Huastec statue from the Tampico Region, 14th–16th centuries

The Huastec, also rendered as Huaxtec, Wastek and Huastecos, are an indigenous people of Mexico, historically based in the states of Hidalgo, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas concentrated along the route of the Panuco River and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The Huastec people call themselves Teenek. The ancient Huastec culture is one of the pre-ColumbianMesoamerican cultures. Judging from archaeological remains, they are thought to date back to approximately the 10th century BC, although their most productive period of civilization is usually considered to be the Post-Classic era between the fall of Teotihuacan and the rise of the Aztec Empire. The Pre-Columbian Huastecs constructed temples on step-pyramids, carved independent standing sculptures, and produced elaborately painted pottery. The Huastecs were unusual as one of the few cultures that attained civilization and built cities yet usually wore no clothing. They were admired for their abilities as musicians by other Mesoamerican peoples. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (1000x2240, 1402 KB) Description Licensing File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Huastec Metadata This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera or scanner used... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (1000x2240, 1402 KB) Description Licensing File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Huastec Metadata This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera or scanner used... El Puente Tampico (finished in October 1988) links the states of Tamaulipas and Veracruz and is a major element in the Gulf of Mexico highway system. ... Brazilian Indian chiefs The scope of this indigenous peoples of the Americas article encompasses the definitions of indigenous peoples and the Americas as established in their respective articles. ... The United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos or Mexico) comprises 31 states (estados) and one federal district (Distrito Federal), which contains the capital, Mexico City. ... Hidalgo is a state in central Mexico, with an area of 20,502 km². In 2000 the state had a population of some 2,231,000 people. ... The state of Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave is one of the 31 states that compose Mexico (does not include the Mexican Federal District). ... The Mexican state of San Luis Potosí has an area of 62,848 km². It is in the north-central part of the republic, bordered by the Mexican states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Querétaro, Hidalgo, Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Zacatecas. ... Tamaulipas is a state in the northeast of Mexico. ... Río Pánuco or the Pánuco River is a river in Veracruz, Mexico. ... Gulf of Mexico in 3D perspective. ... The term Pre-Columbian is used to refer to the cultures of the New World in the era before significant European influence. ... The cultural areas of Mesoamerica The term Mesoamérica is used to refer to a geographical region that extends roughly from the Tropic of Cancer in central Mexico down through Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to northwestern Costa Rica, and which is characterized by the particular cultural homogeneity... (2nd millennium BC - 1st millennium BC - 1st millennium) // Overview Events Partition of ancient Israel into the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel (c. ... Mesoamerican chronology The chronology of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is usually divided into the following eras: Paleo-Indian Period c. ... Teotihuacan was the largest Pre-Columbian known city in the Americas, and the name Teotihuacan is used to refer to the civilization this city dominated, which at its greatest extent included most of Mesoamerica. ... The Aztecs were a Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican people of central Mexico in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. ...

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. Events March - French troops under Guy de Richemont besiege the English commander in France, Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, in Caen April 15 - Battle of Formigny. ... The Aztecs were a Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican people of central Mexico in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. ... The first great leader of the Aztecs, Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, or Moctezuma I (the surname meaning solitary one who shoots an arrow into the sky) was born from a noble named Huitzilihuitl. ...

The Huastecs were conquered by the Spanish between 1519 and the 1530s. With the imposition of the Roman Catholic faith they were required to don clothing. Events March 4 - Hernán Cortés lands in Mexico. ... Centuries: 15th century - 16th century - 17th century Decades: 1480s 1490s 1500s 1510s 1520s - 1530s - 1540s 1550s 1560s 1570s 1580s Years: 1530 1531 1532 1533 1534 1535 1536 1537 1538 1539 Events and Trends Spanish conquest of Peru Beginning of colonization of Brazil Categories: 1530s ... The Roman Catholic Church, most often spoken of simply as the Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with over one billion members. ...

How, When, and Why the Huastecs Separated from the Maya and Arrived in their Present Location

Huastecs call their language “Teenek” (also spelled “Tenek” or “Tenec”), which means “those who live in the field”. There are approximately 66,000 Huastec speakers today, of which two-thirds are in San Luis Potosi and one-third in Veracruz (INAH, p. 56), although their population was probably much higher, as much as half a million, when the Spanish arrived in 1529 (Ariel de Vidas, p. 57).

When did the Huastecs split from the rest of the Maya?

Studies of language change, especially lexical statistics (i. e., words changing their form or being replaced by borrowed synonyms), have given linguists the tools to estimate the time depth at which many pairs of languages diverged from their common ancestral tongue. The procedure depend on assuming that language change, in the absence of widespread literacy, is constant over time. Today, Lexicostatistics is a subfield of Quantitative Linguistics. ...

Of all the languages descended from Proto-Mayan the proto-Huastecan language was the first to split from Mayan proper. (The second split, in the non-Huastecan main branch, was between proto-Yucatecan, now spoken across Yucatán, Mexico, and the ancestors of all other Maya languages. The only other language besides Huastec which arose from proto-Huastecan was Chicomuceltec (also called Cotoque), spoken in Chiapas near Comitan and which is now extinct. Proto-Mayan is the hypothetical common ancestor of the 30 living Mayan languages. ...

Linguists have approximated that the precursor to the language of the Huastecs diverged from the Proto-Mayan language between 2200 and 1200 BC. Pioneering comparative linguist Maurice Swadesh posited the later date as the latest possible time for this split to have occurred, and gave the Huastec/Chicomuceltec inik (“man”) versus other-Maya winik as a typical contrast (Wilkerson, p. 928). McQuown suggests 1500 BC, Manrique Castaneda 1800 BC, and Dahlin 2100 BC as the most likely dates for the split (Ochoa, p. 40; Dahlin, p. 367). Kaufman’s proposed date of about 2200 BC would require two regular phonological (sound) changes that are attested in all Maya languages, “r” changing to “y” and “q” to “k”, to have happened independently after the split, in both the Huastec/Chicomuceltec branch and in the branch of all other Maya languages (Campbell and Kaufman, p.195). Proto-Mayan is the hypothetical common ancestor of the 30 living Mayan languages. ...

Robertson’s work on verb affixes in the Maya languages implies that the Huastecs were in contact with proto-Tzeltal branch of Maya. In Proto-Mayan, absolutives could be marked either by a prefix or a suffix, depending on the presence of a tense/aspect marker. This feature was retained in Kanjobal (a Tzeltal-branch Maya language, spoken in the Cuchumatanes mountains of Guatemala), but lost in other branches (Yucatecan always uses a suffix for absolutives, while Ki’che always uses a prefix). Huastec appears to have been influenced by proto-Tzeltal, resulting in such innovations as the preposition ta, used with the object of a verb in the third person (Robertson, p. 307). If, as seems likely, the Huastec-Maya split occurred c. 2000 BC, the Huastecs did not probably travel far from the Guatemala-Chiapas borderlands until after about 1100 BC, by which time the proto-Tzeltalans had been established as a separate branch. Proto-Mayan is the hypothetical common ancestor of the 30 living Mayan languages. ...

When did the Huastecs arrive in the Huasteca region?

The Huasteca region of Mexico extends from the easternmost limestone ranges of the Sierra Madre Oriental, across the coastal plain and the Otontepec hills to the Gulf of Mexico, in northern Veracruz state, eastern San Luis Potosi state, and (by some definitions) southern Tamaulipas state. At least three indigenous languages are spoken in parts of the region today: Nahuatl (a Uto-Aztecan language), spoken especially in Veracruz, but also in San Luis Potosi; Pame (an Oto-Manguean language). spokenvin the hilly borderlands of San Luis Potosi and Queretaro; and Huastec (a Maya language), spoken in San Luis Potosi and northernmost Veracruz, and formerly in Tamaulipas. Some would include the Totonac-speaking area, in north-central Veracruz, as part of the Huasteca. The Huastec region was known to the Aztecs (ancestors of today’s Nahuatl speakers, who arrived in the Huasteca around AD 1450) for its fertile abundance (Campbell and Kaufman, p. 188), and includes the northernmost patches of tropical moist forest and cloud forest in the Americas.

The Huastecs arrived in the Huasteca between 1500 BC (Kaufman, p. 106) and 900 BC (Stresser-Pean). The linguistic evidence is corroborated by archaeological discoveries. In 1954, Richard MacNeish found ceramics and figurines in the Middle Formative period, called “Pavon de Panuco” in the Panuco River sites of the Huasteca, which resemble Preclassic objects from Uaxactun, a Peten-region Maya site (Ochoa, p. 42). A date of no earlier than 1100 BC for the Huastecs’ arrival at their present location seems most likely, since they probably had not arrived at the north-central Veracruz site of Santa Luisa until about 1200 BC, the phase at the end of the Early Formative period known locally as the “Ojite phase” (Wilkerson, p. 897). Artifacts of the period include Panuco-like basalt manos and metates (Wilkerson, p. 892). (The Huastecs remained in Santa Luisa, located east of Papantla near the Gulf coast, until supplanted or absorbed by the Totonacs around AD 1000).

One nexus of carved iconographic traditions, the “yoke-palm-axe” complex, was found from Jaina Island in coastal Campeche to the Huasteca (and in between, in Aparicio, Veracruz), in association with the pelota ballgame, decapitation, and tooth mutilation (Ochoa, p. 43); however, this may reflect coastal trade contacts after the Huastecs were established in the Huasteca.

Where did the Huastec-Maya separation occur, and why?

Fig. 1. Approximate routes and dates of the proto-Huastec and other Maya-speaking groups

Proto-Maya, the common ancestor of all Maya tongues, was probably spoken in west-central Guatemala, around the highland pine-oak forests of the Cuchumatanes mountain chain: north of the Motagua/Grijalva river valleys, through patches of cloud forest, and down to the edge of the tropical forest lowlands near the Ixcan and Chixoy (Negro) rivers, which flow into the Usumacinta River (Campbell and Kaufman, p. 191). Evidence that this region was the Maya “heartland” include its being located near the center of present-day language diversity within the Maya phylum (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 (Dahlin, p. 370). 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 (Dahlin, p. 371). Image File history File links Download high resolution version (780x603, 48 KB) Licensing I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (780x603, 48 KB) Licensing I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. ...

Whether the proto-Huastecs split from the rest of the Maya in 2200 or in 1200 BC, 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) (Kaufman, p. 102).

If we consider 2000 BC as 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 Usumacinta River, and before the two groups resulting from the split began to move in opposite directions: the proto-Huastec speakers moving northwest (and, soon thereafter, the proto-Chicomuceltec west into the Chiapas highlands), and the proto-Yucatec/other Maya-speakers spreading northeast (one branch of which became Chontal, presumed by many from its widespread loan words and hieroglyphic evidence to be the dominant language of the classic Peten Maya heartland) (see Fig. 1). While we have no direct archaeological evidence to explain the split itself, we can assume by linguistic evidence that contact was soon cut off between the two groups, despite there being no geographical feature that would automatically isolate them from each other. For the group of Hokan languages spoken in Oaxaca, please see Chontal languages. ...

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 BC (when the proto-Huastecs began their journey) and 1000 BC (by which time the proto-Yucatecs had arrived in Yucatán, the Chicomuceltecs had been isolated from the Huastecs (Kaufman, p. 111), and the Huastecs were arriving in central Veracruz)? Most scholars propose that this region was inhabited by speakers of the Mixe-Zoque phylum. While speakers of Mixe-Zoque languages are today confined to the mountains of northeast Oaxaca state, along the backbone of the isthmus of Tehuantepec, and into extreme western Chiapas, it is likely that they once occupied the entire Gulf Coast lowland from the isthmus to the Tuxtla mountains – in other words, the Olmec heartland, soon dominated by the presumably Mixe-Zoque-speaking Olmec civilization of about 1400 to 500 BC. One line of evidence that the Olmecs spoke Mixe-Zoque are the words that the proto-Huastecs borrowed from proto-Mixe-Zoque as they passed through the southern Gulf lowlands (Campbell and Kaufman, p. 191); for example, ciw, meaning “squash” (Robertson, p. 309). Monument 1, an Olmec colossal head at La Venta The Olmec were an ancient Pre-Columbian people living in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico, roughly in what are the modern-day states of Veracruz and Tabasco on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. ... Genealogy Areal Uto-Aztecan —5000 BP* Soshonean (N Uto-Aztecan) —3500 BP Numic (Plateau group) —2000 BP C Plateau Soshoni [SHH] Comanche [COM] Paramint [PAR] S Plateau Ute-Chemehuevi (S Paiute) [UTE] Kawaiisu [KAW] W Plateau Mono [MON] Paiute (Northern Paiute) [PAO] Takic ( Southern Californian) —2400 BP Hopi Tubatulabal Sonoran...

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 (Malstrom, p.28). 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 BC) 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. Front and side views of Colossal Head 1 now located at Museo de Antropología de Xalapa in Xalapa, Veracruz. ...

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 Campeche state 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 (Vadillo Lopez and Riviera Ayala, p. 96).

References

• Ariel de Vidas, A. 2003. “Ethnicidad y cosmologia: 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 Mexico: Linguistica. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia.
• Kaufman, T. 1976. “Archaeological and linguistic correlations in Mayaland and associated areas of Mesoamerica,” in World Archaeology. Vol. 8, pp. 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 area 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. Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 294-314
• Stresser-Pean, G. 1989. “Los indios huastecos”, in Ochoa, L., ed. Huastecos y Totonacas. Mexico City: CONACULTA.
• Vadillo Lopez, C. and C. Riviera Ayala. 2003. “El trafico maratimo, vehiculo de relaciones culturales entre la region maya chontal de Laguna de Terminos y la region 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.