Itamu umumi yooya' ökiwni ('We will arrive as rain to you'): Evidence of Historical Relationships among Western Basketmaker, Fremont, and Hopi People

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Noel Morss (1931) and researchers into the 1990s defined Fremont Culture in terms of the "Anasazi," leaving unanswered the question of the ethnic and linguistic identity of the Formative Era Fremont people. This paper expands upon the findings of two recent studies: (1) Eastern Basketmakers (EBM) were Kiowa-speakers (Ortman and McNeil 2017) and (2) Western Basketmakers (WBM) were mainly Hopi-speakers (McNeil and Shaul 2018). In this paper, we argue that migrating Hopi-speaking farmers interacted with Kiowa- and Tiwan-speaking farmers in the Colorado-Utah borderlands. The supporting evidence includes: the exchange of loanwords between Tanoan (Kiowa, Tiwan) and Hopi speakers; the mixture of EBM II and WBM II archaeological material at Basketmaker II sites; and the blending of EBM and WBM variants of San Juan Anthropomorphic rock art styles. Finally, the paper examines a subtype of the Classic Vernal rock art style believed to be ancestral to historic Hopi Katsinas, agriculture, and rain-making rites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22930