a deer.
To the west of the Huichol are the Cora, who crafted the rattle pictured here. The Cora are traditionally farmers and live near to what is now considered the origin of New World agriculture. At the time of first contact with the Spanish, the Cora occupied a large area on the western slope of Sierra Madre Occidental range. Their language may have been among the first of the Uto-Aztecan group, says Whiteley.
Finally, the second of the cultures that provides this linguistic family’s name: the Aztec, who spoke Nahuatl (as do their modern-day descendants, the Nahua). “If Southern Paiute is on one end of the continuum of cultural complexity, Aztec is on the opposite end,” says Whiteley, contrasting the tiny, nomadic bands native to the Great Basin with the complex city-states that formed Mesoamerica’s ancient empire.
This piece of Aztec art, called the Lienzo del Chalchihuitzan, dates back to around 1570 AD and illustrates the social status and inherited rights of the individual depicted at its center, through connections to ancestors and allies. Made in the decades following the conquest of Aztec civilization by the Spanish, Whiteley says, this artifact could represent an attempt by a lord—who likely commissioned the piece—to assert and defend his traditional privileges under a new authority.
“He’s laying out the terms of his chiefly privileges,” says Whiteley. “It’s kind of like his Magna Carta.”
Farmers and hunters. City-dwellers and nomads. The 12 groups named above—and dozens more not represented here—are bound together by an ancient linguistic tradition that may help researchers learn more about how people and cultures spread throughout the Americas.