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1 INTRODUCTION
Archaeology, Linguistics, and the Andean Past: A Much-Needed Conversation DAVID BERESFORD-JONES AND PAUL HEGGARTY
THE ANDES RANK AMONG HUMANITY’S RARE INDEPENDENT hearths of agriculture and cradles of ‘pristine’ civilization, a chapter of undeniable significance in the wider story of humankind. And it is no coincidence that the region is home also to what, by number of speakers, counts as our greatest surviving link to the speech of the Americas before European conquest: the Quechua language family (Fig. 1.1). Its prehistory is a rich and turbulent one, jostling with many other indigenous tongues, each with its own tale of origins to tell, not least the Aymara that still dominates the Lake Titicaca region today. For times before the final cataclysmic encounter between the conquistadors and the Incas, our historical sources are for the most part mute. From a strictly Eurocentric viewpoint, the Incas had a ‘Neolithic’ empire, won and run with neither sword nor pen. They left us no true history; or at least none that we can yet decipher. For they administered their vast realm through the khipu, a record-keeping system of intricate, multicoloured knotted cords, able to convey (so the colonial chronicles recount) both ‘accounting’ and ‘narrative’ information. But the khipu can no longer, or not yet again, be ‘read’, as Gary Urton reminds us in his own contribution to this volume. We do have accounts in Spanish from the early colonial period that relate the mythohistories of the Incas, their contemporaries and predecessors. These texts do greatly enrich our understanding of times on the eve of Spanish conquest, and back before it for a time-span as yet unclear. Their accounts are sometimes contradictory, however, and were recorded through the distorting prism of the conquistadors’ world-view, through which historians must negotiate if we are to interpret these chronicles reliably. Yet written texts are far from our only record of the Andean past in any case. To piece prehistory together here we can look also to a range of other sources and tools across the sciences and humanities. The succession of Proceedings of the British Academy, 173, 1–41. © The British Academy 2012.
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Figure 1.1. The two major language families of the Andes, present-day distribution.
societies that rose and fell in the central Andes, during the millennia before the Incas, have left us a rich record of material culture and human interaction with the environment for archaeologists to uncover and interpret. Geneticists, meanwhile, are beginning to trace an emerging picture of the relationships that underlie human population diversity in the Andes. But perhaps least well
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appreciated of all is how, by comparing the ways in which a plethora of indigenous languages and dialects across the Andes relate to each other, linguists too can infer rich details of the prehistory of the populations that spoke them. The data and methods of each of these disciplines are all largely independent of one another, however, and each opens up but its own partial window on the past. Only together might they tell us the fullest tale of Andean origins. In other parts of the world, for a few decades now the disciplines have sought to merge their different but thereby also complementary perspectives into a single, holistic picture of our prehistory. It is all the more fitting, indeed, that the contributions to this volume should begin with the ample perspective of one of the foremost pioneers and promoters of this ‘new synthesis’ of the disciplines, Colin Renfrew. The central Andean region has so far been conspicuous by its absence from this interdisciplinary enthusiasm. Yet as Richard Burger reminds us in his own chapter here, it was not always thus. For the great pioneers of Andean archaeology, not least Max Uhle and Julio C. Tello, did indeed see interaction between archaeology and language as a sine qua non for a true understanding of the region’s prehistory. More recently though, specialists in each discipline have seemed content to work largely in isolation from, if not in ignorance of, the findings of the other. Those rare efforts that have been made—among them Isbell (1974), Bird et al. (1984), Browman (1994), Stanish (2003), and Hiltunen and McEwan (2004)—still hold a number of identifiable shortcomings in the eyes of scholars from other disciplines (see, for instance, Isbell 1984; Cerrón-Palomino 2000a). On the other hand, that so little has been done thus far only leaves the prospects all the brighter for significant advances in our understanding, if we can at last properly weave all these disparate stories together. In few regions of the world, moreover, do the timescales of the critical and richest phases in both the archaeological and linguistic records overlap so closely as in the Andes (Fig. 1.2). So much so, in fact, that the region can even prove a valuable case-study for how one might achieve a more holistic view of prehistory in other parts of the world as well (see Heggarty and Beresford-Jones 2010). The task is all the more urgent here, too, as both our archaeological and linguistic records are progressively and irrecoverably destroyed: by looting to supply the market in illicit antiquities, and by the inexorable, imminent extinction of most indigenous language varieties spoken across the region—even the future of Quechua itself is not secure (Adelaar 1991: 50; Marr 2011). For all these reasons, the time is surely ripe for a fresh collaboration between the various disciplines whose shared purpose is to understand the single Andean past (see also Ramos 2011: 19–23). This is what motivated us, an archaeologist and a linguist of the Andes respectively, to convene in September 2008 the Cambridge Symposium on Archaeology and Linguistics in the Andes, whose proceedings now appear in this volume.
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Figure 1.2. Time-depth estimates for the major Andean language families, set alongside IndoEuropean, and a simplified Andean archaeological chronology.
A Much-Needed Conversation The Cambridge symposium (see Heggarty and Beresford-Jones 2009) served first to dispel a number of popular myths about the language history of the Andes, not only peddled among tourist guidebooks on Peru, but until now still all too current even among archaeologists and historians: that the Incas were responsible for the wide dissemination of Quechua out of a Cuzco homeland, for instance, or that Tiyawanaku1 had earlier driven the expansion of Aymara across the Altiplano. Indeed, too few non-linguists appreciate that Quechua is not a single language at all, but a language family, whose timedepth and phases of expansion have significant implications for (pre)history. 1
We prefer this spelling as closter to the original indigenous pronunciation, restoring the second syllable -ya- suggested both by etymology and by the original Hispanicised version Tiahuanaco (but omitted from the popular modern Tiwanaku).
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It is true that the geographical distribution of Quechua today seems to make for an uncannily close overlap with the greatest extent of the Inca Empire (Fig. 1.1), and the Incas themselves did indeed promote Quechua as their ‘official language’ of empire. Yet while the dialects of southern Bolivia can be derived directly from those of Cuzco at the time of Inca imperial expansion, this is not quite so straightforward even for the far-flung Quechua of Argentina, as Elizabeth DeMarrais explores in this volume. The Quechua of Ecuador, meanwhile, was certainly not transplanted from Cuzco, even if it may have been through Inca policies that speakers of other regions were relocated there—the topic of Anne-Marie Hocquenghem’s contribution here. As for where the original Quechua homeland lay, it has long been clear to historical linguists that Quechua had already spread widely across central and southern Peru many centuries before the Incas first rose out of obscurity (Fig. 1.3). The Inca heartland itself, meanwhile, is dotted with placenames that seem not Quechua but Aymara: the river Vilcanota flowing past Ollantaytambo, and even Cuzco itself, the ‘owl [stone]’, recalling one of the Incas’ origin myths. (The popular ‘navel (of the world)’ etymology seems quite unfounded.) Spanish chronicles also report a ‘secret language’ of the Inca nobility, citing a few verses that clearly betray their non-Quechua origins. We owe much of our understanding of these enigmas to the lifelong work of Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino (e.g. 1999, 2008b), whose contribution here delves into them still deeper. This brings us on to a second widely held misconception, surrounding that other great linguistic survivor in the Andes. Today, Aymara is spoken in regions centred on Lake Titicaca, and across much of the ancient realm of Tiyawanaku, whose ruins stand near its southern, Bolivian shore. But again, it is all too easy to be beguiled by the apparent coincidences between modern language geography and the extent of an ancient material culture. For the language data turn out to betray Aymara’s spread here as too recent to be compatible with the millennium or more that has elapsed since Tiyawanaku fell. Within its modern Altiplano heartland, Aymara exhibits such limited variation (Briggs 1993) that linguists can be confident that its expansion there is of relatively recent date (see Torero 1987: 339 and Heggarty 2008: 38–43). Moreover, as Willem Adelaar reminds us in his own chapter here, placename studies and early Spanish colonial reports attest that Aymara was once spoken widely across many other, more northerly regions (Fig. 1.4), in forms now lost to us, and suggest that its expansion across them pre-dates that of its now larger partner in Andean linguistic domination, Quechua. To this day, forms of ‘Central Aymara’ (alias the Jaqaru/Kawki language) are still spoken in scattered pockets in the highlands inland from Lima, some 800 km north-west of Titicaca. The widespread association between Tiyawanaku and Aymara (see for instance Kolata 1993: 241) quite fails to explain any of this historical
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Figure 1.3. Assumed expansions of Quechua prior to and since the rise of the Incas.
and toponymic evidence for Aymara’s former wide presence across southern Peru. Nor can it account for the very deep and intimate associations between the Quechua and Aymara language families, as Cerrón-Palomino (2000a) points out. For linguists, then, the putative link between Aymara and Tiyawanaku, ingrained alike into archaeological literature and Bolivian national mythology, is, as Cerrón-Palomino (2000a: 132) puts it, ‘lingüísticamente hablando, insostenible’ (linguistically speaking, unsustainable). It is perhaps worth spelling out the interdisciplinary indiscipline that has brought us to this pass. For this same linguistic consensus, and the multiple lines of evidence it is founded upon, have in fact been largely ignored by many in archaeology, in particular
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Figure 1.4. Current and assumed earlier distributions of Aymara, by nature and strength of evidence.
Browman (1994), who argued that continuity in the material culture record of the Titicaca Basin (itself a matter of debate among archaeologists) should entail continuity also in language use—when in reality there is no necessary one-to-one equation between the two levels. Others, in particular Stanish (2003: 221–6), do acknowledge the relevance of linguistic evidence, but nonetheless misconstrue it in favour of models that cannot be squared with it. The difference between the esoteric modern Kallawaya speech and the long-extinct Puquina language, for instance, may seem a linguistic detail, but one that prehistorians confuse and conflate at their peril. Stanish’s scenario for Titicaca prehistory relies on seeing Puquina as a rare ‘mixed language’ (with Quechua).
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But this definition applies only to modern Kallawaya, which is not at all the same thing as, nor a direct descendant of, Puquina. It merely retains a lexicon partly from Puquina, within a ‘language’ (or at least a secret ritual register) which otherwise is entirely Quechua. Indeed it is precisely the great difference between the two that Kallawaya is a mixed language, based grammatically on Quechua, while Puquina was not. As even our limited surviving documentation of the language makes clear, Puquina was perfectly well endowed with its own, very different grammar. Thus Stanish’s hypothesis that ‘sixteenthcentury Pukina was a mixed language that had evolved into a lingua franca and was not the natal language of any significant population’ is quite mistaken. Rather, the linguistics makes clear that Puquina was indeed a fully fledged independent native language of the region, and had a former distribution, traceable both in Spanish colonial documentation and in toponymy, that falls intriguingly in line with that of Tiyawanaku in the archaeological record—see, for example, Torero (2002: 48, 49, 404) and Cerrón-Palomino (this volume). In short, established interpretations by leading archaeologists of the Titicaca Basin—among them Kolata (1993), Browman (1994), and Stanish (2003)—base their linguistic arguments for their scenarios on misconceptions of the language data. Those very misconceptions are sometimes even invoked as though they offered cross-disciplinary support for the authors’ preferred interpretations of the material culture record, when in fact the language data directly undermine the scenarios proposed. These cautionary tales show how important it is that our disciplines truly engage with and talk to each other, if we are correctly to understand each other’s data. So it would be well for us to set out here precisely what historical linguistics really has to say on the Andean past, as we shall do below. Before that, however, and out of cross-disciplinary justice, let us immediately note that the problem cuts both ways, of course. Andean linguists, for their part, have tended to rest all too comfortably close to their own ‘traditional model’ (as we term it herein) to account for the expansions of the Quechua and Aymara families. Established since the 1970s, this was principally the work of the two key authorities in the field of Andean linguistics over the past few decades: Alfredo Torero, generally seconded by Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino. Torero’s ([1970] 1972, 1984) pioneering hypotheses relied heavily upon dates derived from a technique known as ‘glottochronology’, and on his own proposed family-tree classifications for the divergence of Quechua and of Aymara. Taking in turn each of the major branches in his trees, Torero sought to map them one-for-one against an assumed sequence of discrete migrations. Yet glottochronology is in fact now largely discredited, and Torero’s tree-like vision of Quechua divergence has also been challenged: see Landerman (1991), Taylor (1994), and Heggarty (2005). In our own chapter in this volume, too, we propose for the Quechua family an alternative
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‘dialect continuum’ model instead, which implies a quite different prehistory. But Andean linguists have not yet followed through on those linguistic objections, to take them to their logical conclusion also for what they entail for language prehistory. Instead the traditional Torero model has remained largely unchallenged until now, and this while archaeologists have long since shied away from the facile invocation of ‘migration’ as the only or even the prime motor for culture change — a dangerous hangover from the days when material culture was simplistically associated with ‘peoples’. As we shall shortly see, the specific sequences of migrations that Torero espoused turn out to show few, if any, meaningful correlations with the archaeological record. The Cambridge symposium’s raison d’être, then, was to bring together two disciplines. We cannot put it better than did Richard Burger at that very meeting, when he wryly evoked the image of a once intimate but then bitterly divorced couple, now so long estranged that they might rekindle a fresh discourse without rancour. In such a context we saw little point in calling for the presentation of formal conference papers. Rather, the symposium was structured as a series of roundtable discussions, according to the chronology and geography of Andean prehistory, with the intention that publication—this volume—would emerge out of these interactions. As conveners we sought to launch the debate by airing a deliberately radical new vision of our own for a cross-disciplinary prehistory of the Andes, set out in writing in our chapter here. Our proposal is founded firstly upon a significant reclassification, which we feel is long overdue, of the relationships between the various regional languages and ‘dialects’ within the Quechua family; and secondly on the search for a far more satisfactory correlation with the archaeological record. Necessarily this involved setting aside any simplistic associations between material cultures, languages and ‘peoples’, which so blighted the interdisciplinary project in the days of culture history—see the warnings from George Lau in this volume, and from Isbell (1984) and Stanish (2003: 222). Rather, we have sought to start afresh from a set of first principles for how to go about linking the different disciplines of prehistory. We look not to facile equations of ‘language equals culture equals genes’, but to a more plausible equation that language families reflect major expansive processes which should also be visible in the material culture record. Direct, strong correspondences need to be established on each of three key levels: geography, chronology and causation. In other words, archaeological and linguistic patterns must match in the right place, at the right time, and for the right reason. Our logic appeals in particular to the principle that language spreads do not ‘just happen’ in a demographic and social vacuum. Spectacular linguistic impact occurs only when a language has behind it some real-world driving process of a scale to match. There is no better example than Rome, and the resulting language family aptly named Romance, in that word’s original sense of speaking ‘in Roman’ (Latin ro¯ma¯nice¯ ). Among its members are the likewise
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aptly named Romanian and Romansch, as well as Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, and others. Looking back to the Andes, this suggests that we should look to the wider-spread horizons, not the intermediate periods, as offering the most natural explanations for the major Quechua and Aymara dispersals. With the rise of the Incas too late to account for the timedepth of either family, the most plausible candidate for the first major expansion of Quechua turns out in our view to be the Wari Middle Horizon, with the Chavín Early Horizon more tentatively suggested as behind the earlier spread of the Aymara family. This effectively both upturns the traditional Torero hypothesis (which we set out in more detail below) and revisits the long-running debate in archaeology as to the nature, duration, and extent of ‘horizons’, the latter taken up here also by Willem Adelaar, Richard Burger, Bill Isbell, George Lau, and Gordon McEwan. Our proposal, unashamedly somewhat provocative to both archaeologists and linguists, duly achieved the desired result: a vigorous cross-disciplinary debate throughout the Cambridge symposium. It is that interaction that has crystallized into the chapters in this volume, and the presentations to the follow-up conference held the following year (August–September 2009) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) in Lima, under the title Lenguas y sociedades en el antiguo Perú: hacia un enfoque interdisciplinario, and published now as the book of the same name (Kaulicke et al. 2011). Indeed, our overall programme of study of the Andean past continued into the period since Columbus (or rather, Pizarro) with a similar crossdisciplinary conversation, published in a companion volume History and Language in the Andes (Heggarty and Pearce 2011). Gabriela Ramos (2011) in particular makes a powerful plea for an equivalent dialogue between historians and linguists of the Andes Perhaps most indicative of the progress made in our meetings, and this volume, is the comprehensive reassessment now under way of the long-standing traditional model for associating the linguistic and archaeological records in the Andes. Certainly, many of our criticisms of the traditional model were well received, though of course our own proposal too naturally met with objections. Indeed precisely as desired, other participants advanced their own new, alternative scenarios, each of which well illustrates other crucial considerations in working out how archaeological and linguistic patterns might go together. Could the Wari Middle Horizon alone, for instance, have driven both language expansions, Quechua and Aymara? If so, might the linguistic contrast reflect instead the ‘ecological complementarity’ between high-altitude populations, living mostly from potato crops and camelid herding, and others living at mid-elevations, cultivating primarily maize? Gary Urton and Bill Sillar each propose variants on this possibility in this volume. Alternatively, might the main Quechua expansion have occurred in two distinct stages? Was the first driven by the Chavín Early Horizon, and the second by the Wari
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Middle Horizon, accounting respectively for the major branches in the traditional vision of the classification of the Quechua family into Central Quechua (or ‘QI’, expanding with Chavín) vs. North/South Quechua (‘QII’, expanding with Wari)? At the follow-on Lima conference, however, Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino mounted a strong defence of the original, traditional hypothesis that we had sought to challenge, albeit not without some significant revisions and clarifications. These include taking up the suggestion that the Chavín Early Horizon had launched the first Quechua expansion, while reasserting the Wari Middle Horizon as Aymara-speaking, as per his contribution here. Once readers have had the opportunity to explore these various alternative hypotheses in the chapters that follow, we shall assess them all alongside one another in our concluding remarks on the current ‘state of the art’ in cross-disciplinary Andean prehistory. This introduction, meanwhile, will firstly set out the structure of this book and introduce its component chapters. Thereafter we clarify briefly a number of principles from historical linguistics that are indispensable to an understanding of how language data can inform us about prehistory at all, as a general methodological background to the chapters that follow. Next, and as a more specifically Andean reference point for much of that ensuing discussion, we review the traditional model for associating the linguistic and archaeological records in the Andes, and the problems that attend it. Finally, we close by looking at one particular cross-disciplinary proposal that has commanded much attention worldwide, but precious little hitherto in the Andes: the ‘farming/language dispersal’ hypothesis. Several of the contributions here touch upon demography and subsistence regimes, and the Andean case clearly offers questions, and critical lessons, for the hypothesis worldwide.
The Structure and Chapters of this Book The structure of this book follows the same chronological and geographical logic that underlay our discussions at the Cambridge symposium. It begins with three contributions on general methodological questions, models and scenarios, to set the scene for the remaining chapters which then home in on particular regions and time-frames, arranged chronologically. That is, we move forwards in time through the sequence of horizons and intermediate periods, which also entails a progressive shift south-eastwards, roughly tracking the centre of gravity of Andean civilization (at least in the highlands) as it moved from Chavín to Wari and ultimately to Cuzco. As we cross from the pre- into the post-Pizarro period, the companion volume History and Language in the Andes (Heggarty and Pearce 2011) takes up where this one leaves off. Colin Renfrew opens this volume with a review of the ‘new synthesis’ endeavour worldwide, and an exploration of some broad, foundational models
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for what archaeological realities may underlie language expansions, assessing then how the particular case of the Andes might fit into such general models. Our own chapter then follows, setting out some basic principles for how to go about linking the archaeological and linguistic records of the past. Firstly we propose a new general approach: to seek to correlate language family dispersals with major expansive processes in the material culture record. When applied specifically to the Andes this duly leads us to our new hypothesis: that the Wari Middle Horizon was responsible for the main dispersal of Quechua, and the Chavín Early Horizon for the Aymara that underlay it. Pieter Muysken, meanwhile, looks not at histories of language expansion and divergence in the Andes, but at a process that is all but the reverse: convergence, also unmistakably attested to by Quechua and Aymara. For these two language lineages clearly interacted intensely with one another, and from some early stage, either before the first of them began to expand, or as it did so. Muysken’s contribution is exemplary in its cross-disciplinary scope, and explores a novel approach applicable to the ‘new synthesis’ worldwide. He sets out a framework by which to distinguish among an array of different forms of language convergence, so that in any given case we might recruit language data as pointers to help identify which type of prehistorical scenario must have prevailed to have shaped the particular linguistic outcome observed. The remarkable phenomenon of Quechua–Aymara convergence serves as an ideal case-study, as we shall shortly see. The book then moves on to the sequence of contributions on particular regions and time-frames. Arranged chronologically, these begin with Peter Kaulicke’s overview of the foundations of Andean civilization, over the two millennia from the Middle Archaic to the Middle Formative (c. 3000–1000 BC, on his chronology). As Kaulicke observes, it is significant that viable estimates for the time-depths of the language families of the Andes do not even approach the antiquity of the Archaic Period. Yet on those very grounds, his overview usefully sets the stage for this volume, for archaeologists such as Shady (2003) and Haas and Creamer (2006) have ventured that the famous Archaic Period site of Caral, and Norte Chico in general, may have been the homeland of Quechua: suggestions that are ‘premature, if not to say speculative’, from the linguist’s perspective (Cerrón-Palomino 2003: 22; see also Heggarty and Beresford-Jones 2010: suppl. A). Kaulicke seeks to rebalance perceptions of the role of the north coast in these precocious developments: a role which he argues may find some echo in that region’s subsequent trajectory, largely independent of trajectories elsewhere, not just in archaeology but also in language. The next chapter, by Richard Burger, takes us into the Chavín Early Horizon. It picks up on our proposal that horizons should in principle be the most plausible drivers of significant language dispersals in the Andes, but takes an alternative view as to precisely how the Early Horizon might
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have promoted any such expansion. Paralleling his vision of Chavín as a proselytizing cult, Burger invokes and contrasts the processes underlying the dispersals of Sanskrit and Latin, both of which he interprets as intimately and formally associated with the spread of religions (an assumption we revisit in our Conclusion chapter here). Of the two, he argues that it is the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ that offers the best template by which we might understand the Chavín Early Horizon as a medium for a major language expansion in the Andes. He challenges, then, our own vision of a role in the Early Horizon for Renfrew’s subsistence/demography model of language expansion. George Lau continues the coverage of Ancash, but takes us on into the Early Intermediate Period and Middle Horizon. He sketches some alternative views on the nature of the Andean ‘horizons’, and on whether and how they may have promoted language expansions. He assesses the place of the Culle language, and poses serious questions as to how significant and widespread Wari’s impact in Ancash really could have been on various levels, language among them. A rather stronger vision of the nature of Wari, meanwhile, underlies Bill Isbell’s chapter, in which he draws upon more than three decades of archaeological insights and expertise on Wari, so as to evaluate its potential linguistic impact in the light of our own proposal. In particular he takes up the geographical correspondences that we suggest in our proposal with the Quechua ‘Continuous Zone’ (Fig. 1.1) from the north-central through to the southern highlands, from Ancash to Cuzco, and formerly also on the central and southern coasts. Isbell examines in some detail how close a fit there might be between archaeologists’ current understanding of Wari’s presumed imperial reach and linguists’ mappings of the distribution of Quechua by that time. Within this, meanwhile, Willem Adelaar homes in on one particular Quechua-speaking enclave, taking up another role of Wari hypothesized within our scenario: as an explanation for the idiosyncratic nature of the variants of Quechua still spoken in isolated pockets about the city of Cajamarca and in other islands of Quechua in northern Peru. These have long been a thorn in the side of the traditional classification of the Quechua family, so Adelaar explores this new possibility for clearing up the long-standing enigmas of why and when this form of Quechua ended up here, and precisely where it originated. There then follows a suite of chapters focusing on a key region and time-period, on which all of the new overarching scenarios for a crossdisciplinary Andean prehistory will ultimately stand or fall: the southern Andes, during the transitions from the Wari Middle Horizon into the Late Intermediate Period and the rise of the Incas. Gordon McEwan reviews the archaeological record of the Cuzco region specifically, for what clues it may offer us for the sequence of expansive processes, and with them language dispersals, in this crucial region. He begins even before Wari’s domination, with the Q’utakalli cermaic style and a tentative linguistic identity for its makers,
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and runs through to the turbulent times following Wari’s collapse, out of which the Incas’ own imperial destiny was eventually forged. Gary Urton, meanwhile, explores his own alternative proposal as to the linguistic impact of Wari expansion: that it could in fact have been two-fold, dispersing both Quechua and Aymara simultaneously. To this end, Urton invokes the distinctive Andean institutions of ‘complementary asymmetric dualism’, to explore whether they might not have linguistic correlates too. Specifically, he looks to the wari–llaqwash dyadism between mid-altitude, maize-cultivating wari, hypothesized as speaking Quechua, and higher-altitude, camelid-herding llaqwash speaking Aymara. Might this also explain one further Andean idiosyncrasy on the linguistic level too? For across the panoply of regional forms of the Quechua and Aymara families, it is the southernmost varieties of each, from the Cuzco region southwards, that show the fullest intermingling of all, beyond even the close structural convergence at an earlier stage between the Aymara and Quechua lineages as a whole (covered by Muysken’s chapter). Bill Sillar looks to a similar model of Quechua speakers dominating lower climes and Aymara speakers at higher altitudes, but extends it south of the Vilcanota drainage too, into the Titicaca Basin, as a potential explanation for the relatively late spread of Aymara there, within a wider survey of relationships across the La Raya watershed that divides the two. Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino also explores this relationship, but suggests an additional movement in the opposite direction on the part of the original Incas, and this on linguistic grounds. For he continues his fascinating interaction between linguistics and mythohistory, building upon his existing publications (e.g. Cerrón-Palomino 2007, 2008b) to focus now on Puquina, the likely candidate for the language of Tiyawanaku. Specifically, he presents the evidence for its use and status in early Inca Cuzco, which resonates with those key mythohistorical accounts that trace Inca origins back to Titicaca. To round off the book come two chapters that range over the final and furthest-flung of all the outposts of Quechua, and the extent to which the Incas were responsible for carrying the language there. Anne Marie Hocquenghem revisits Torero’s (1984) traditional explanation for how Quechua (or here, ‘Quichua’) reached highland Ecuador, based upon longstanding but disputed interpretations of accounts of the balsa-raft fleets of Chincha, and its significance as a trading power. Hocquenghem blends together historical sources from early chronicles, data on currents, winds and seafaring, and her own extensive research on the trade in Spondylus shells between northern Peru and southern Ecuador. The result is a set of very serious objections to the plausibility of Quechua reaching Ecuador by maritime trade out of Chincha during the Late Intermediate Period, as per Torero’s hypothesis. Instead she inclines to a hypothesis by which it was the Incas who
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took Quechua to Ecuador—only not their own Cuzco variety. Rather, could the Incas not have transplanted, as they were so wont to do, a population of Quechua speakers from the central coastal region of Peru into the Ecuadoran highlands? Hocquenghem seeks thus to account for both the particular nature of Ecuador Quechua and Torero’s initial instinct to look to Chincha for its source. With Elizabeth DeMarrais we then travel to quite the opposite end of Tawantinsuyu, to review a perhaps even later stage in Quechua expansion: into north-west Argentina. Again the linguistic data suggest that the origins of the language are not entirely straightforward, for while the bulk of it is obviously of Cuzco/Bolivian type, certain particularities point also to smaller inputs from further north. To clarify its origins, DeMarrais reviews a range of archaeological and historical evidence for precisely when it appears to have spread here, from which region(s) of the Andes its mix of speakers originally hailed, and which processes brought them to these southernmost limits of any Quechua speech—whether in the Inca period, or even into early colonial times. Many of the chapters here—not least those by Adelaar, Hocquenghem, McEwan and ourselves—put the traditional model under renewed scrutiny in its various aspects. It would be well, then, before turning to the chapters themselves, for us to review that traditional model, and draw attention to certain infelicities in the associations it proposes, which any improvement upon it will have to clear up. Later in this Introduction we shall provide just such a survey. First, though, more fundamental still is that we clarify briefly a number of principles from historical linguistics that are indispensable to an understanding of how language data can inform us about prehistory at all. Or in other words: for the purpose of archaeology, what does historical linguistics actually say, particularly in the Andes? (Readers with an interest in fuller treatments of these principles may find them in Heggarty 2007, 2008, Heggarty and Beresford-Jones 2010, and Heggarty and Renfrew forthcoming b.)
What Does Historical Linguistics Actually Say? Language Correspondences: Relatedness or Contact? Among those outside the discipline, historical linguistics suffers from one widespread and particularly misleading misconception. This is the assumption that its practitioners look for correspondences between different languages simply in order to demonstrate thereby that those languages have a common origin. Or in other words, to imagine that language correspondences necessarily indicate relatedness.
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In fact, there are two types of process that give rise to patterns of correspondences between languages, and not only are the mechanisms separate, they are all but the reverse of each other, not least in their footprints in the material culture record. 1
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The first type of correspondence between languages results from some expansive and ultimately divergent process. In this case one does indeed start out from a single original source language, which over time diverges into different ‘daughter’ languages. Given that all languages inevitably change through time, once the same original language is implanted in two or more different regions, and contacts are lost (or at least reduced) between the populations in each, their speech will not only continue to change, but will henceforth begin to do so in different ways from region to region. The emerging regional speech forms, then, while retaining much of their common linguistic inheritance, progressively lose more and more of their original correspondences. They thus diverge into different regional accents, dialects, and ultimately different languages—all imprecise terms which necessarily denote stages along a continuum of degree of linguistic divergence. The second process, conversely, begins with multiple different source languages, but these enter into a process of convergence over time, when their originally different speaker populations come into contact and interact with each other. These languages thereby acquire correspondences which they did not originally have, although they are typically of a quite different type, linguistically, to those correspondences that survive from relatedness.
It follows that simply identifying some correspondences between two languages means nothing specific in itself. Everything depends on which particular type of correspondence one finds. The business of comparative-historical linguistics is to compare languages to identify which type of correspondence they show (if any), and from that information to go on to work out the histories of those languages as of either divergence or convergence. Few examples are clearer than that of English, which certainly attests to an enormous convergence impact from Norman French, and learned borrowings from Latin. Nonetheless, there is not a shred of linguistic doubt that English is no Romance language, and that those convergence signals can be perfectly well distinguished from the overwhelming evidence of correspondences of a different type, which reveal that the linguistic ancestry of English lies elsewhere. They place English squarely within the Germanic family instead, derived by divergence from an original Proto-Germanic ancestor language. For the (pre)history of the British Isles, the implications could hardly be clearer as to the respective strengths of the demographic and cultural
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impacts from various quarters. Indigenous Celtic speech largely gave way to seaborne invaders from continental Europe: a defining core of linguistically ‘West’ Germanic Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and so forth. That core was soon refashioned first by Norse speakers from Scandinavia, namely ‘North’ Germanic; and then by the Normans, infusing a rich Romance veneer over the still Germanic core. The result is the language in which this book is written; to the historical linguist, every sentence is a reaffirmation of the past forces that created it. As this case of English well illustrates, the distinction between language divergence and convergence matters enormously for other disciplines, because the two processes reflect very different real-world (pre)histories of the human populations involved. Languages do not determine the external contexts in which their speaker populations live; on the contrary, languages, particularly the patterns of divergence and convergence between them, are moulded by and reflect those real-world contexts. While it may be contrary to popular perception, it is a founding axiom of linguistics that all natural languages are, to all intents and purposes, effectively equal in their communicative utility, in the sense that any language will adapt to whatever new purposes may be required by its speaker population (for clarification, see Heggarty 2007: 338, note 6). Whether certain languages ‘succeed’ over time, and spread and diverge into families, at the expense of others that become marginalized and extinct, is nothing to do with any intrinsic linguistic qualities of their vocabularies, grammars or sound systems. For speakers of any language to imagine so is only to delude themselves as to the relationship between language and ‘culture’. Any of a panoply of Quechua or Aymara derivational suffixes soon makes a mockery of attempts to measure a language’s ‘wealth’ by how many ‘words’ it can boast. Quechua borrows Spanish words, just as Spanish borrows English ones, for obvious real-world reasons that have nothing to do with the languages themselves. Had it been Atahualpa who had invaded and conquered Spain, it would be Spanish that would now be borrowing Quechua words en masse, not vice versa. Misleading Temptations: ‘Language and Culture’ and ‘Folk Etymology’ Another popular misconception among non-linguists well worth debunking here, which follows from precisely the same basic logic, is the idea that particular aspects of a language’s grammar or lexicon might offer us some peculiar insight into the ‘culture’ that spoke it, or even allow us thereby to identify it in the material culture record. For languages typically lose or gain new characteristics for purely linguistic reasons that have nothing whatever to do with culture. A fine example is that of English and German, whose contrasting grammars and lexicons might seem to imply some basis for interpreting
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corresponding cultural differences, but in fact of course do not. Like many European languages, German marks contrasts in grammatical ‘gender’, visible, for example, in the different articles der, die, and das used with the following nouns: ‘masculine’ der Mann, vs. ‘feminine’ die Frau, vs. ‘neuter’ das Boot. English, by contrast, uses indiscriminately the word the in each case: the man, the woman, the boat, for it has no true noun gender system. Yet English did actually inherit the original Germanic-language gender distinctions, from the same source that German did: their common Proto-Germanic ancestor language. That English has since lost these grammatical distinctions hardly denotes any fundamental change, at the point in history when this happened, in English speakers’ ability to discern the contrast between male and female, or their sense of the significance of that contrast, on a cultural or on any other level. Nor does it reflect any deep cultural gulf today in this respect between English speakers and their linguistic relatives in Germany. This is not to deny the importance of the linguistic contrast between the grammars and lexicons of English and German; on the contrary, the point is to stress that even so significant a linguistic difference as having grammatical gender or not is no sound basis upon which to interpret any corresponding cultural difference at all. Conversely, cultural differences may well exist in approaches to sexuality, for instance, between different populations across the continents who all speak English alike. But their common, genderless English grammar necessarily tells us nothing at all about any such cultural differences. To the linguist it is mere fanciful invention to conjure up supposed cultural correlates and pseudo-‘explanations’ for such linguistic differences, when we already know the real reason why English lost its gender distinction—and it patently had nothing to do with culture at all. Rather, it was largely because of what linguists call ‘phonetic attrition’, changes merely on the level of sound, and entirely independent of culture. (The fact that the phonetic impacts on Anglo-Saxon and Norse diverged somewhat also contributed to the ‘compromise’ outcome in English.) And such sound changes take place so gradually, on a (‘sub-phonemic’) level beyond conscious linguistic awareness, that when English was losing its grammatical gender system, its speakers would hardly have even noticed it happening. The same lesson emerges from Andean language examples too. Quechua grammar, for instance, also has no gender system. Furthermore it places adjectives before nouns (hatun wasi, big house), and makes extensive use of noun compounding (allqu wasi, dog-house). In each of these, Quechua grammar is identical to English, and entirely different to Spanish. Does that entitle us to say that Quechua speakers are culturally closer to English speakers than to Spanish speakers? Of course not: grammar has nothing to say on the matter, and no cultural inferences can be made upon it. Indeed, most Quechua speakers are speakers of Spanish too, but not of English.
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Consider also the famous difference between the two Quechua words that both correspond to the same English word ‘brother’, but differ depending on the point of view from which a brother is being referred to: the same man would be called tura by his sister, but wawqi by his brother. Much is made of this supposedly ‘cultural’ difference, and yet a moment’s linguistic reflection reveals that effectively the same distinction of the sexes also surfaces in English too, but by a different means: her brother vs. his brother. On this level, it is Quechua that does not make the distinction between his or her, in that in both cases it uses indistinguishably the same suffix -n (his/her). Spanish, meanwhile, marks the difference on neither level, using just su hermano in both cases. There are differences between the languages here in the contexts in which the male–female contrast is expressed (in English only in the third-person singular, but for all words), and in the means by which it is shown (in grammatical forms in English, in certain words in the lexicon in Quechua). For the linguist, these are patently just linguistic details of what different languages happen to prefer to express by particular means (grammar, lexicon, or paraphrase where necessary), and in which cases. Beguiling as they may seem at first sight, these illustrations show why it is so fanciful to imagine that one can infer even present, let alone past, cultural affiliations on the basis of particular grammatical or lexical characteristics, which obey linguistic not cultural determiners. (The temptation to the contrary continues to be attractive to anthropologists, not least in the Andes, hence Núñez and Sweetser’s (2006) narrow interpretations of space–time relationships in Aymara. Again, sanguine analysis of the linguistic detail, and the substitution of some simple synonyms, soon undermines their case. In English too, as in countless languages, the past came before us, just as much as the future lies before us.) Another form of pseudo-linguistics that exerts an abiding, fateful attraction—but is equally misleading and counter-productive—is what is all too well known to linguistics as ‘folk etymology’. In the Andes, countless terms in native languages, particularly placenames and personal names, have acquired ‘translations’ and thereby supposed ‘explanations’ of their origins: classic cases include the terms Aymara, Atahualpa, Cuzco, Apurímac, Ollantaytambo, Titicaca, and Potosí, to mention just a very few. Many such folk etymologies have become common currency among scholars of the Andean past of various disciplines; but for their linguist colleagues—those really in a position to judge—they are little more than old wives’ tales. Popular perception is rightly wary of equivalent folklore in meteorology or medicine, for example. It is regrettable for Andean prehistory that much less restraint is exercised, and far too much credence accorded, to folk etymologies, just as to ‘language as culture’ myths, which abound nowhere more than here. In simple cases, etymologies can of course be self-evident and reliable, provided that the words in question remain in use today in languages fully
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attested and whose grammatical and sound systems are well understood: Inkallaqta, Paqariqtambo, or forms so simple as khipu (‘knot’), for instance. The origins of many other terms, however, are much less clear cut, and uncovering them reliably is a far more demanding exercise. However attractive or plausible the supposed etymologies may seem superficially, and on apparently good authority, scholars without specifically linguistic training should be under no illusions. There is a whole science of linguistic analysis to which competence in this matter necessarily falls. A reliable etymology may well require thorough investigation on a gamut of levels for which it is necessarily linguistics alone that possesses the appropriate analytical framework: a sophisticated panoply of phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and historical linguistic analysis. Even a single term may require an article in itself to make for a sufficiently thorough analysis of its origins, and to exclude a raft of rival folk etymologies: witness the whole chapters in the authoritative work on Andean etymologies, Cerrón-Palomino’s Voces del Ande (2008b). Precisely the trap for those without linguistic training is not even to be aware of any of the dozens of questions to be asked before jumping to conclusions in fact immediately invalidated by the very nature of the languages in question. In the Andes especially, the pitfalls are multiplied by the enormous inconsistencies between the sound and spelling systems of Spanish and native Andean languages: any of c, k, or q may correspond (all but randomly) to any of six different sounds (and thus words) in Quechua or Aymara, for example. Further complexity is added by almost five centuries of sound change in all the languages concerned, and across deep gulfs of regional differences within language families like Quechua. Native speakers, moreover, are anything but immune to such pitfalls, and nor were colonial chroniclers. On the contrary, in most cases they are precisely the sources who invented and convinced themselves of the ‘folk etymologies’ in the first place. It is no guarantee at all, then, that an etymology is given in a Spanish chronicle and repeated in other secondary sources, even those that may seem perfectly sound on other levels of analysis. To any linguist, it is no surprise that plenty of the etymologies offered even by ‘El Inca’ Garcilaso, for example, turn out to be clearly erroneous (Cerrón-Palomino 2004). So too do many of those proposed in the dictionary of the self-styled ‘Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua’ in Cuzco (as exposed by Cerrón-Palomino 1997). Etymologies are likely to be sound bases upon which to build inferences on the past only when backed up by sanguine, well-informed, and thorough linguistic analysis on all relevant levels. Even then, the true origin may simply be impossible to confirm. Many key terms in the Andes remain to be researched to the necessary level of detail. In the meantime, unsuspecting scholars from other disciplines who place trust in supposed meanings or
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translations, cited by chroniclers or other authors without credentials in modern linguistics, do so at their peril. Fanciful folk etymologies can only undermine, far more than support, any interpretations of prehistory raised on their tottering foundations. Language Families: Expansion and Divergence We must plot a course, then, that steers well clear of the Scylla of folk etymology and the Charybdis of ‘language and culture’ assumptions. Rather, the level on which languages do reflect the real-world forces that operate upon the populations that speak them is an entirely different one in linguistic analysis: that of the relationships between languages as a whole. Certainly, any convergent interactions between languages, and particularly any territorial expansion that then leads a language to diverge into a wider family, are indeed entirely a function of demographic, social, cultural and political forces or ‘processes’. It is these forces, created by and acting upon the communities that speak those languages, that can bring them together or break them apart, or lead a population to switch from one language to another. The relationship here is eminently one of cause-and-effect: real-world processes leaving linguistic effects. Among the relevant processes are many that can affect the size, density, and growth of a population; the degree and nature of its contact with, or isolation from, other populations; and its relative sociocultural or political power and/or prestige. It is important to re-emphasize that these processes are external to language itself, and do not generally determine which precise language changes occur. They cannot confidently explain why English lost gender while German did not, or why German lost the distinct