Uto-Aztecan, Language Families
Standing
Concerns Homeland Hypothesis
Currently States Either the Great Basin, with the spread running south, or northwest Mexico, with it running north.
Lyle Campbell's standard reference on Native American historical linguistics records two opposed accounts of Uto-Aztecan's homeland and direction of spread, argued mainly among specialists in Uto-Aztecan historical linguistics and archaeology since the mid-twentieth century. One places the homeland in the Great Basin of the western United States, with speakers later moving south into Mexico; the other places it in northwest Mexico, with speakers moving north into the Great Basin and the American Southwest. The direction matters beyond geography because it bears directly on the history of maize agriculture in North America: if the spread ran south, Uto-Aztecan speakers carried a hunter-gatherer economy into Mesoamerica and took up maize farming after arriving there from neighbouring farming peoples, while if it ran north, Uto-Aztecan speakers were already agricultural in Mexico and carried maize farming northward with them as they spread. Uto-Aztecan counts the Native American Church among the peoples speaking its languages, but the dispute recorded here is about population movement and agricultural history, not about any daughter tradition's own ceremonial practice. Neither direction can be independently confirmed because the same reconstructed vocabulary for maize and cultivation is compatible with either story, borrowed words look similar to inherited ones at this range, and the linguistic evidence alone cannot distinguish which population originated the connection.
Source American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America, Lyle Campbell