[Aztlan] Race and ethnicity in the past

[Nick Hopkins]

Jerry (et al.) --  Your comments are well taken.  By way of response:

First, I have no illusions about the constancy of ethnicity and  
ethnic diacritics, (1)  living in Florida, where the leading  
indigenous group, the Seminoles, did not exist as such until the 19th  
century, and (2), having observed in recent historic times in  
Mesoamerica striking changes in dress, food habits, agricultural  
practices, housing, settlement patterns, land tenure, kinship  
systems, marriage practices, social organization, religion, and a  
host of other features commonly taken to define ethnic groups.   
Nonetheless people self-identify as being of the same ethnicity as  
ancestors who lived in very different ways.  One of the ethnic  
features that seems to be more stable than others is language, and as  
a linguist I tend to take language as the principal index of  
ethnicity.  Thus when I trace the development of a language family, I  
tend to think I am tracing the development of an ethnic thread as it  
changes through time.

Second, sorry if my brush tarred so wide as to impugn Michael Smith.   
That was not my intention.  It is fairly clear that he does not  
reject a multidisciplinary approach, he just has not bothered to  
explore the potential of linguistic input.  In my opinion he *should*  
care what the language spoken by the Teotihuacanos was, because if  
the elite language of Teotihuacan was Northern Mije-Sokean, as  
Kaufman and Justeson argue (not an assumption, but a conclusion based  
on extensive data), that means that the elite of Teotihuacan share a  
cultural heritage with the Olmec and Izapan peoples, not just  
diffused culture, and it makes phenomena like the Teotihuacan  
intrusions into coastal Guatemala (the old homeland) less  
mysterious.  It also would allow him to explain to the unwashed that  
the ethnic group who dominated Teotihuacan died out, and has no  
modern descendants, while the huge number of Mije-Sokean loanwords in  
Totonac indicates that the Totonacs were also present there (as they  
told Torquemada).  Likewise the borrowing of Mije-Sokean vocabulary   
throughout Central  and Northern Mexico is a good index of  
Teotihuacan cultural influence where there is little physical  
evidence of such.  And while there are no modern descendants of  
Northern Mije-Sokean, we can attribute to early stages of their  
development all those features that we can reconstruct from cognate  
vocabulary in Mijean and Sokean data, so we can suggest with what  
cultural baggage they made their way to Central Mexico.  It's  
worthwhile knowing all this, because it suggests hypotheses that can  
be tested archaeologically.

Nick Hopkins