Biological distance among Huastec, Veracruz, and Maya groups

Summary

The people of the Huasteca region have a shared language history with the Maya region. This connection has long been of interest to Mesoamerican archaeologists and linguists. They also traded with other populations along the Gulf Coast, such as those in Veracruz. To date, biological evidence for these connections remains limited. We compared Huastec (n= 62), Veracruz (n= 47), highland (n= 29) and lowland Maya (n= 63) groups to evaluate the effects of shared language and economic exchange on biological similarities using dental morphological observations. We also conducted non-metric multidimensional scaling to evaluate within-group variation among samples from each region. Our results show a high similarity between Huastec and Maya groups compared with Veracruz groups. The highland Maya is similar to both the Huastec and lowland Maya groups. Additionally, non-metric multidimensional scaling results suggest high variation among individuals from the Huastec sample from Tamtoc, indicating high immigration related to cultural processes. Our results are consistent with archaeological and linguistic evidence for similarities between Huastec and Maya groups. We further conclude that shared migration histories between Huastec, Veracruz, and Maya groups effect population structure based on morphological (phenotypic) data.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Tamtoc: characterizing an urban society. Recent investigations.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage