Huastec people
Total population | |
---|---|
Approximately 66,000 (INAH)–150,000 (Ethnologue 1990) | |
Regions with significant populations | |
Roman Catholicism | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Maya peoples |
The Huastec
There are approximately 66,000 Huastec speakers today, of which two-thirds are in San Luis Potosí and one-third in Veracruz,[1] although their population was probably much higher, as much as half a million, when the Spanish arrived in 1529.[2]
The ancient
About 1450, the Huastecs were defeated by Aztec armies under the leadership of Moctezuma I; the Huastecs henceforth paid tribute to the Aztec Empire but retained a large degree of local self-government.
The Huastecs were conquered by the Spanish between 1519 and the 1530s. After the Spanish Conquest, many Huastecs were sold as slaves in the Caribbean by the Spanish.[3]
The first grammatical and lexical description of the Huastec language accessible to Europeans was by Fray Andrés de Olmos, who also wrote the first such grammars of Nahuatl and Totonac.
Migration history
Splitting from the rest of the Maya
Studies of language change, especially glottochronology (that is, words changing in form or being replaced by borrowed synonyms), have given[citation needed] linguists the tools to estimate the point in time when many pairs of languages diverged from their common ancestral tongue. The procedure depends on the assumption that languages change, in the absence of widespread literacy, at a constant rate.
Of all the languages descended from
, but now extinct.Linguists have approximated that the precursor to the language of the Huastecs diverged from the
Robertson's work on verb
If, as seems likely, the Huastec-Maya split occurred around 2000 BCE, the Huastecs probably did not travel far from the Guatemala-Chiapas borderlands until after 1100 BCE, more or less, by which time the proto-Tzeltalans had been established as a separate branch.Art
The Huastec people historically lived north of the Totonacs in the northeastern corner of Mesoamerica, which helped their influence with distinct style of art. The Huastec people spoke Mayan, which was once a useful trade language. Their art was influenced by the coastal area resulting in shell artifacts.
Amongst their art they also made pots, gaming stones, platform pipes, and sculptures. These items were often made from shells and made into shape of human heads, engraved shell gorgets, fan headdresses, and of hunch backed humans. [8]
Arrival in the Huasteca region
The Huasteca region of Mexico extends from the easternmost limestone ranges of the
The Huastecs arrived in the Huasteca between 1500 BCE
One nexus of carved iconographic traditions, the "yoke-palm-axe" complex, was found from
Huastec–Maya separation
Proto-Maya, the common ancestor of all Maya languages, was probably spoken in west-central Guatemala, around the highland pine-oak forests of the Cuchumatanes mountain chain: north of the Motagua and Grijalva river valleys, through patches of cloud forest, and down to the edge of the tropical forest lowlands near the Ixcán and Chixoy (Negro) rivers, which flow into the Usumacinta River.[16] Evidence that this region was the Maya "heartland" include its being located near the center of present-day language diversity of the Maya language family (and therefore requiring the minimum number of moves to place the languages in their current locations), the fact that proto-Maya included words for flora and fauna from both highland and lowland areas, and the debatable idea that it is easier for a group of people to spread from a highland region to a lowland one than vice versa.[17] Not all archaeological evidence agrees with this conclusion: there are older, unbroken ceramic traditions from Loltun Cave in Yucatán, as well as Cuello in Belize, which suggest alternative Maya homelands.[18]
Whether the proto-Huastecs split from the rest of the Maya in 2200 or in 1200 BCE, the separation occurred at least a millennium before the rise of classic Maya culture. It is no surprise, therefore, that the word "to write" is different in proto-Huastec (θuc-) and in the other Maya language branch (c’ib).[19]
2000 BCE is a reasonable date for the Huastec/Maya split, and the slopes of the Cuchumatanes range as a reasonable location for the speakers of proto-Maya, it seems likely that the split occurred after these proto-Maya speakers (or a portion of them) began to migrate north, probably along the
The intervening feature, then, was likely a powerful linguistic-cultural group. What group occupied the Usumacinta River-Gulf Coast lowlands (mainly in today's Mexican state of Tabasco) between 2000 BCE (when the proto-Huastecs began their journey) and 1000 BCE (by which time the proto-Yucatecs had arrived in Yucatán, the Chicomuceltecs had been isolated from the Huastecs,
Thus, there is some reason to ascribe the linguistic isolation of early Huastecs from other Maya speakers to proto-Olmecs speaking a Mixe–Zoque language, themselves recently arrived after migrating northward from the Soconusco region of the Pacific coast and across the isthmus of Tehuantepec.[23] There is much stronger evidence that the push for the Huastecs’ further migration up the Gulf coast was caused by the active presence of the early Olmecs (c. 1400 to 1100 BCE) of San Lorenzo and associated sites. If this is true, most of the distance that the Huastecs migrated during their entire history, from Guatemala to the Huasteca, was traveled in only a century or two at most: the portion between the Olmec heartland around San Lorenzo, and the environs of San Luisa.
The Huastecs and the Yucatán Maya were reunited, in a way, during the late nineteenth century, when Huastec chicle-tappers and lumbermen were transported to the state of Campeche to work the similar forests there, mainly employed by U.S.-based companies. A cross-Gulf steamship trade developed at the same time, with products such as salt exported from Campeche to Tuxpan (a Huastec-region port), and items such as sugar from Tuxpan to Campeche.[24]
See also
Notes
- ^ INAH, p. 56
- ^ Ariel de Vidas, p. 57
- ^ Sandstrom, Alan R., and Enrique Hugo García Valencia. 2005. Native peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
- ^ Wilkerson, p. 928
- ^ Ochoa, p. 40; Dahlin, p. 367
- ^ Campbell and Kaufman, p. 195
- ^ Robertson, p. 307
- ISBN 9780136156864.
- ^ Campbell and Kaufman, p. 188
- ^ Kaufman, p. 106
- ^ Stresser-Pean
- ^ Ochoa, p. 42
- ^ Wilkerson, p. 897
- ^ Wilkerson, p. 892
- ^ Ochoa, p. 43
- ^ Campbell and Kaufman, p. 191
- ^ Dahlin, p. 370
- ^ Dahlin, p. 371
- ^ Kaufman, p. 102
- ^ Kaufman, p. 111
- ^ Campbell and Kaufman, p. 191
- ^ Robertson, p. 309
- ^ (Malstrom, p. 28
- ^ Vadillo Lopez and Riviera Ayala, p. 96
References
- Ariel de Vidas, A. 2003. "Ethnicidad y cosmología: La construccion cultural de la diferencia entre los teenek (huaxtecos) de Veracruz", in UNAM, Estudios de Cultura Maya. Vol. 23.
- Campbell, L. and T. Kaufman. 1985. "Maya linguistics: Where are we now?", in Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 14, pp. 187–98
- Dahlin, B. et al. 1987. "Linguistic divergence and the collapse of Preclassic civilization in southern Mesoamerica". American Antiquity. Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 367–82.
- INAH. 1988. Atlas cultural de México: Lingüística. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
- Kaufman, T. 1976. "Archaeological and linguistic correlations in Mayaland and associated areas of Mesoamerica." World Archaeology 8:101-18.
- Malstrom, V. 1985. "The origins of civilization in Mesoamerica: A geographic perspective", in L. Pulsipher, ed. Yearbook of the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers. Vol. 11, pp. 23–29.
- Ochoa, L. 2003. "La costa del Golfo y el área maya: Relaciones imaginables o imaginadas?", in UNAM, Estudios de Cultura Maya. Vol. 23.
- Robertson, J. 1993. "The origins and development of Huastec pronouns." International Journal of American Linguistics. 59(3):294–314
- Stresser-Pean, G. 1989. "Los indios huastecos." In Huastecos y Totonacas, edited by L. Ochoa. Mexico City: CONACULTA.
- Vadillo López, C. and C. Riviera Ayala. 2003. "El tráfico marítimo, vehículo de relaciones culturales entre la región maya chontal de Laguna de Términos y la región huaxteca del norte de Veracruz, siglos XVI-XIX", in UNAM, Estudios de Cultura Maya. Vol. 23.
- Wilkerson, J. 1972. Ethnogenesis of the Huastecs and Totonacs. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Tulane University, New Orleans.
External links
- Orientation: Wasteko, Countries and Their Cultures