The Uto-Aztecan Presence in the U.S. Southwest: The Evidence from Language

by Jane H. Hill, University of Arizona

Text (preliminary draft only -- absolutely no quotation)
Copyright © 2003 Jane Hill. All rights reserved

INTRODUCTION
Recent advances in the archaeology of maize cultivation in the U.S. Southwest have convinced many scholars that migration, rather than simply diffusion, figured importantly in the earliest appearance of cultivated maize in the region. The historically-attested distribution of the Uto-Aztecan languages, from Mesoamerican to the Great Basin and southern California, suggest that Uto-Aztecan groups are likely candidates for involvement in such a migration. This proposal was originally advanced by Bellwood (1997, and see Diamond and Bellwood 2003). The present paper will summarize evidence, some of it developed in other papers, from so-called "linguistic paleontology" to support this proposal. A suite of vocabulary for the cultivation and processing of maize can be reconstructed for Proto-Uto-Aztecan (Hill 2001). Loan words within the maize-cultivation complex from a very early stage of Uto-Aztecan, probably Proto-Northern Uto-Aztecan, can be identified in Kiowa-Tanoan languages (Hill 2002). Uto-Aztecan-speaking groups continue to be important participants in major cultural developments in throughout Southwestern prehistory, as attested in several later layers of loan materials, including evidence for language contact with Yuman, probably within the Hohokam formation (Hill and Shaul 1998), loan material involving ideas about the Horned Serpent, and loan material associated with the Kachina Cult (Hill forthcoming).

THE UTO-AZTECANS AS CULTIVATORS WHO MIGRATED TO THE SOUTHWEST
During most of the history of southwestern archaeology, the arrival of maize cultivation in the U.S. Southwest has been considered to represent a classic case of cultural diffusion, with southwestern peoples, including the Uto-Aztecans, adopting maize cultivation by borrowing it from communities further south. Linguists such as Fowler (1983) and Miller (1983) found that their evidence was in accord with this position, and argued that the Proto-Uto-Aztecan community was most likely a group of hunter-gatherers with a range including the uplands of the Gila River drainage system in Arizona, Chihuahua, and Sonora. Linguistic evidence suggested that a splinter group came into contact with Mesoamerican cultivators and adopted their practices; this group was ancestral to "Southern Uto-Aztecan" (cf. Miller 1983, Campbell and Langacker 1978), a group of languages including, from north to south, Tepiman, Opatan, Taracahitan, Tubar, Corachol, and Aztecan, which share maize cultivation vocabulary. Maize cultivation then diffused into a community ancestral to Hopi, and from there northward into the most southern Numic-speaking groups, including Chemehuevi and southern Paiute in a late period of prehistory.

In the 1980’s the archaeological commitment to diffusion as the process which brought maize cultivation to the Southwest was challenged especially by archaeologists Michael and Claudia Berry (Berry (1982), Berry and Berry (1986)), and by Matson (1991). The Berrys and Matson found important discontinuities between Archaic cultures and the earliest cultivators at several locations on the Colorado Plateau. In southeastern Huckell (e.g. 1990, 1996) argued for a discontinuity between communities of hunters and gatherers and early cultivators in the Late Archaic of the region. Discoveries of very early maize cultivation in the Tucson Basin, with dates reaching as far back as 4000 BP (cf. Mabry 1999) also suggested a discontinuity, favoring an important involvement for migration. Further east, the discovery of very large and elaborate agricultural sites with early dates, like Cerro Juanaqueño in northern Chihuahua (Hard and Roney 1999), amplified the impression of discontinuity with the Archaic.
The great antiquity of maize in the Southwest -- it appears in the Southwest only 1400 years after the first dates on maize cobs and kernels in Mesoamerica itself, and only 500 years after the earliest evidence for settled villages in Mesoamerica, which we can take as an index for the beginnings of the kinds of demographic pressure that might drive a demic expansion of cultivators -- also suggests migration. The spread of maize out of Mesoamerica into the Southwest is a much more rapid spread than that of cultivation into Europe from the ancient Near East.

Carpenter, Mabry, and Sánchez Miranda (2002) have pointed out that archaeological evidence for the movement of peoples from Mesoamerica into the U.S. Southwest does not suggest a simple one-step migration. For instance, concerning the lithic evidence, both Gypsum and Cortaro point types have Mesoamerican affiliations, but only the latter is associated in the southwest with evidence for maize cultivation. Matson (2003) has suggested that the earliest cultivation of maize in the southwest may have involved primarily the use of the sweet stalks, possibly for fermented beverages, rather than the cobs, so that varieties grown primarily for their starchy kernels might have arrived later. However, Mabry (personal communication) has pointed out that the presence of burned and parched corn kernels in sites in the Tucson Basin suggest strongly that maize kernels were being prepared for human consumption. In summary, while the details remain obscure, new archaeological evidence continues to favor the hypothesis of a migration of cultivators as a major factor in the beginnings of cultivation in the U.S. Southwest.

New materials have also permitted a reevaluation of the linguistic evidence. Especially, the publication of the Hopi Dictionary (Hopi Dictionary Project 1988) permitted the identification in the Hopi language of maize-cultivation vocabulary cognate with vocabulary in the southern languages of Uto-Aztecan. A few items in the maize vocabulary complex are also found in the Numic languages. This evidence is crucial because of the phylogenetic structure of Uto-Aztecan. Most scholars agree today that the language has at least two major branches, Northern Uto-Aztecan and Southern Uto-Aztecan. This is a claim that each of these branches is descended from a single speech community. Hence, if cognate vocabulary (that is, words that are similar in meaning and relatable to one another by regular "sound laws") can be identified in languages of both branches, the Comparative Method in historical linguistics requires us to reconstruct that vocabulary to the common ancestor of the two groups, to Proto-Uto-Aztecan itself. An important principle of Linguistic Paleontology is that if a lexical item can be reconstructed to the proto-language, then the cultural referents encompassed in the meaning of the item were part of the culture of the speakers of that language. In this case, the implication is that the Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community must have included maize cultivators.

My own view (summarized in Hill 2001) is that Southern Uto-Aztecan has not been demonstrated to constitute a single unified daughter group, but there is no question about the presence of maize vocabulary cognates throughout the southern languages. The new Hopi evidence, however, is crucial because the presence of cognate maize vocabulary in this language permits us to push the date of maize cultivation to the proto-language itself. I present below the list of lexical items that have thus far been reconstructed with meanings within the maize complex in both major subgroups of Uto-Aztecan. This is a substantial suite of vocabulary. While the details of several of the etymologies require further research, as pointed out in Hill (2001, 2003), this is very strong evidence. Indeed, I would venture that this is at least as strong as the evidence in that most classic of linguistic-paleontological cases, the argument for the use of wheeled vehicles among speakers of Proto-Indo-European (Anthony 1994).

TABLE I. THE UTO-AZTECAN MAIZE COMPLEX
1. **sono ‘maize byproducts such as cobs, leaves, cane’
2. **pa?ci ‘corn ear ("elote"), corn kernel, seed’
3. **wˆra ‘to shell corn’
4. **o?ra/*o?ri ‘ear of corn, cob’
5. **sura ‘embryo of corn, tender ear of green maize’
6. **tˆma ‘tortilla, tamale’
7. **komal ‘cooking surface for maize cakes’
8. **ku:mi/u ‘to nibble small pieces of food, especially corn on the cob or popcorn’
9. **wika ‘digging stick’
10. **ˆca ‘to plant’

The exact location of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community remains open. I have argued that it was probably on the northwestern fringes of Mesoamerica, probably in upland regions where the suite of flora and fauna reconstructed by Fowler (1983) can be found, as in the present-day Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango, Zacatecas, and Aguascalientes. If the Proto-Uto-Aztecans were further north, outside Mesoamerica and perhaps in the Gila River uplands as suggested by Fowler, then we must identify some other group who migrated north. While it is always possible that such a group existed and has vanished -- four thousand years is a long time -- our current knowledge makes identification of the Uto-Aztecans as major agents in the migration the most parsimonious explanation.

What was the date of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan community? Using glottochronology, Miller (1983) proposed a date of about 6000 BP. Fowler (1983) preferred a later date, 5000 to 4500 BP. Fowler's glottochronological dates are more consistent with the archaeological evidence. I have suggested on the basis of the linguistic evidence (Hill 2001) that the community had begun to break up by the time of the arrival of domesticated cucurbits into the Southwest, at about 3000 BP. In any case, while glottochronological dates are of dubious utility, at least Fowler's dates are not wildly at variance with the dates on the spread of maize cultivation.

THE UTO-AZTECANS AS AGENTS OF DIFFUSION IN THE SOUTHWEST: CULTIVATION
Matson (1991), based on excavations on Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah, pointed out a striking cultural discontinuity there between the Western Basketmaker II and the Eastern Basketmaker II. The former group were cultivators, whose material culture did not resemble that of the Archaic populations who had previously occupied their area. The latter group, in contrast, did exhibit cultural continuity with the Archaic materials in their region and did not adopt cultivation until several hundred years after the Western Basketmaker II first appear in the archaeological record at Cedar Mesa. Matson suggested that the Eastern Basketmaker II, in his view ancestors of the Durango Basketmakers and at least some aspects of the Fremont, borrowed cultivation from the Western Basketmaker during a period of contact at about 3000-2500 BP. He also suggested that the Western Basketmaker II were Uto-Aztecan speakers, while the Eastern Basketmaker II were ancestral Tanoans.

I have recently identified linguistic evidence in support of Matson’s position, in the form of a small suite of loan words between Proto Northern Uto-Aztecan and Proto Kiowa-Tanoan. The identification of loan words, along with reconstruction under the Comparative Method, is an important technique within linguistic paleontology. The principle involved is, that if two languages share loan vocabulary, then there must have been contact between their speakers in interactions involving the lexical domains attested by the loan words. Furthermore, the association between loan words and their lexical domains sometimes permit dating of this contact, when the cultural content of the domains can be identified in the archaeological record.

Hale and Harris (1979) suggest a break-up date for Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan at about 2500-3000 BP, contemporaneous with the contact period between the Western and Eastern Basketmaker pointed out by Matson. Among the resemblant sets that I have identified as loan words between Proto Northern Uto-Aztecan and Proto Kiowa Tanoan, some were originally proposed by Whorf and Trager (1937), and used in support of their "Azteco-Tanoan" hypothesis, that Uto-Aztecan and Kiowa-Tanoan share a common ancestor. Given our contemporary understanding of the dating of maize, maize terminology could not be used in support of a language ancestral to "Azteco-Tanoan," which, had it existed, would have done so at a very early date, certainly before the arrival of maize cultivation in the U.S. Southwest at around 4000 BP. Thus it seems most likely that these items are loans. These forms are shown in Table II. A detailed discussion of the etymologies is included in Hill 2002. However, it is useful to note here one or two important points. First, all the sets except (6) show a loss in Kiowa-Tanoan of intervocalic consonants that are attested in Uto-Aztecan. This permits the very interesting suggestion that the weakening of some intervocalic consonants in NUA, especially intervocalic **c to *y, may have been part of an areal phenomenon in which both NUA and KT languages participated. Second, it seems most likely that the language spoken on the Uto-Aztecan side was a very early stage of Northern Uto-Aztecan. The evidence is as follows. First, item (2) is used as a word for "corn" itself only in NUA (elsewhere it means "to eat corn"). Reflexes of item (7) in some Kiowa-Tanoan languages show an incremental /n/; this /n/, if it is indeed from a Uto-Aztecan source, would have to be from NUA, since the southern languages have /r/, /l/ in this word. Items (8) and (9), which I believe to be loans from Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan into Proto-Northern Uto-Aztecan, are found only in NUA languages.

TABLE II. LOANS BETWEEN UTO-AZTECAN AND KIOWA-TANOAN
UTO-AZTECAN KIOWA-TANOAN
1. PNUA *ˆya (< **ˆca) ‘to plant’ KT *?ia ‘corn’
2. PNUA **kuma ‘corn’ KT *k?un, *khë ‘corn, seed’
3. PUA **pa?ci ‘corn, corn kernel, seed’ KT *p?ëa ‘fresh corn’
4. PUA **wika ‘planting stick,dibble’ Taos xwia-d- ‘hoe’
5. PUA **kwˆsˆC ‘to carry, take’ Taos xwia ‘to harvest’
6. PNUA *toi- ‘male person’ KT *t?oi ‘person’
7. PNUA *wˆnˆ ‘stand’ KT *gwi(n)- ~ *kwi(n)- ‘stand’
8. PNUA *kuhcuN ‘buffalo, cow’ < KT *kon ‘buffalo’
9. PNUA *tˆpat ‘piñon, pine nut’ < KT *t?ou ‘pine nut’

These resemblant sets support the hypothesis of Uto-Aztecan priority as southwestern cultivators. Since the source words in several of the loans must have been Northern Uto-Aztecan forms, these sets also support the hypothesis that cultivation was a part of PNUA culture, in spite of the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century only the Hopi and a few Southern Numic groups exhibited cultivation.

The last two items in Table II show that the exchange between early Northern Uto-Aztecans and early Kiowa-Tanoans did not go only one way. The word for "buffalo" resembles a set of widespread forms illustrated by Campbell (1997:271) with Atakapa cokoñ. The Northern Uto-Aztecan form, which presumably attests to an early stage of the Kiowa-Tanoan form before the lenition and loss of intervocalic consonants, is *kuhcuN. It seems likely that the Atakapa and PNUA forms are metatheses of one another, with the position of /k/ and /c/ reversed, a common-enough phenomenon in phonological change. The source of this item is impossible to determine, but since it is found only in NUA among the Uto-Aztecan languages, it is unlikely that it is Uto-Aztecan. This suggests that the Kiowa-Tanoans or some group further east is the source of this item. The word for "pine nut" is found only in NUA; PNUA *tˆpat probably resembles the original PKT source, which probably had a medial labial consonant, hence lost and attested only in the rounded vowels of the PKT form, *t?ou. The presence of these forms in PNUA suggest a scenario where PNUA "farmagers" (Diehl GETREF) were learning about local hunting and gathering resources from speakers of Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan. This, along with the apparent sharing of an areal tendency for the weakening of intervocalic consonants. Suggests fairly close relationships between the two groups. Malhi et al (2003) have recently suggested, on the basis of a study of the distribution of mitochondrial DNA haplotypes, that the Uto-Aztecan movement into the Southwest may have taken the form of a male migration. Such male migrants might have recruited women, knowledgeable in local collecting resources, from autochthonous groups. Additional research into vocabulary for local flora and fauna in the Southwestern languages is badly needed to determine whether "pine nut" is an unusual case, or whether other Uto-Aztecan plant and animal vocabulary may reflect the influence of such locally-recruited women and their male consanguines.

There is no comparable body of loan material involving any other language family in the Southwest from this period. The maize vocabularies of the Yuman languages, Zuni, and Keresan seem all to be quite independent both of one another, of Kiowa-Tanoan, and of Uto-Aztecan. However, during a later period, we again see evidence of Uto-Aztecan involvement in an evolving southwestern areal system, especially in the domain of ritual and religion. I now turn to these issues.

UTO-AZTECAN IN THE SOUTHWESTERN AREAL SYSTEM
As pointed out above, the study of loan words can reveal the presence and nature of cultural contact between groups of peoples in prehistory. Three sets of loan materials involving Uto-Aztecan participation in the development of the Southwest as a culture area have thus far been identified: Between Tepiman and Yuman, probably within the Hohokam formation (Shaul and Hill 1998), between Tepiman and Zuni, between Hopi and Zuni, and between Hopi and Keresan. I review these loan complexes here, focussing especially on vocabulary in the domain of ritual.

Shaul and Hill (1998) made several proposals about contact between speakers of Proto-Tepiman, the northernmost of the southern Uto-Aztecan groups, and speakers of Yuman languages. I would like to take this opportunity to suggest a minor revision in one of the proposals made there, for the Tepiman word for "water", *su:-dagi. This form is unique among the Uto-Aztecan languages, which elsewhere have reflexes of PUA *pa: "water." Shaul and Hill suggested that *su:-dagi, literally "green-ness", originated as a truncation of a loan from Colorado River Yuman *havasu "green, blue", yielding *su:, and the Uto-Aztecan abstract-noun-forming suffix seen in Tepiman *-dagi, from PUA **-ra'a-wv (Dakin 2003). We argued that speakers of Proto-Tepiman could have heard this word as a Uto-Aztecan difrasismo or ceremonial couplet, va-su, "water-green." I have now identified a formative element in Uto-Aztecan that would have appeared in Tepiman as *su "green, blue." This is attested in words across the language meaning "grass, green, leaf" and the like, and appears in the maize complex as well. Thus I would now argue that Tepiman *su:-dagi is not a loan word, but a case of stimulus diffusion, of a fortuitous resemblance between Yuman *havasu (which could be interpreted as containing the Yuman word for water, *aha) and the entirely possible ceremonial couplet va-su "water-green/blueness".

Shaul and Hill (1998) suggested that, at least at a late stage, ancestral Zuni as well as Yumans and Tepimans were involved in the Hohokam system. We pointed out a number of loan words going in both directions. Among these are Upper Piman siwani "head of a Hohokam Great House", from Keresan _i:wana "rain deity, kachina", probably by way of Zuni _iwani "rain priest"; Tepiman kihe/a "some kind of brother" loaned into Zuni as kihe "ceremonial brother"; Tepiman and Northern Uto-Aztecan *ki "house", loaned into Zuni in kiwihci "kiva", and Tepiman kok'oi "ghost, spirit of the dead", appearing in Zuni as kokko, the root for many words for kachinas. I want to turn now to a series of derivations related to the last element, which appear in Zuni and in Hopi as well as in Tepiman.

Uto-Aztecan *ko-, "death, pain, sickness"
A series of vocabulary items that I refer to as the "ko- words"are widespread in ritual contexts in Southwestern languages, appearing in Tepiman, Hopi, and Zuni. These forms have a complex story. Apparently Hopi rather early abandoned the *ko- words, probably for ideological reasons discussed below. However, they persisted in Tepiman, and were loaned into Zuni from that language, appearing in words for the Water Serpent and for kachinas. They were then loaned from Zuni into Hopi, probably at a late period, in at least two kachina names. These are given below in Table III.

TABLE III. "ko- words"
Tepiman>Zuni
1. k?ola "chile" < Piman ko?okol "chile" (ultimately from a Uto-Aztecan verb "to hurt, sting") (Shaul ms c)
2. kokko "good kachina" < Tepiman kok?oi "spirit of the dead." from PUA **koi "die" (Shaul and Hill 1998).
3. kolowisi "Horned water serpent" < Tepiman *ko?o-wi "rattlesnake" from PUA **kowa "rattlesnake" (but cf. Z. kolho "make a rattling sound")
Zuni> Hopi
4. Kookopölö "a kachina with a hunchback" < Z. kokko "kachina" plus Hopi –pölö "having a round shape"
5. kooyemsi "Mudhead kachina" < Z. koyemshi

Of special interest among the ko- words is Zuni kokko "kachina," almost certainly from Piman kok?oi "spirit of the dead" (Shaul and Hill 1998). Zuni forms noun compounds and noun-incorporation by taking only the first CV of the noun and prefixing this to a second stem (Lynn Nichols, personal communication). Using this process, Zuni has formed many words with ko-. Since Newman (1958) includes very few words in the ceremonial vocabulary, the following examples are taken from Bunzel ([1932] 1991): komosona "kachina chief" (p. 518), kop?ekwin " 'p?ekwin' of the kachina chief" (p. 518), kolhuwalaawa "kachina village, kachina home (the western home)" (p. 482,521), koyemshi "Mudhead kachina, clown" (this word does appear in Newman 1958). The ko- in kolowisi, the word for the Horned Serpent divinity, discussed below, may be part of this set.

Kokko "kachina" was borrowed into Hopi from Zuni, but not as the general term for "kachina", which is kacina, discussed below in detail. Kokko appears in some Hopi kachina names, for instance, in kookopölö "Kokopelli", presumably from Zuni kokko plus Hopi pölö, "having a round shape, hunch-backed kachina," where pölö refers to the curved shape of Kokopelli's back. This is an extremely interesting form. Had Hopi inherited the kooko- directly from Uto-Aztecan, it would appear as köökö, because in Hopi Uto-Aztecan **o everywhere becomes /ö/. This is part of a "chain shift": Uto-Aztecan **u becomes Hopi /o/, and Uto-Aztecan **o (perhaps to avoid massive homophony) becomes Hopi /ö/. The "kokopelli" word, which should not have existed prior to the appearance of the Kachina Cult in the Southwest in the late 13th century (Adams 1991) thus may permit us to date the Hopi sound change PUA *u>Hopi /o/, PUA *o > Hopi /ö/ as prior to the arrival of the kachina cult. The same point can be made using Hopi kooyemsi "mudheads" from Zuni koyem_i.

Keresan has a word rendered in English as koshare – Keresan *k?ˆysáirí‘clown’, that may contain the ko- element, originally from Piman. If this is the case, the word probably reached Keresan by way of Zuni, since, unlike Zuni, Keresan does not incorporate noun roots as CV. The word appears in Hopi as kosari, clearly a very late loan. Lynn Nichols (personal communication, October 1, 2001) speculates that Zuni koyemshi might be the result of a playful metathesis; undoing this would give us ko-sh(?)..., a form even closer to Keresan -- both words denote types of clowns. However, Nichols notes that –shi may also be a noun class marker; it apears in several names for animals and in the word for ‘arrowhead’.

The second element of kookopölö, the word for "to be round, ball" as well as for "hunch-backed kachina" is a sound-symbolic word that is very widespread in the western U.S. For instance, Newman (1964) noted it in California in both Maidu and Miwok. The Hopi word shows the change from UA *o to /ö/. Thus the kokkopölö has an obvious borrowed word with /o/ in the first part of the compound, and a word with the regular Hopi sound change in the second. This is a bilingual compound, comprised of the Zuni loan-word kokko and the indigenous Hopi pölö.

Zuni kolowisi "Horned Water Serpent" probably is related to a widespread Uto-Aztecan word for rattlesnake, which includes the ko- "death, pain" element. The element is not found in other recorded Zuni words for any kind of snake, nor does it resemble recorded Keresan words for snake. It does, however, resemble the first CV of Piman ko?owi "rattlesnake", related to PUA **kowa "snake, rattlesnake." The etymology would be the incorporation of the first syllable, ko-, of Piman ko?o-wi into a Zuni compound with –lo-wihci(?), the regular Zuni compounding strategy.

Kolowisi "Horned Serpent" is not in Newman's (1958) Zuni dictionary. I use Bunzel's spelling (1932:515). It is possible that Bunzel's –wisi element is the same as the –wihci, otherwise unidentified, that appears in the Zuni word for "kiva", kiwihci. Zuni kolho "make a rattling sound" may also be derived from this formative element, which would make it even more likely that the Uto-Aztecan (probably Piman) rattlesnake word is involved.

The Hopi word for the Horned Serpent contrasts with the Zuni word in a very interesting way in that it does not incorporate the ko- element. Hopi Paalölöqangw "Horned Serpent" is probably composed of paa- "water" , plus an element –lölö- that is a reduplicated resemblant of Zuni –lo- in Kolowisi. Hopi lö?ö- means "pour out (of liquid)." Water serpents/Horned serpents are associated with flooding. Bunzel (1932:516) reports that the image of the Horned Serpent in the Zuni kiva astonishes initiates by vomiting water and seed. Hopi lölöqangw is the word for "bullsnake, gopher snake". Given the general relationship between snakes and water in Hopi, I suspect that the two forms, for "pour out of liquid" and "snake spp.", are related. The second part of the Zuni word, -lo, may be related to this etymon. It would have to come from an early stage of Hopi, when UA **w had already become Hopi /l/ before /o/, but before UA **o had become Hopi /ö/.

The Hopi, who use the word cˆˆ?a "rattlesnake" (probably sound-imitative), have no reflex of the Uto-Aztecan word for "rattlesnake," PUA **kowa. Yet this etymon is present everywhere else in Northern Uto-Aztecan, including in Southern Numic, the immediate neighbor of Hopi, cf. Chemehuevi kogo "snake sp.", Southern Paiute and Ute tokoa-pi "rattlesnake". This situation suggests a deliberate replacement (and of course rattlesnake, along with bear and coyote, is one of the most commonly "euphemized" animals in western North America). Thus the Hopi ceremonial terms (or at least the terms that can be spoken in public and put in the dictionary) for the Water Serpent and related snakes perhaps should be thought of as propitiating, mentioning the most positive qualities of the animal, their associations with water, wet places, and the coming of spring. This is in contrast to the Zuni ko- words with their association in Uto-Aztecan with pain (PUA *ko-) and death (PUA **koi). PUA **kowa "rattlesnake", *koi "to die", and *ko "hurt, be sick" (the root that shows up in Piman ko?okol "chile") may all be related within Uto-Aztecan. Of course we do not know that these associations with death, so clear in the Uto-Aztecan words, persist in Zuni. They do, however, suggest something of the ideology surrounding the Horned Serpent among the Pimans who seem to have been the source of the Zuni words. The Hopi tendency to focus on water and life may also be developed in katsina "kachina", to which I return below.
Other Loans

The Uto-Aztecan *ko- words are, thus, widespread in association with cult activity in the Southwest, and attest to diverse stages in the development of an areal system of ritual. However, other items also attest to contacts between the Uto-Aztecans and their neighbors. While the development of the Uto-Aztecan sound system in the daughter languages assures us that the *ko- words must have originated in Tepiman, Zuni does have some loan words of apparent antiquity that come from Hopi. The first example is Zuni teshkwi ‘shrine placed in the house’, Hopi tˆˆtˆskya ‘shrine.’ Both languages have related verbs, again with almost identical meanings: Z. teshla-na ‘be afraid’, H. tˆ\ˆtˆs- ‘have misgivings about one’s safety’, tˆ\ˆsi ‘careful, cautious’, tˆ\ˆsö ‘cave, rock shelter, cliff overhang’. The last item has a clear Uto-Aztecan etymology, from PUA**tˆn ‘rock’ + **so ‘burrow’. So it seems likely that the loan is from Hopi into Zuni, with the Hopi word originally having to do with caves, niches, and rockshelters. Ethnographically and archaeologically, such places are known to be used to store ritual paraphernalia. In Uto-Aztecan thought, caves are the prototypical water sources.

A second Zuni word with possible Uto-Aztecan ancestry would also have had to come from Hopi. This is recorded in Bunzel (1932:526) as pa?etone "the great shell", an importantpiece of ritual paraphernalia. The first syllable is Uto-Aztecan *pa:- "water" or Uto-Aztecan *pa:- "great", compounded with Zuni ?etoo- "material effigy of a sacred being" (Bunzel 1932:490). This word cannot come from Piman. First, in Tepiman PUA *p in word-initial position appears as /w/. The source cannot be a Tepiman word for "water" for a second reason: during Proto-Tepiman times, as pointed out above, the Tepimans developed by stimulus diffusion from Yuman a unique Tepiman word for water, *su:-dagi. Hopi, however, retained the PUA water word as paahˆ. PUA *pa: "great", a second possible source, is seen in Uto-Aztecan vocabulary such as Tumpisha Shoshone pa-tˆhˆya "elk, moose" (where tˆhˆya is "deer"), Serrano pa:kiha- "chicken hawk" (where kiha is related to words for hawk), paR:havit "supernaturally powerful being", Huichol pá= "grande," and possibly Hopi pas "very" (with -s adverbializer). It is not, however, found in Tepiman. Zuni pa- in pa?etone follows the regular Zuni rule for using only the first CV- of a word in the first element of a compound.
A final set of loan items attesting to contacts between Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples and speakers of other southwestern languages involves Hopi and Keresan. Items in ritual vocabulary (I neglect other domains) are shown in Table IV.

Table IV. Loans between Hopi and Keresan
A. Hopi to Keresan
1. honani "badger" > K. honani "badger fetish"
2. kacina > Acoma k?aázíná "kachina" (?)
3. Maasawˆ "Masawu" (connected with words for "ashes" and "skeleton" (Miller 1965, No. 261)), with a southern distribution in Uto-Aztecan) >K. Masewi "One of the twin war gods"
4. poli- "butterfly" (combining form of povoli-hoya "any of the smaller species of butterflies"; source might be a form like polìi-kacina "Butterfly Kachina"" ) > Acoma buúr?ai?kA, Santa Ana buúr?aga, Santo Domingo buúr?àikA,
5. yaawi "ceremonial baton, cf. Uto-Aztecan *yaawi "carry" > K. *yaápí "staff of office"
B. Keresan to Hopi
6. Katoya "two headed snake patron of the Antelope Society" < K. k?aáDçwi "mythical two-headed snake" (Parsons 1936)
7. Kawéstima "Betatakin Ruin, northwest kachina home" < Acoma k-áw?es-tiima "Mt. Taylor" (K. áw?es "snowy")
8. sipapˆ "Sipapu" < Santa Ana sip?aaphˆ "Sipapu"
9. Weenima "Southeast kachina home" < Keresan wenimace (Bunzel 1932: 482 ) (used also in Zuni as a ritual term for the western kachina home)

This set of items all involves relatively recent ceremonial vocabulary associated with the Kachina Cult. In the first group of forms, discussion is required for (2), Hopi kacina "kachina." Malotki (1991) has carefully reviewed the debate over this form, quite properly concluding that many of the contributions have utterly neglected basic principles of historical linguistics and constitute, as Malotki ironically remarked, "folk etymology at its finest" (Malotki 1991:51). Malotki, along with most other modern authorities, argues that kacina must be a loan word into Hopi from some other language. The reason for this is that in the Northern Uto-Aztecan languages, including Hopi, Proto-Uto-Aztecan *k went everywhere to /q/ before /a/. Thus Hopi words like kacina, katoya, kawestima in the above table must be loan words that have come into the language since this sound change. There is no question about the pronunciation of kacina; all authorities have recorded it with the /ka/ pronunciation, with the exception being the Voegelins (1957:44). Fewkes (1898:174, cited in Malotki 1991) concluded that this pronunciation showed that the "katcina cultus is extra Tusayan in origin." Miller (letter to Ekkehart Malotki March 16, 1993, in the files of the Hopi Dictionary Project) believed that the source of the loan was Keresan k?-áazíi-ná "third person - ?-plural subject", "Kachinas". However, Miller was unable to identify the meaning of the root, áazíi, so his argument basically rests on the claim of being able to identify the Keresan affixes.
I believe that this matter requires more research. Kenneth C. Hill (personal communication, June 14, 2002), was told by a Hopi consultant that the word is probably not a loan, because, said this source, it is common for Hopis to modify the pronunciation of ritually important words in order to obscure their origins. That is, this consultant believed that the word was "really" qatsina, with the /qa/ we would predict for a Uto-Aztecan root. The Voegelins may have encountered similar claims, explaining their use of /q/ in their recording of the word.

If the word is indeed "really" qatsina, it may have an etymology internal to Hopi and to Uto-Aztecan more generally, coming from words meaning "to be, to live". Fewkes' assumption of the "extra Tusayan" origin of the kachina cult could then not be sustained, and there would be strong arguments for an origin within Uto-Aztecan, given the probable Hopi origin of the Keresan form and the probable Tepiman origin of the Zuni word. In Hopi, a verb qatˆ "to sit, to live" forms a derived noun qatsi "life" by regular processes. However, the more likely derivation for qatsina is qatˆ-ina "to live-cause," with the causative suffix -ina, regular loss of /ˆ/, and regular change of /t/ to /ts/ before /i/. There are many examples of verbs used as names in Hopi. Thus qatsina would mean "(the one who) causes things to live". This is an appropriate label for the kachinas, who, as Malotki points out, are especially associated with water and bring rain when they appear. The problem with this line of derivation is that if qatsina is a verb being used as a name, its plural should be q/katsina-ya. Instead, the plural is kacina-m, with the regular noun plural. The possible Keresan source word is plural (the additional plural marker in Hopi is the kind of phenomenon that is common in loan vocabulary). If a derivation from Uto-Aztecan origins can be sustained, then katsina constitutes a second case, along with the word for the Water Serpent discussed above, where Hopi usage emphasizes water and life, in contrast to the Zuni use of words associated with death. (Recall that in Zuni, the generic word for kachina is kokko, from Tepiman *kok'oi "spirits of the dead".) Like the Zuni, the Hopi believe that the kachinas are the perfected spirits of the dead. However, unlike the Zuni, they apparently prefer to emphasize the life-giving force of these beings over their association with death.

I must emphasize that the above proposal is speculative. Further discussion of this point with knowledgeable speakers of Hopi is required. In addition, Miller's Acoma Keres form should also be revisited with speakers of Keres, although I am not optimistic that Keres speakers will be willing to discuss it.

In the case of item (4), Hopi poli- "butterfly," a ritually important animal, an ultimately Hopi source for this word, attested as a loan in Zuni as well as in Keresan, must be asserted. The reason is that the combining form poli has an etymology within Hopi, from povoli-hoya, a reduplicated word from underlying po-poli-hoya; (-hoya is the diminutive suffix).
There is one ‘snake’ word in Keresan that may be an old Uto-Aztecan loan; this is Santa Ana _úwi: ‘snake’, possibly related to Takic (California Uto-Aztecan) sˆwi-t ‘rattlesnake,’ Piman _o’owa ‘bullsnake’.

CONCLUSION
I have tried to illustrate above the utility of methods in Linguistic Paleontology, including the method of reconstructing the cultural complexes of prehistoric societies by using the Comparative Method of historical linguistics, and the method of reconstructing domains in which cultural contact has taken place by looking at loan vocabularies, to trace the involvement of the Uto-Aztecan peoples in the emergence of what we know today in the United States as the Southwest culture area. I have suggested that the Uto-Aztecans came from the south, perhaps as far south as northwestern Mesoamerica itself, and that they appeared in the southwest as cultivators. They loaned maize and cultivation and processing techniques to at least one autochthonous southwestern group, the ancestors of speakers of Kiowa Tanoan, at a very early date. During later periods, the study of loan words can trace the involvement of Uto-Aztecans in the Hohokam complex, in the kachina cult, and in the cult of the horned serpent. Thus, the multi-lingual and multiethnic nature of the Southwestern areal system can be confirmed from the earliest times using linguistic paleontological methods. We have only just begun to apply these methods, and they hold great promise as a way for linguists to join with archaeologists in the project of untangling ever-finer details of prehistoric cultural systems and adaptations.

Endnotes:

i Note that this list does not include a few items published in Hill (2001) for which cognates are attested in the northern languages only in non-maize-related meanings. I believe that many of these cognates acquired their non-maize-related meanings through secondary semantic change, as discussed in Hill 2003. However, to keep the present presentation straightforward and brief, I do not include them.

ii Whorf and Trager, who did not know about *kumi/a, proposed that the cognate form was Hopi qa'_ "dried ear of corn." This proposal is discussed in Hill 2002.

iii Keresan has a word rendered in English as koshare – Keresan *k?ˆysáirí‘clown’, that may contain the ko- element, originally from Piman. If this is the case, the word probably reached Keresan by way of Zuni, since, unlike Zuni, Keresan does not incorporate noun roots as CV. The word appears in Hopi as kosari. Lynn Nichols (personal communication, October 1, 2001) speculates that koyemshi might be the result of a playful metathesis; undoing this would give us ko-sh(?)..., a form even closer to Keresan. However, she notes that –shi may also be a noun class marker; it apears in several names for animals and in the word for ‘arrowhead’.

iv All modern authorities agree that Zuni has no glottalized /p/, but that is what Bunzel wrote.

v Kenneth C. Hill (personal communication October 1, 2001) suggests that this may come from PUA *paa- "large, great", rather than *paa "water." The "great" meaning is found in forms such as Tumpisha Shoshone pa-tˆhˆya "elk, moose" (where tˆhˆya is "deer"), Serrano pa:kiha- "chicken hawk" (where kiha is related to words for hawk), paR:havit "supernaturally powerful being", Huichol pá= "grande," and possibly Hopi pas "very" (with -s adverbializer).

vi I am trying to avoid "fetish".

vii This transcription is from Miller's text "Around Acoma" (Miller 1965:206).

viii In Miller's Acoma Grammar and Texts the form appears in a text, "The Birth of the War Twins," as k?áazíná (Miller 1965:248).

ix Kenneth C. Hill (personal communication) points out that Hopi verbal names are all male names. Female names are nouns. The most common suffixes in male verbal names are -iwa "passive" (verbal action has been accomplished), -va "ingressive (to arrive with, to start doing...", -ima "progressive" (to go along doing). Among the verbal suffixes in the 605 male names from Oraibi collected by Titiev, the suffix -(i)na "causative" does not occur as a final element. Only 16 names for supernatural beings are recorded in the Hopi dictionary; many do not have Hopi etymologies. None end in -(i)na. This may indicate either a special status of the name (q?)/katsina, emphasizing the agentive power of these beings, or it may suggest that the word is indeed borrowed.

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NOTES
Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge help from the many scholars with whom I have discussed these materials, but especially the following: Kenneth C. Hill, David L. Shaul, Lynn Nichols, R. G. Matson, and Alexis Manaster-Ramer.