Jane Hill
University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology
Linguistic Prehistory of the Uto-Aztecan Peoples
Maize cultivators arrived on the Colorado Plateau early in the 2nd Millennium B.C. They encountered there a distinctive array of flora and fauna and a set of environmental challenges different from what cultivators had faced previously in the spread of maize cultivation (and probably cultivators) out of the Mexican highlands. The linguistic evidence suggests that one of their strategies in accommodating to the new environment was to form social ties with, and to solicit knowledge from, local populations of hunter-gatherers. The evidence takes the form of a set of words for economically important plants that are found only in Northern Uto-Aztecan languages, including pinyon pine, acorn-bearing oaks, Apocynum, Chrysothamnus, Carum gairdneri, and Calochortus among the plants. The Northern Uto-Aztecan word for a prototypical large game animal, variously meaning deer or pronghorn, may be a similar loan. I argue that this set of words was borrowed by speakers of Proto-Northern Uto-Aztecan from speakers of a language ancestral to the modern Kiowa-Tanoan languages. In turn, the ancestral Kiowa-Tanoan community appears to have borrowed some maize cultivation vocabulary from Proto-Northern Uto-Aztecan.
