Our understanding of the initial period of agriculture in the southwestern United States has been transformed by recent discoveries that establish the presence of maize there by 2100 cal. B.C. (calibrated calendrical years before the Christian era) and document the processes by which it was integrated into local foraging economies. Here we review archaeological, paleoecological, linguistic, and genetic data to evaluate the hypothesis that Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) farmers migrating from a homeland in Mesoamerica introduced maize agriculture to the region. We conclude that this hypothesis is untenable and that the available data indicate instead a Great Basin homeland for the PUA, the breakup of this speech community into northern and southern divisions Ϸ6900 cal. B.C. and the dispersal of maize agriculture from Mesoamerica to the US Southwest via group-to-group diffusion across a Southern UtoAztecan linguistic continuum.early agriculture ͉ migration ͉ US Southwest ͉ Mesoamerica ͉ Uto-Aztecan

A truism in anthropology is that hunters and gatherers are mobile and agriculturalists are sedentary. Factors affecting residential mobility are examined using data from a Rarámuri (Tarahumara) community of residentially mobile agriculturalists in northern Mexico who move among principal residences, growing‐season residences associated with distant fields, winter locations, and a ceremonial center. This case indicates that the unilineal model from mobile hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture must be broadened and that economic factors alone do not totally determine settlement patterns. Explanatory models related to the causes of sedentism are considered.

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The internal structure of the Uto-Aztecan language family has been debated since the late 19th century, when the historical relationships among all of its major subdivisions were first recognized. Alexis Manaster Ramer’s identification in 1992 of a phonological innovation shared by languages belonging to the four northernmost subfamilies led to the acceptance of these languages as a genetic linguistic unit called Northern Uto-Aztecan, but no consensus has emerged regarding the organization into higher-level subgroups of the remaining five subfamilies. In this essay, I argue in support of a perspective, originally developed by Terrence Kaufman, that the languages in these subfamilies also constitute a genetic unit, Southern Uto-Aztecan, based on two shared, sequential innovations: *-n- > *-r- and *-ŋ- > *-n-. Key to my argument is the reconstruction of a Proto-Uto-Aztecan liquid phoneme with **[-r-] and **[-l-] as its allophones, which clarifies the diachronic relationships among reflexes of **-n-, **-ŋ-, and **-r- in the daughter languages. The model that I propose offers a parsimonious solution to several perennial issues in Uto-Aztecan historical phonology and a possible explanation for the absence of a liquid phoneme in the Numic languages.