The Mesoamerican Connection: Central American diffusion into the North American Southwest

”Diffusionism (anthropological definition): How ideas and objects are passed and spread from one culture to another; it leads to borrowing from one culture and modifying what is borrowed to [be compatible] with another culture, e.g., pottery styles; borrowing and modifying in diffusionism begins to explain cultural differences.”
Anthr 3, PCC Spring 2000
”What one group takes over from another is always adapted and reinterpreted according to the system of values of the group doing the receiving. Everything they receive from others they transform so as to give the innovations functions and meanings suited to their own purposes and cultural traditions.”
”Ancient Greece; From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times” by Thomas R. Martin.

Pic 1: Map of ancient trade routes in the American South West

Exotic items clearly imported from Central America have been repeatedly uncovered in the archaeological records within the traditional territory of the northerners collectively known aptly as the ‘Pueblo’, or town peoples. Such items include, but are not necessarily limited to, copper bells and macaw-parrots (the Hopi people of U.S. northern Arizona do indeed have a parrot clan - pic 3); utensils such as corn-grinding mano-metates; architectural features such as platform mounds, ball-courts (pic 4) and residences; and particularly their cultivated plants that originated in Mexico, especially the ‘Three Sisters’, maize-corn, beans and squashes. This influence is also seen in pottery styles and artistic iconography, the latter exemplified by the mysterious and ubiquitous T-shape symbol (as found in Pueblo doorways and tablita headdress, plus Meso-American funerary masks).

Pic 3: Parrot, Badger, Sun, Corn & Lizard Clan symbols, Tutuveni

As for other parallels, it is intriguing that the Hopis’ Masau’u (Masaaw) is their deity of fire, the temporal earthly plane and - that quintessential Meso-American theme - death, indicating a probable, distinct southern influence. He is also known as the ‘Skeleton Man’, further evoking Mexican regional imagery. Of course, rain-divinities have been understandably important to these farmers in both places. Another example is the Dineh (‘Navajo)’ of the same region who have traditions in common with both Pueblo peoples and so with Meso-Americans, indirectly at least. Apparently this has occurred through the same diffusion process, and although they are instead Athabaskan speakers like their Apache brethren, about a third of all Dineh clans are actually Pueblo in origin (and the former even have a Mexican clan).

Pic 5: Masaw kachina, Heard Museum

Disregarding the latter-day, contentious political-international border separating the United States of America from the nation of Mexico, there are not really many physical, geographical obstacles significantly impeding cultural diffusion. Admittedly, there are the immense Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and the river system of the Rio Grande separating the two (pic 7). But, items and concepts have flowed through more inhospitable deserts than these: The Silk Road through the Gobi and the camel caravans of the Sahara. Additionally, the Big River can be somewhat easily crossed in many places, thus the derogatory epithet ‘Wetback’ applied to those illegally wading across the shallows from the south. (Relatively recently, this permeability aggravates many North American citizens and creates job security for their Border Patrol...)

Pic 7: The Rio Grande at Albuquerque

Some southern concepts either never even arrived northward at all, or diluted until they were unknown to the northernmost Four-Corners area (where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet); the Puebloans did not possess any known jade, construct great pyramids and huge temple-complexes, nor use any written language, per se, like that of the Maya. Yet, astronomical observatories like those of the Maya may have been the intended purpose of the Four-Corners Pueblo towers, and several of these Southwestern pueblos - like Mesa Verde’s Cliff Palace and Chaco Canyon’s Pueblo Bonito - were quite large, reminiscent of Central American communities such as Teotihuacan, ad infintium.

Pic 9: Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde

Chronicles from both of these neighboring regions do indeed refer to epic migrations, though, seemingly such as that which occurred in the Southwest around 1300 CE. They also have made comparable references to their emergence from underworlds and searching for a Promised Land (known as Tuuwanasavi, the ‘Center Point’, in Hopi). The Zuni’s verbal histories mention, ”stone houses that may yet be seen...” just as the Aztec-Chichimeca state that, ”The remains of what [was] made and left behind... can still be seen, among them the structures of stone and earth...” While these are obvious references to the ruins in their two respective cultural areas, the verbiage still seems too similar to be entirely coincidental. As for the Hopi, they have used the term, “The footprints of our ancestors” to describe the ‘ruins’, an apt term for archaeological sites in both North and Central America.

Pic 11: Hovenweep ruins