Abstract
Pueblo societies comprise a culture area, and a zone of linguistic convergence or Sprachbund, that encompassed four distinct language families. Pueblo groups are also quite genetically homogeneous. The general forces promoting or diluting cultural differences across groups are defined and given a preliminary weighting through time for Pueblo societies. The Neolithic demographic transition and the hierarchical society transition (defined herein) contribute to homogeneity across groups derived from a single descent group, but create differences among groups derived from different descent groups. High mobility across communities and across regions contributes to cultural similarities across phylogenetically defined groups, as may adaptation to similar environments. Pronounced tendencies towards within-group conformity and linguistic purism were probably late (i.e., early first-millennium ad) developments in the Pueblo world.
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Notes
Pueblo peoples speak languages derived from four families: Tanoan (including Tewa, Tiwa, and Towa), Keresan, Uto-Aztecan (Hopi), and Zuni. Hopi is a member of a large, geographically widespread language family, and Tanoan is part of the Kiowa-Tanoan family (see review in Ortman 2012, pp. 125–152). Keres and Zuni are isolates, which in this case means that any shared ancestry between them and the other surviving languages of North America is likely more than 7,000 years old (Hill 2007, p. 23). Contemporary Pueblo societies probably count among their ancestors people whom archaeologists would call Hohokam or Mogollon. The phrase “prehispanic Pueblo peoples” refers to peoples previously called the Anasazi. Unless otherwise noted, all dates herein are ad (ce).
Other examples include Mesoamerica, South Asia, and the Balkans (Campbell et al. 1986). This article also discusses the history of areal linguistics, the mechanisms producing Sprachbünde, and controversies over criteria for their identification.
As this article was going to press, Kohler and Reese (2012) reported preliminary analyses of a much-enlarged database of skeletal materials. Although these results will be presented in detail elsewhere, by 200 bce population growth rates on the Colorado Plateau far outstripped those being achieved contemporaneously in the Sonoran desert and Mogollon areas. Growth rates in most areas appear to equilibrate around 700, possibly suggesting large-scale population mixing in the mid-first millennium.
Moieties have long been recognized for the terminal portions of the central Mesa Verde region sequence (Rohn 1971). Vivian (1990) traces their development to as early as 1000 in Chaco Canyon. Recently, Wilshusen et al. (2012) have identified elements of dual divisions in Pueblo I villages in the northern San Juan region. That this long-standing element of social organization survived the late-1200s demise of so many aspects of central Mesa Verde social and religious organization suggests either that it was not implicated in the delegitimized aspects of those societies or that it was functionally required for the large social groups of the post-migration period.
Local increases in frequencies of tree-ring dates are imperfect proxies for local population increases. Decreases in tree-ring dates can be due to either population stasis, or decrease. Treated with caution, tree-ring date distributions provide the possibility of glimpsing population changes that are too high in frequency to be visible in chronologies based on ceramics. Probable biases in the tree-ring record include underrepresentation of periods when most people lived in small sites; overrepresentation of large and late sites; poor or no representation of some regions; and a tendency to proxy growth better than stasis. The first two of these are likely being corrected, slowly, by excavations mandated by preservation legislation. The last is not necessarily a bias unless we attempt to interpret the tree-ring record as recording population levels.
Berry and Benson also suggest that the peaks in the cutting distributions in the wetter periods are too widespread and peaked to be explained just by in-place growth processes, or movements of farmers within the Southwest. These periods, they propose, identify episodes of influx of non-farming peoples from outside the Southwest or from its peripheries into the Southwest. If this is correct—and it must be added that it is not clear where such peoples could come from in any numbers—these peoples blend in remarkably well.
We have developed a version of the simulation in which households form groups within which they play an evolutionary public-goods game (Kohler et al. 2012b). In the context of this game, they may determine that they would prefer to work under the supervision of a leader who extracts a tax in order to monitor and punish households not contributing to the public good. Groups willing to accept leadership grow much larger than nonhierarchical groups, though since groups are allowed to overlap, hierarchical groups do not necessarily displace nonhierarchical groups. The simulations reported in this paper do not employ this extension.
For a complete discussion, see Kohler, Bocinsky et al. 2012. The lines report the proportions of positive correlations between 512 sets of simulated household distributions, and the real household distributions, assessed at each of the 14 periods recognizable in the archaeological record. These are renormed so that the location of zero on the y-axis represents the expected number of positive correlations for the null model in which there is no relationship between household locations and resources. The two lines represent different ways of establishing this null model.
Here, a perfect cluster includes all the Pueblo groups and only the Pueblo groups. An imperfect cluster includes all the Pueblo groups and others as well.
Relative growth though is what matters; even slow growth, if faster than one’s neighbors, may cause this process.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Valentine Roux, Marie-Agnès Courty, and Virginie Guillomet-Malmassari for their invitation to participate in the provocative symposium in Paris from which this collection of papers emerged; Larry Benson, Kyle Bocinsky, Stefani Crabtree, Bill Lipe, Kelsey Reese, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version; Larry Benson and Michael Berry for permission to reuse some of their data and figures; Jesse Clark and Kelsey Reese for help with aspects of production; and my many collaborators in the Village Ecodynamics Project. Valentine Roux prepared Fig. 1. The VEP is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DEB-0816400. Rudyard Kipling, and my parents who read him to me, probably helped me to wonder about how things really do come to be the way they are.
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Kohler, T.A. How the Pueblos Got Their Sprachbund. J Archaeol Method Theory 20, 212–234 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9145-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9145-4