Southern Uto-Aztecan History (SUAHIST)

The overarching aim of this project is to use historical linguistics to reinscribe the Southern Uto-Aztecan (SUA) peoples into the history of the area that we dub the Southern Uto-Aztecan Sphere of Interaction (or SUA-sphere).

What were the cultures that inhabited most of Northern Mexico for several thousand years before European colonization like? What were their languages like, and what were the relations between communities speaking Uto-Aztecan languages and other communities in ancient Mesoamerica and the US Southwest? What did they believe and how did they understand the world around them? What did the Uto-Aztecan peoples bring with them into Mesoamerica and what did they bring back north to the Greater Southwest?

These questions correspond to the two main objectives of the project:

1. To improve our overall understanding of the history of the various ethnic groups speaking Southern Uto-Aztecan languages, particularly by integrating information about the linguistic histories of Náayeri, Wixárika and Nahua communities better into the existing record, and by achieving reconstructions of intermediate stages of SUA language history.
2. To achieve a better and more nuanced understanding of the flows of ideas, words, and people within the SUA-sphere, by modeling these flows phylogenetically and phylogeographically based on better, larger, and more detailed datasets, and by distinguishing systematically between borrowings and SUA-inheritance, innovation in individual branches or languages.

The Uto-Aztecan (UA) language family is the most widely distributed language family in the Americas. Before European contact, populations speaking languages of the Southern branch of the UA language family (SUA) stretched from the Pueblo region in the American Southwest and far into the urbanized cultures of Mesoamerica. The main groups of Uto-Aztecan languages spoken in Mexico are: Tepiman (Tepehuán/Odam, Pima & O’odham), Cahitan (Yaqui & Mayo), Tarahumaran (Raramuri & Warihio), Ópatan (Teguima & Eudeve), Corachol (Náayeri and Wixárika) and Nahua (various Nahuan languages). 

Even though the Pueblo Southwest and Mesoamerica are probably the two most intensely studied regions in North American archaeology, the intermediary zone which connects these two regions, has received much less attention.  There is no established term to describe the region connecting the US Southwest and Mesoamerica, but since a majority of its inhabitants appear to have been speakers of Southern Uto-Aztecan languages, we refer to it as the SUA-sphere, thus bringing the shared ethnolinguistic roots of the people who lived there into focus. The SUA-sphere was home to many archaeological cultures: The classic period Teuchitlan-culture of Jalisco, contemporary with Teotihuacan in Central Mexico; La Quemada and Altavista in Zacatecas; And the postclassic Aztatlán culture that dominated a trade network running along the Pacific coast from Jalisco to Paquimé in Northern Chihuahua, and which probably brought Mesoamerican commodities and ideas as far north as Chaco Canyon. Nevertheless, we still know very little about which SUA peoples lived where at different points in time, and how they interacted and spread through the region. Here historical linguistics, may be able to help.

We will make an online dictionary of Náayeri in CLLD format published through dictionaria.org, which will include a minimum of 3000 entries with grammatical information and example of use from text.  There are 4 or 5 different varieties of Náayeri spoken in Nayarit – and we hope to make the dictionary fully multidialectal, with coverage of at least four varieties. We will also produce print dictionaries for use in the communities. The Náayeri dictionary project will be organized by Rodrigo Parra (UAN/CELINAY) and Mtro. Pedro Muñíz (Kwaxataa), in collaboration with the Náayeri speaking communities.

We will make an online dictionary of Wixárika in CLLD format published through dictionaria.org, which will include a minimum of 3000 entries.  There are two major varieties of Wixárika spoken in Jalisco and Nayarit – and we hope to make the dictionary cover both. We will also produce print dictionaries for use in the communities. The Wixárika dictionary project will be organized by Tutupika Carrillo (UAN/CELINAY) and Dr. Stefanie Ramos Bierge, in close collaboration with the Wixárika speaking communities.

The Mythicon will be a database of mythological narrative texts in Uto-Aztecan languages (primarily Nahua, Náayeri, Wixárika). Texts will be fully glossed, translated and coded for narrative elements and mythological motifs/mythemes. This database will make it possible to do comparative analysis of both the linguistic, semantic and mythological structures of texts among Uto-Aztecan languages.

SUALEX will be an etymological database of historical relations between words among Southern Uto-Aztecan languages. The aim is to reconstruct all intermediary stages in the developments of the various words in the different SUA branches. This will enable us to produce word-trees, which can in turn be collated into a full consensus tree lexical relations. This work will be done in collaboration with Dr. Johann-Mattis List at the University of Passau.