[Aztlan] sunflowers in Tabasco

[Nick Hopkins]

Dick-- I wouldn't be too quick to throw out the Mexican sunflowers.   
Heiser may have withdrawn his ID of the Tabasco sunflower seed/ 
achene, but that doesn't negate the existence of the evidence from  
Morelos (Cueva del Gallo, also prehispanic) and the fact that  
"sunflower" terms are not by any means limited to borrowings from  
Spanish.  Note, for instance, the Central Mayan *su7(u)n, based on  
more than twenty Mayan languages, with a good distribution across the  
family.  This is not a Proto-Mayan reconstruction only because it  
lacks cognates in Yucatecan and Huastecan, but Central Mayan, the  
common ancestor of Western Mayan and Eastern Mayan, still dates back  
to 1800-2000 BC  (data from Kaufman's Mayan Etymological Dictionary  
on FAMSI).

Nick Hopkins

On May 8, 2008, at 4:03 PM, Diehl, Richard wrote:

> Dear Listeros,
>
> Many thanks to Edward Allen for alerting us to Charles Heiser's  
> note on his mis-identification of potentially very early  
> domesticated sunflower plants at San Andres. Now I have to notify  
> my students from the semester that just ended that I mis-informed  
> them. Undoubtedly I mis-informed about many other things as well  
> but that is another issue.
> Saludos,
> Dick Diehl
>
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