Our family visited the Chaco Canyon "Anasazi" ruins a long time ago, like summer 1991. My brother went to college around there, later. I don't remember much about the 1991 visit - probably the usual rot about peaceful natives living in harmony with nature until climate chanzzz*snore*. By the late 1990s, some of the shine had come off and we got Serious Discussions. Cannibalism in the valley. Migrations to the Pueblos. Hints that that Navaho/-jo term "Anasazi", which term is hostile, may have been earned honestly - at least by the elite.
Let's revisit. There's a youtube with a Something Was Very Wrong With - series. This notes Mesoamerican influence. If "New Mexico" (and various reference to "Aztecs" in the region) remain insalubrious; something came here to make of the place at least a New Chichen Itzá.
This YTer is arguing that Mesoamerican influence wasn't all chocolate and ballgames. It entered the place in the AD 1000s and then, 1130-50, got to a fever pitch. This coincided with a climate downturn. Starting 1180ish the locals, who were not Mesoamericans, did what the Maya had done in the 900s. They said - this isn't fun anymore, let's get out of here. Several "pueblos", as the Spaniards call them, exist to this day claiming ancestry from the region, some even able to tell you which ruined town they'd left. They don't find "pueblo" offensive but they don't like "anasazi".
They assuredly have some motive to say they dindu nuffin and if there was ever some cannibalism or an "evil spirit" or any of that, it wasn't them doing it. Unfortunately for them, somebody was doing it. They may not have been born anasazis but anasazis were there. People can lie, but forensics can't. And I am loath to call the Navajo, invasive as they are, liars - in this event anyway. They got there well after-the-fact, such as to lack a dog in the fight. (I vaguely recall that they did arrive in time to watch some of the closing festivities or at least to hear some locals deliver some hair-raising tales.)
The Navajo, further, are not those who introduced any of this - too late, remember. So, let's look at the ethnic groups as might have been there before the Navajo showed up. Best I can tell they are three: Hopi, Tiwa, and Keres.
Keres are an isolate. I take them for the true natives here until I can be convinced otherwise.
Tiwa and Tewa look like branches as different as East and (former) West Baltic. The Slavs of that group would be the... Kiowa. Who live very far from there. Some nomadism happened here, like how Apache are the nomadic branch of the Navajo or, better, the Navajo the settled para-Apache. The Kiowa tell no tradition of coming from this desert; instead they say they came from the north. It looks, then, like the Tiwa, Tewa (and we can throw in the Jemez) migrated off the plains into this region, where people were growing food.
Then... are the Hopi. These are related to the Comanche as fellow north-Uto[-Aztecans], but are not Comanche (these also came later) nor Ute. This language family is also intrusive to, really, anywhere northeast of Puerto Penhasco.
However: we are talking about "intrusions" on a potential scale of millennia. How long ago was the Kiowa / Tiwa split? or Hopi / Ute? I don't see these splits as late as AD 1100.
Compromise: the Hopi, speaking the closest language to the Nahuatl Mesoamerica, would have been the choice vector for Anasazic thought into the region.
No comments:
Post a Comment