1994-present Nahua Migration Project
Chris Beekman, Alec Christensen
My own research, looking at material culture from a chronological point of view, met Alec's research, examining the biological affinities of skeletal populations through the study of non-metric cranial traits. Together we began an examination of the ethnohistorically attested migrations of Nahua speaking peoples out of northern Mesoamerica. Alec focused on the ethnohistory, biological, and linguistic aspects. I turned my attention more towards the archaeological data, associated paleoclimatic information, and the theoretical treatment of migration. Although we had a skeletal version of the paper largely completed by 1996, our dissertations, fieldwork, marriages, and teaching duties made it difficult to revise the manuscript into a format that a publisher would take. The Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory came to the rescue, and a better focused version of the paper recently came out.
Major conclusions are that the Postclassic migrations of nomadic hunters and gatherers (to which the Aztecs belonged) were but the tail end of earlier migrations of more sedentary peoples out of the Bajio region of north central Mexico (the state of Guanajuato) that began in the Epiclassic (A.D. 550-900); that these migrations correspond chronologically to the beginning of the decline of complex highland societies like Teotihuacan and the Teuchitlan Tradition; and that there is good reason to believe that a physical influx of people occurred during this earlier migration; that the latest, nomadic migrants into central Mexico were unlikely to have been Nahua speakers, but rather appear to have adopted the Nahua language, which was probably present in the Basin of Mexico already. Another basic conclusion, more theoretical than the rest, is that migration is such a complex process that it can be accompanied by a great or a negligible amount of change in material culture. Population movements have been documented in various areas as leaving a wide variety of material traces depending on the social contexts of the migration, and only a conjunctive approach that utilizes very different kinds of data will be successful.
The entire picture is testable only over the long term, as the only way to convincingly support the hypothesis of a population replacement will be to analyze human remains, through either morphological or genetic markers. Much more excavation will be necessary before this is a testable prospect, at least in western Mexico. Central Mexico may be another question.
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