Title: GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGINS OF THE TARASCANS , By: Malmstrom, Vincent
H., Geographical Review, 00167428, Jan95, Vol. 85, Issue 1
Database: Academic Search Elite
GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGINS OF THE TARASCANS
ABSTRACT. After the destruction of the Aztec empire, the Spanish learned
that the Tarascans, or Purepecha, of Michoacan were culturally different
from their neighbors. The origin of the Purepecha continues to intrigue.
Clues include linguistic affinity and long-established trade links with
the Andean region and overseas contact to the south. The evidence indicates
a South American background for the Purepecha. Key words: cultural origins,
metallurgy, Michoacan, migration, Tarascans.
Shortly after Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital,
fell to the Spanish in 1521 the conquistadores turned their attention
westward to Michoacan, which was reputed to be rich in gold and silver.
At that time the inhabitants of the region received the name by which
they are generally known today, Tarascan, although this misnomer perpetuates
a misuse by the Spanish. On the demand of their conquerors, the hapless
natives proffered their daughters to the Spanish with the word tarhaskua
(father-in-law) to legitimize the relationship. However, when the Spanish
at best insensitively and at worst derisively used the word to identify
the natives, they quickly came to regard it as a term of derogation
and a cause of embarrassment.
Perhaps only after the conquest of Michoacan
was completed did the Spanish begin to perceive how different the people
were from their neighbors to the east. In some ways the former were
far more primitive than the Aztecs. They depended on hunting and fishing
to the degree that the Aztec term for the region, Michoacan, meant "place
of the fishermen." Their religion centered on the worship of fire
and of the moon, and they had a rudimentary counting system based on
five. Their calendar was a simplistic copy of that used by their neighbors.
The temples they constructed looked like nothing else in Mesoamerica;
their language was unrelated to that of any people in the region; and
they manner of dress differed markedly from all other indigenous peoples
in Mexico. Yet in one impressive way they were more advanced than any
of their neighbors. They were skilled workers of gold, silver, and copper
who possessed weapons and tools of metal, in contrast with all other
Mesoamerican peoples who employed obsidian and flint for those purposes.
Already perplexed by attempts to reconcile the presence of people in
the New World with Biblical accounts of the lost tribes of Israel, the
Spanish realized that the Tarascan question added an entirely new dimension
to the debate about human origins in the western hemisphere.
THE MIGRATION LEGEND
Soon after the initial excesses of the conquest, certain Spanish clerics
began to inquire into the background of the Tarascans. Notable among
them was Don Vasco de Quiroga, known to the Indians as Tata Vasco, or
Father Vasco, who as their champion and protector literally became their
patron saint. At that time the Spanish learned that the Tarascans called
themselves Purepecha, which in their tongue meant "the latecomers"
or "the recent arrivals." The term piqued the Spaniards' curiosity
and they immediately set about questioning the elders of the tribe as
to where they had come from and when. As a preliterate people totally
dependent on oral tradition, the Purepecha had no way to record their
history in written form, except by drawing pictures. Consequently the
Spanish had them summarize the legend of their migration on a piece
of linen called the Lienzo de Jucutacato, which was not rediscovered
until the 1870s (Craine and Reindorp 1970, x). It purports to explain
how the Purepecha journeyed from a homeland far to the south to their
current abode in Michoacan. Though historically the Lienzo is considered
a priceless document, geographically it has to be one of the most farfetched
reconstructions.
Identifying Cuzco, Peru, as the point of origin--largely
it seems, at the suggestion of the Spanish interrogators--the Purepecha
elders asserted that their forbears had wandered for many moons before
reaching the mouth of a great river. The Spanish concluded that it must
have been the Orinoco, whence the journey continued by sea, reputedly
on the backs of turtles. The Spanish dismissed that naive explanation
as poetic license, and their next question sought to pinpoint the location
of the landfall. In turn, the Purepecha quickly identified it as Veracruz
on the Gulf of Mexico. When asked how they passed through the territory
of their mortal enemies, the Aztecs, on the way westward to Michoacan,
the Purepecha responded that the Aztecs had come with them, a suggestion
that the two groups had once been friendly. Other sources suggest that
the wanderings of the Purepecha started instead in the legendary Seven
Caves of Chicomoztoc in the northern desert of Mexico, which in effect
identifies the group as Chichimec cousins of the Aztecs.
If the fanciful Lienzo lacks credibility as a
reliable geographical source, it can probably be ascribed to a combination
of the Spaniards' own limited knowledge of geography, the manner in
which they suggestively posed their questions, and the natives' apparent
eagerness to please. In this light the fact that the maritime part of
the venture was supposedly accomplished on the backs of turtles is scarcely
less strange than is the route reputedly taken by the migrants!
GEOGRAPHY OF MICHOACAN
That the origins of the Purepecha remained shrouded in doubt after the
recounting of the legend is not surprising. On the other hand, the Spanish
soon became familiar with the geography of the Purepecha region as they
probed ever more deeply into Michoacan to ferret out its mineral wealth.
They discovered that the territory the Purepecha occupied could be divided
into three different areas (Fig. 1). In the north, stretching across
part of the Mexican plateau, was a low, subhumid zone fronting on lakes
Chapala and Cuitzeo and on the basin of Jalisco. Through the middle
ran a higher, moister band of cool forestlands, a part of the Transverse
Volcanic Axis, dotted with hundreds of cinder coves and punctuated by
several sizable lakes. Draining toward the south was the Rio Balsas
depression, a virtual hell that constituted the hottest and driest place
in all Mexico, an area largely separated from the ocean by the ridges
of the Sierra Madre del Sur. Not surprisingly, the Spanish found that
the cooler, moister upland forest region was the preferred residence
of the Purepecha, who had all but avoided settling in the Balsas depression,
a pattern still reflected in the distributions of population and native
languages in Michoacan as well as their principal religious centers
and political capitals (Fig. 2) (Brand 1943; Stanislawski 1947).
On the basis of the distribution of Purepecha
place-names, the area they inhabited at the height of their political
expansion embraced the bulk of the present-day state of Michoacan and
adjacent portions of the states of Guanajuato, Queretaro, and Guerrero
(Fig. 3). Although some sources suggest that a part of eastern Jalisco
had also been ruled by the Purepecha, the total absence of their place-names
in that region today would mean that their presence had been wholly
expunged by the time of the Spanish conquest. However, the conclusion
is unacceptable because of their continued presence in other areas that
were far more subject to the pressure of other peoples. On the other
hand, place-names are not infallible evidence, and they are thoroughly
confused in the southwestern coastal area of Michoacan (Brand 1960,
185-202). Probably the single natural region that coincides most closely
with the Purepecha heartland is the drainage basin of the Balsas river
system. The Rio Balsas has a drainage area of 112,320 square kilometers,
the second-largest watershed of any Pacific-draining river in Mexico.
The annual discharge is more than 2 billion cubic meters, which definitely
qualifies the Rio Balsas as the largest west-coast river in Mexico (Tamayo
1976, 135-140).
Initially, the most generally accepted scenario
for the presence of the Purepecha in Michoacan and their admittedly
late arrival there is that they were Chichimecs, nomadic hunters and
gathers who pushed southward from the American Southwest or the Mexican
plateau, together with waves of Toltec and Aztec migrants (Craine and
Reindorp 1970, xiii). The fact that the Purepecha do not speak Nahuatl,
as do most of the other central Mexican peoples who are undoubtedly
descendants of the Chichimecs, was a source of concern to most scholars
who otherwise could find no cultural antecedents with whom to link them.
The absence of metallurgy among the Chichimecs, in contrast with the
proficiency of the Purepecha, posed another dilemma. The only substantiation
that anyone could find in a scenario of Chichimec origin was the candid
assertion of the Purepecha that they were ruled by the Chichimecs. Although
an externally imposed political system might well have been the product
of Chichimec conquest during the Toltec period, the premise does not
mean that the entire Purepecha people and culture had that origin.
AN ALTERNATIVE SCENARIO
The geographical evidence at hand is sufficient to favor a very different
explanation of the origins of the Purepecha people and culture. A primary
assumption is that the Purepecha language is related to Quechua, the
native tongue of the Incas (Adams 1991, 324). The obvious implication
is that the Purepecha did come from South America, though not necessarily
from Cuzco and certainly not by way of the Orinoco delta and Veracruz.
Although a recent classification of Mesoamerican languages relates Purepecha
to Chibcha in Colombia rather than to Quechua (Greenberg 1987), the
point remains the same--the closest antecedents of the Purepecha language
are found in South America. That they arrived by sea seems quite likely,
and if they had ventured to sail close to a great circle route, they
could have completed the voyage in something under 2,000 statute miles.
Such a practice may have been fairly standard on the basis of evidence
that the Indian navigators who took Pedro de Alvarado from Guatemala
to Ecuador followed a direct course (Coe 1960, 386). If the Purepecha
had made their landfall anywhere north of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec,
they would have been confronted with rugged headlands punctuated by
small mountain-backed coves and isolated sandy beaches. Few places except
the mouth of the Rio Balsas would have tempted them to land, and none
other would have beckoned them into the interior. On the other hand,
if they lacked a suitable craft for open-ocean sailing or if their provisions
were inadequate for the journey, they may have chosen to skirt the coast,
which would have added more distance to their voyage but would have
reduced the risks. Even so, the first fiver of any size along the Mesoamerican
coast, and thus the first gateway that promised them access into the
interior, would have been the Rio Balsas.
For Purepecha settlement to have so completely
filled the Balsas drainage basin the original inhabitants would have
had to move upstream into headwater areas rather than downstream from
a point of entry somewhere on the interior water divide. Once in so
hot, dry, and inhospitable a region as the Balsas depression, the Purepecha
would have been quick to recognize that the river they followed upstream
clearly emanated from the moist interior uplands, knowledge that would
have urged them to move into the interior as rapidly as possible. Nevertheless,
during their advance into the uplands, they could not have failed to
become familiar with the resources of the Balsas region, because mere
survival on the transit through the niggardly environment would have
posed a challenge, as it does today for the small number of people who
reside there. If they had been acquainted with metallic ores of various
kinds, as many Andean cultures were as early as 800 B.C., they would
have recognized them during their northward push and, once settled,
would have found adequate cause to exploit them. Because metal-deficient
volcanic formations extend virtually down to the banks of the fiver
itself, exploitation of the gold, silver, and copper ores necessarily
entailed a protracted journey to the very heart of the depression, an
onerous effort that would have been undertaken only with an extremely
compelling motivation. On the other hand, if the Purepecha moved into
Michoacan from any other direction, they would not have been tempted
to go down into the tierra caliente in a search for ores, especially
when they could not have been expected to recognize them in the first
place.
The argument for the Andean origin rests on evidence
in addition to that of language affinity, settlement pattern, and knowledge
of metallurgy. Other South American elements were in the Purepecha cultural
baggage. Their stirrup-handle teapots have a "distinct flavor of
Peru or Ecuador" (Craine and Reindorp 1970, xiii). A low structure
with a trapezoidal doorway in Arcelia, Guerrero, duplicates features
found among the Incas, but the site might be outside the Purepecha settlement
area (Adams 1991, 324). The site is 20 kilometers southeast of Tlalchapa,
near the border of the Aztec sphere of interest, and is well within
the fortified perimeter of Purepecha settlement. Three of the seven
main Purepecha border fortresses guarded the approaches to the Rio Balsas
depression (Fig. 4). Even though the depression was not the religious
and political core of the Purepecha, the mineral endowment gave it strategic
importance that warranted protection from Aztec incursion.
Another possible clue is the interlocking stonework
used to face the temples at Tzintzuntzan, the last Purepecha capital,
overlooking Lake Patzcuaro. The manner in which the individual stones
are custom cut and fitted to the adjacent stones, sometimes with as
many as eight distinct facets, is strongly reminiscent of the building
techniques employed in the Andes not only by the Incas but also by the
preceding Tiahuanaco civilization. The presence of this kind of stonework
both on Easter Island and the island of Kauai in Hawaii suggests a widespread
diffusion of the trait in the eastern Pacific region. In Michoacan these
specially cut stones, called xanamu, are recognized as hallmarks of
the Purepecha culture (Schondube 1981, 18).
Yet another clue is recognition and worship of
the Southern Cross constellation by the Purepecha. Because of its configuration,
the Purepecha visualized it as a fire drill and called it Parahtacuqua.
However, because of its declination, this asterism appears at a very
low angle as seen from Michoacan. Even in A.D. 800, which is a good
approximation for the time of the Purepecha migration from South America,
because the first evidence of metallurgy in Mesoamerica appears then
(Hosler 1988), it would have been seen at an altitude of between 14
degrees and 20 degrees above the southern horizon in western Mexico.
Due to precession, the Southern Cross has subsequently shifted 6 more
degrees to the south and now stands between 8 degrees and 14 degrees
above the horizon as seen from Patzcuaro. Even 1,200 years ago the Southern
Cross was not an especially noteworthy phenomenon on which to fix sights
at the latitude of Michoacan, yet it would have made quite a dramatic
spectacle when viewed from the southern hemisphere at an altitude between
40 degrees and 50 degrees. On the other hand, because its maximum visibility
occurs during March, whatever seasonal significance it might have had
originally, such as the onset of the low-sun dry season, would have
been totally lost when its worshippers changed hemispheres.
PUREPECHA MIGRATION
How realistic is it to postulate that the Purepecha are a group of late
arrivals from South America? In terms of accepted interpretations of
earlier contacts between the cultural hearths of the Andean and Mesoamerican
regions, the premise is not only very possible but also extremely likely.
As early as 1500 B.C. ceramic complexes started to appear on the Pacific
coast of Mexico whose stylistic antecedents strongly point to Ecuador
and Peru (Coe 1960; Adams 1991, 114). Around 1300 B.C. chamber tombs
patterned on South American prototypes appeared in the lower reaches
of the Santiago drainage basin in the present-day states of Nayarit
and Jalisco and adjacent parts of Colima. However, some of the most
elaborate and best preserved of these shaft tombs have been located
as far inland as El Openo in northwestern Michoacan, where the burial
customs seemingly continued at least to A.D. 500 (Adams 1991, 115).
In these same areas numerous clay figurines similar to those produced
by the Chimu and Mochica cultures of northern Peru, as well as star-shaped
maceheads reminiscent of the same region, have been discovered (Krickeberg
1982, 354). Many of the cultural traits of western Mexico have closer
parallels with Andean areas such as Colombia and Peru than they do with
the rest of Mesoamerica, and the cultural evolution of the Pacific region
must be considered as principally the product of outside influences
(Krickeberg 1982, 359).
In addition to the archaeological evidence is
the ethnographic evidence provided by Rodrigo de Albornoz, the royal
accountant of Cortes, who in a letter to the king of Spain in 1525 wrote
(Warren 1985, 8):
According to the Indians of Zacatula, at the
mouth of the Rio Balsas, their fathers and grandfathers had told them
that from time to time Indians had come to that coast from certain islands
on the south in large dugout canoes, bringing excellent things to trade
and taking other things from the land. Sometimes, when the sea was running
high, those who came stayed for five or six months until good weather
returned, the seas became calm, and they could go back.
That contact between Mesoamerica and Andean South
America began early and continued late obviously means that the intervening
journey was completed successfully numerous times, with people, goods,
and ideas being exchanged on repeated occasions. Of course, it would
be impossible to gauge either the volume or the frequency of movement
that passed along the Pacific coast in pre-Columbian times, but at the
time of Spanish conquest canoes capable of accommodating seventy persons
were being used (Coe 1960, 384). To hypothesize a migration between
Ecuador and Michoacan it becomes necessary to determine the number of
people required to form a credible nucleus for subsequent expansion
of Purepecha settlement into western Mexico and the number reasonably
expected to undertake such a seaborne relocation in terms of available
craft.
There are so many unknowns that answers can only
be theoretical. On the assumption that the preconquest population of
Purepecha speakers approximated that currently in the region, the total
population would have been more than 80,000. If the annual growth rate
of a subsistence-level farming-hunting-gathering people can be averaged
as .75 percent, then about seven or eight canoe loads of migrants arriving
in A.D. 800 would have been sufficient to generate the population that
existed in 1500. In other words, the scale of migration could easily
have been sufficient to generate a pre-Columbian population the size
of the current Purepecha-language group in Michoacan, and it could have
been small enough to have been accommodated on a flotilla of very reasonable
size.
For nearly 3,000 years before the Spanish conquest
of Mexico there seems to have a lively, continuing contact between Andean
South America and the western coast of Mesoamerica. The migration of
the Purepecha, who brought knowledge of metallurgy and a dialect of
Quechua, was a belated part of that exchange, dramatic and lasting,
but hardly an unexplained or surprising episode.
MAP: FIG. 1--Moisture-regime zones in the Tarascan
area.
MAP: FIG. 2--Pre-Columbian centers of the Tarascans.
MAP: FIG. 3--Extent of the Purepecha language
circa 1500.
MAP: FIG. 4--Mineral deposits and border fortresses
of the Tarascan region.
CITATIONS
Adams, R.E.W. 1991. Prehistoric Mesoamerica. 2d ed. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press.
Brand, D.D. 1943. An historical sketch of geography
and
anthropology in the Tarascan region. New Mexico
Anthropologist 6-7:37-108.
-----. 1960. Coalcoman and Motines del Oro: an
ex-distrito of
Michoacan. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Coe, M D. 1960. Archaeological linkages with
North and South
America at La Victoria, Guatemala. American Anthropologist
62:363-393.
Craine, E. R., and R. C. Reindorp, trans. and
eds. 1970. The
chronicles of Michoacan. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Greenberg, J.H. 1987. Language in the Americas.
Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press.
Hosler, D. 1988. Ancient west Mexican metallurgy:
South and
Central American origins and west Mexican transformations.
American Anthropologist 90:832-855.
Krickeberg, W. 1982. Las antiguas culturas mexicanas.
Mexico City:
Fondo de Cultura Economica.
Schondube, O. 1981. Las exploraciones arqueologicas
en el area
tarasca. La cultura purhe, ed. F. Miranda, 16-27. II Coloquio
de Antropologia e Historia Regionales, Colegio de Michoacan.
Stanislawski, D. 1947. Tarascan political geography.
American
Anthropologist 49:46-55.
Tamayo, J.L. 1976. Geografia moderna de Mexico.
Mexico City:
Editorial Trillas.
Warren, J. B. 1985. The conquest of Michoacan:
the Spanish
domination of the Tarascan kingdom in western Mexico,
1521-1530. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
~~~~~~~~
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