One Lineage, Nothing Else in Common

This grouping runs from Oregon to central Mexico and joins peoples whose lives had almost nothing in common. At the northern end are the Northern Paiute and the Shoshone of the Great Basin, foragers in one of the harshest environments in North America. In the middle are the Hopi, farming maize on the mesas of northern Arizona in permanent stone towns, and the Comanche, who from the eighteenth century built a mounted empire on the southern plains that constrained Spanish, Mexican and American expansion for a century.

At the southern end are the Wixarika and Raramuri of the Sierra Madre, and the Nahua, whose Aztec state ran the largest city in the pre-conquest Americas. Five ways of living, one language family. The grouping is nonetheless real: the relationship was demonstrated by the comparative method and is not in doubt. It records that the ancestors of all these peoples once spoke one language, and it records nothing whatsoever about what any of them believed, built or ate. Reading a family tree as a chart of cultural affinity is the commonest error made with entries of this kind, and this row is the clearest available demonstration of why it fails. It is worth adding what the relationship does license. Reconstructed vocabulary can indicate what the ancestral speech community had words for, and the presence or absence of maize terminology in that reconstruction is one of the arguments in the dispute about which way the family spread.