[Aztlan] Race and ethnicity in the past

[Nick Hopkins]

Listeros:

Michael Smith’s comments a few days ago caught my eye and I thought  
it was worth a response.  I don’t mean to be critical of him, because  
he at least is aware of the latest developments in relevant  
linguistics (Mixe-Zoques at Teotihuacan), although he clearly doesn’t  
see how language identification would shed any light on the questions  
he is interested in.  However, there are many other “linguistically- 
challenged archaeologists” who treat archaeology as an autonomous  
discipline, and are committed to positions like “truth comes only  
from the point of a trowel” and “potsherds don’t speak languages.”  
Just to put some perspective on the issue, let me rephrase these  
comments as if they came from an “archaeologically-challenged linguist”:

As an archaeologically-challenged linguist, I can reconstruct the  
prehistory of the speakers of a language family from linguistic data  
by applying the scientific methodology of historical linguistics,  
including comparative reconstruction to sequence and even date  
significant cultural periods, vocabulary studies to get information  
on geographical and ecological settings, social structures, cultural  
practices, etc., the identification of loan words, showing the nature  
and chronology of contacts with other ethnic groups, distributional  
studies for hypotheses about population movements, and so on.

Note that all these shed light on questions like “how they  
farmed...the kinds of rituals or craft activities they participated  
in...how they traveled to other areas and how they interpreted  
information from other areas...the ways they constructed and lived  
with class differences...the type of government they forged...etc.”

In other words, I can reconstruct prehistory in some detail without  
any reference to the physical evidence provided by archaeology, so I  
can ignore archaeology.

How stupid does that sound?  Why would I want to study prehistory  
without making use of all available relevant information?  Why would  
I not wish to test my linguistically-derived hypotheses against other  
lines of information?  Because I didn’t want them challenged?  That’s  
hardly good science.  The best models of prehistory result from the  
integration of data from all fields, including physical anthropology,  
comparative ethnology, ethnohistory, epigraphy, linguistics, and  
archaeology – as well as fields outside of anthropology.  These  
different lines of evidence are not in competition with each other to  
see which one can establish the truth, they are complementary to each  
other, and each reflects the same underlying social processes in its  
own way.  Each reveals aspects of the truth that are difficult to  
come by from other kinds of data.  Maybe none of us is capable of  
fully understanding all the contributons of all of these fields, but  
surely it is incumbent on us to try.

Nick Hopkins