Editing Huastec people

{{Short description|Indigenous people of Mexico}}
{{Infobox ethnic group|
|group=Huastec<BR>'''''Tenek'''''
|population= Approximately 66,000 (INAH)–150,000 (Ethnologue 1990)
|popplace=[[Mexico]] ([[San Luis Potosí]]: [[Veracruz]]: [[Tamaulipas]])
|rels= [[Roman Catholicism]]
|langs=[[Wastek language|Wastek]], [[Spanish language|Spanish]]
|related=[[Maya peoples]]
}}
The '''Huastec''' {{IPAc-en|ˈ|w|ɑː|s|t|ɛ|k}} or '''Téenek''' {{Pronunciation-needed}} (contraction of ''Te' Inik'', "people from here"; also known as '''Huaxtec''', '''Wastek''' or '''Huastecos''') are an [[Indigenous people of Mexico]], living in the [[La Huasteca]] region including the [[Mexican state|state]]s of [[Hidalgo (Mexico)|Hidalgo]], [[Veracruz]], [[San Luis Potosí]] and [[Tamaulipas]] concentrated along the route of the [[Pánuco River]] and along the coast of the [[Gulf of Mexico]].

There are approximately 66,000 Huastec speakers today, of which two-thirds are in [[San Luis Potosí]] and one-third in [[Veracruz]],<ref>INAH, p. 56</ref> although their population was probably much higher, as much as half a million, when the Spanish arrived in 1529.<ref>Ariel de Vidas, p. 57</ref>

The ancient [[Huastec civilization]] is one of the [[pre-Columbian]] [[Mesoamerica]]n cultures. Judging from archaeological remains, they are thought to date back to approximately the 10th century BCE, although their most productive period of civilization is usually considered to be the [[Mesoamerican chronology|Postclassic era]] between the fall of [[Teotihuacan]] and the rise of the [[Aztec]] Empire. The Pre-Columbian Huastecs constructed [[temple]]s on [[Mesoamerican pyramid|step-pyramid]]s, carved independently standing sculptures, and produced elaborately painted pottery. They were admired for their abilities as musicians by other [[Mesoamerica]]n peoples.

About 1450, the Huastecs were defeated by Aztec armies under the leadership of [[Moctezuma I]]; the Huastecs henceforth paid tribute to the Aztec Empire but retained a large degree of local self-government.

The Huastecs were conquered by the [[Spanish Empire|Spanish]] between 1519 and the 1530s. After the Spanish Conquest, many Huastecs were sold as slaves in the Caribbean by the Spanish.<ref>Sandstrom, Alan R., and Enrique Hugo García Valencia. 2005. ''Native peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico''. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.</ref>

The first grammatical and lexical description of the Huastec language accessible to Europeans was by [[Friar|Fray]] [[Andrés de Olmos]], who also wrote the first such grammars of [[Nahuatl]] and [[Totonac]].

==Migration history==

===Splitting from the rest of the Maya===
[[Image:Stavenn Huastec 00.jpg|thumb|left|Huastec stone sculpture – [[AMNH]]]]
[[Image:HuastecaMaleBellasArtes.JPG|thumb|upright|Replica of statue located in [[Metro Bellas Artes]] in [[Mexico City]]. The accompanying plaque translates to "MASCULINE FIGURE – Huasteca Culture – [[Mesoamerica#Postclassic|Early Post Classic]] – Description: From [[Naranjo, Veracruz]]. Possible representation of [[Quetzalcoatl]] wearing a conical cap with a skull in front and long earflaps, characteristic elements of the Huastec."]]
Studies of language change, especially [[glottochronology]] (that is, words changing in form or being replaced by borrowed synonyms), have given{{citation needed|date=October 2013}} linguists the tools to estimate the point in time when many pairs of languages diverged from their common ancestral tongue.  The procedure depends on the assumption that languages change, in the absence of widespread literacy, at a constant rate.

Of all the languages descended from [[Proto-Mayan]], the proto-Huastecan language was the first to split from Mayan proper.  The second split, in the non-Huastecan main branch, was between proto-Yucatecan, now spoken across the [[Yucatán Peninsula]], and the ancestors of all other Maya languages. The only other language, besides Huastec, which arose from proto-Huastecan was [[Chicomuceltec]] (also called Cotoque), a language once spoken in [[Chiapas]] near [[Comitán]], but now extinct.

Linguists have approximated that the precursor to the language of the Huastecs diverged from the [[Proto-Mayan]] language between 2200 and 1200 BCE.  Linguist [[Morris Swadesh]] posited the later date as the latest possible time for this split to have occurred, and gave the [[Wastek language|Huastec]]/[[Chicomuceltec]] ''inik'' ("man") versus other-Maya ''winik'' as a typical contrast.<ref>Wilkerson, p. 928</ref> McQuown suggests 1500 BCE, Manrique Castaneda 1800 BCE, and Dahlin 2100 BCE as the most likely dates for the split.<ref>Ochoa, p. 40; Dahlin, p. 367</ref> Kaufman's proposed date of about 2200 BCE would require two regular phonological (sound) changes that are attested in all Maya languages, "r" changing to "y" and "q" to "k", to have happened independently after the split, in both the Huastec/Chicomuceltec branch and in the branch of all other [[Mayan languages]].<ref>Campbell and Kaufman, p. 195</ref>

Robertson's work on verb [[affix]]es in the Mayan languages implies that the Huastecs were in contact with the proto-[[Tzeltal language|Tzeltal]] branch of Mayan.  In [[Proto-Mayan]], [[Ergative-absolutive language|absolutive]]s could be marked either by a [[prefix]] or a [[suffix]], depending on the presence of a [[Grammatical tense|tense]]/[[Grammatical aspect|aspect]] marker.  This feature was retained in [[Q'anjob'al language|Q'anjob'al]] (a Maya language, spoken in the [[Cuchumatanes]] mountains of [[Guatemala]]), but lost in other branches. (Yucatecan always uses a suffix for absolutives, while [[Kʼicheʼ language|Kʼicheʼ]] always uses a prefix.)  Huastec appears to have been influenced by proto-Tzeltal, resulting in such innovations as the [[preposition]] ''ta'', used with the object of a [[verb]] in the [[grammatical person|third person]].<ref>Robertson, p. 307</ref> If, as seems likely, the Huastec-Maya split occurred around 2000 BCE, the Huastecs probably did not travel far from the Guatemala-Chiapas borderlands until after 1100 BCE, more or less, by which time the proto-Tzeltalans had been established as a separate branch.

===Art===
The Huastec people historically lived north of the Totonacs in the northeastern corner of Mesoamerica, which helped their influence with distinct style of art. Their art was influenced by the coastal area resulting in shell artifacts.

Amongst their art they also made pots, gaming stones, platform pipes, and sculptures. These items were often made from shells and made into shape of human heads, engraved shell gorgets, fan headdresses, and of hunchbacked humans. <ref>{{cite book |last=Snow |first=Dean R |year=2010 |title=Archaeology of Native North America |pages=255, 25 |publisher=Prentice Hall |isbn= 	9780136156864 }}</ref>

[[Image:Huastec statue Tampico Inv D94-20-600.jpg|thumb|upright|Huastec statue from the [[Tampico]] Region, 14th–16th centuries]]

===Arrival in the Huasteca region===

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

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

One nexus of carved iconographic traditions, the "yoke-palm-axe" complex, was found from [[Jaina (Maya site)|Jaina Island]] in coastal [[Campeche]] to the Huasteca (and in between, in Aparicio, Veracruz), in association with the pelota [[Mesoamerican ballgame|ballgame]], decapitation, and tooth mutilation;<ref>Ochoa, p. 43</ref> however, this may reflect coastal trade contacts after the Huastecs were established in the Huasteca.

===Huastec–Maya separation===
Proto-Maya, the common ancestor of all Maya languages, was probably spoken in west-central Guatemala, around the highland pine-oak forests of the Cuchumatanes mountain chain:  north of the [[Motagua River|Motagua]] and [[Grijalva River|Grijalva]] river valleys, through patches of cloud forest, and down to the edge of the tropical forest lowlands near the [[Ixcán River|Ixcán]] and [[Chixoy River|Chixoy (Negro)]] rivers, which flow into the [[Usumacinta River]].<ref>Campbell and Kaufman, p. 191</ref> Evidence that this region was the Maya "heartland" include its being located near the center of present-day language diversity of the Maya language family (and therefore requiring the minimum number of moves to place the languages in their current locations), the fact that proto-Maya included words for flora and fauna from both highland and lowland areas, and the debatable idea that it is easier for a group of people to spread from a highland region to a lowland one than vice versa.<ref>Dahlin, p. 370</ref> Not all archaeological evidence agrees with this conclusion: there are older, unbroken ceramic traditions from [[Loltun Cave]] in Yucatán, as well as [[Cuello]] in Belize, which suggest alternative Maya homelands.<ref>Dahlin, p. 371</ref>

[[Image:HuastecRoute.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|Approximate routes and dates of the proto-Huastec and other Maya-speaking groups]]

Whether the proto-Huastecs split from the rest of the Maya in 2200 or in 1200 BCE, the separation occurred at least a millennium before the rise of classic Maya culture.  It is no surprise, therefore, that the word "to write" is different in proto-Huastec ''(θuc-)'' and in the other Maya language branch ''(c’ib)''.<ref>Kaufman, p. 102</ref>

2000 BCE is a reasonable date for the Huastec/Maya split, and the slopes of the Cuchumatanes range as a reasonable location for the speakers of proto-Maya, it seems likely that the split occurred after these proto-Maya speakers (or a portion of them) began to migrate north, probably along the [[Usumacinta River]], and before the two groups resulting from the split began to move in opposite directions: the proto-Huastec speakers moving northwest (and, soon thereafter, the proto-[[Chicomuceltec]] west into the Chiapas highlands), and the proto-Yucatec/other Maya-speakers spreading northeast (one branch of which became [[Chontal Maya language|Chontal]], presumed by many from its widespread loan words and hieroglyphic evidence to be the dominant language of the classic Peten Maya heartland) (see Fig. 1).  While we have no direct archaeological evidence to explain the split itself, we can assume by linguistic evidence that contact was soon cut off between the two groups, despite there being no geographical feature that would automatically isolate them from each other.

The intervening feature, then, was likely a powerful linguistic-cultural group.  What group occupied the Usumacinta River-Gulf Coast lowlands (mainly in today's Mexican state of Tabasco) between 2000 BCE (when the proto-Huastecs began their journey) and 1000 BCE (by which time the proto-Yucatecs had arrived in Yucatán, the Chicomuceltecs had been isolated from the Huastecs,<ref>Kaufman, p. 111</ref> and the Huastecs were arriving in central Veracruz)?  Most scholars propose that this region was inhabited by speakers of the Mixe–Zoque family.  While speakers of [[Mixe–Zoquean languages]] are today confined to the mountains of northeast [[Oaxaca]], along the backbone of the [[Isthmus of Tehuantepec]], and into extreme western Chiapas, it is likely that they once occupied the entire Gulf Coast lowland from the isthmus to the Tuxtla mountains – in other words, the [[Olmec]] heartland, soon dominated by the presumably Mixe–Zoque-speaking Olmec civilization of about 1400 to 500 BCE.  One line of evidence that the Olmecs spoke [[Mixe–Zoque languages|Mixe–Zoque]] are the words that the proto-Huastecs borrowed from proto-Mixe–Zoque as they passed through the southern Gulf lowlands;<ref>Campbell and Kaufman, p. 191</ref> for example, ''ciw'', meaning "squash."<ref>Robertson, p. 309</ref>  
[[Image:HuilocintlaHuasteca.JPG|thumb|upright|Replica of bas relief image in [[Metro Bellas Artes]] in [[Mexico City]]. The accompanying plaque reads "STELA DE HUILOCINTLA – Huasteca culture – [[Mesoamerica#Late Classic|Late Classic Period]] – Description: Replica from [[Huilocintla]], [[Veracruz]]. An animal licking up the blood of the mouth of a priest who sacrificed himself."]]
Thus, there is some reason to ascribe the linguistic isolation of early Huastecs from other Maya speakers to proto-Olmecs speaking a Mixe–Zoque language, themselves recently arrived after migrating northward from the Soconusco region of the Pacific coast and across the isthmus of Tehuantepec.<ref>(Malstrom, p. 28</ref> There is much stronger evidence that the push for the Huastecs’ further migration up the Gulf coast was caused by the active presence of the early Olmecs (c. 1400 to 1100 BCE) of [[San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán|San Lorenzo]] and associated sites.  If this is true, most of the distance that the Huastecs migrated during their entire history, from Guatemala to the Huasteca, was traveled in only a century or two at most: the portion between the Olmec heartland around San Lorenzo, and the environs of San Luisa.

The Huastecs and the Yucatán Maya were reunited, in a way, during the late nineteenth century, when Huastec [[chicle]]-tappers and lumbermen were transported to the state of Campeche to work the similar forests there, mainly employed by U.S.-based companies.  A cross-Gulf steamship trade developed at the same time, with products such as salt exported from Campeche to Tuxpan (a Huastec-region port), and items such as sugar from Tuxpan to Campeche.<ref>Vadillo Lopez and Riviera Ayala, p. 96</ref>

==See also==
{{Portal|Indigenous peoples of the Americas}}
*[[Huastec State]]

==Notes==
{{reflist|2}}

==References==

*Ariel de Vidas, A.  2003. "Ethnicidad y cosmología: La construccion cultural de la diferencia entre los teenek (huaxtecos) de Veracruz", in UNAM, ''Estudios de Cultura Maya.''  Vol. 23.
*Campbell, L. and T. Kaufman.  1985.  "Maya linguistics: Where are we now?", in'' Annual Review of Anthropology.''  Vol. 14, pp.&nbsp;187–98
*Dahlin, B. et al.  1987. "Linguistic divergence and the collapse of Preclassic civilization in southern Mesoamerica".  ''American Antiquity.''  Vol. 52, No. 2, pp.&nbsp;367–82.
*INAH.  1988. ''Atlas cultural de México: Lingüística.''  Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
*Kaufman, T.  1976.  "Archaeological and linguistic correlations in Mayaland and associated areas of Mesoamerica." ''World Archaeology'' 8:101-18.
*Malstrom, V. 1985. "The origins of civilization in Mesoamerica: A geographic perspective", in L. Pulsipher, ed. ''Yearbook of the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers.''  Vol. 11, pp.&nbsp;23–29.
*Ochoa, L.  2003. "La costa del Golfo y el área maya: Relaciones imaginables o imaginadas?", in UNAM, ''Estudios de Cultura Maya.'' Vol. 23.
*Robertson, J. 1993. "The origins and development of Huastec pronouns."  ''International Journal of American Linguistics.'' 59(3):294–314
*Stresser-Pean, G.  1989. "Los indios huastecos." In ''Huastecos y Totonacas'', edited by L. Ochoa. Mexico City: CONACULTA.
*Vadillo López, C. and C. Riviera Ayala. 2003. "El tráfico marítimo, vehículo de relaciones culturales entre la región maya chontal de Laguna de Términos y la región huaxteca del norte de Veracruz, siglos XVI-XIX", in UNAM, ''Estudios de Cultura Maya.'' Vol. 23.
*Wilkerson, J. 1972. ''Ethnogenesis of the Huastecs and Totonacs.'' PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Tulane University, New Orleans.

== External links ==
{{commons category}}
*[http://www.everyculture.com/Middle-America-Caribbean/Wasteko-Orientation.html Orientation: Wasteko], Countries and Their Cultures

{{Indigenous peoples of Mexico}}
{{Pre-Columbian}}

{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Huastec People}}
[[Category:Huastec| ]]
[[Category:Mesoamerican cultures]]
[[Category:Sierra Madre Oriental]]
[[Category:Maya peoples]]