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Recent research conducted in southern Sonora, Mexico provides an opportunity to revisit debates about interaction between Mesoamerica and the North American Southwest (NAS). In the borderland between these traditions, communities show few signs of cultural amalgamation, instead exhibiting either an avoidance of overt identity markers or an emphasis on more local connections. This pattern contrasts with most discussions of Mesoamerican influence on the NAS that focus on regionally atypical centers of foreign goods consumption or evidence of foreign religious traditions in distant localities. By recentering on local contexts where cultural amalgamation is expected but minimal, we raise important questions about why more distant groups found Mesoamerican societies to be worthy of emulation. The results suggest researchers should devote equal attention to cases in which distinct identities are erased or suppressed as they do to cases in which social boundaries are maintained or created anew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author(s): Timothy A. Kohler (corresponding author) [1, 2, 3]; Michael E. Smith (corresponding author) [4]; Amy Bogaard [2, 5]; Gary M. Feinman [6]; Christian E. Peterson [7]; Alleen Betzenhauser [8]; [...]

Author(s): Timothy A. Kohler; Michael E. Smith; Amy Bogaard; Gary M. Feinman; Christian E. Peterson; Alleen Betzenhauser; Matthew Pailes; Elizabeth C. Stone; Anna Marie Prentiss; Timothy J. Dennehy; Laura J. [...]

For decades, the Huachuca agave, Agave parryi vat. huachucensis (Baker) Litde, has puz2led taxonomists, ethnobotanists and plant geographers alike. It occurs in "manchas" (patches) or clonal islands --mostly on limestone outcrops on knolls and ridges-- in a sea of apparendy suitable habitat dominated by Palmer's agave (Agave palmeri). Previous studies suggest that it was anthropogenically rather than naturally dispersed to establish clonal patches in these isolated habitats. Some botanists (such as Lindsay and colleagues) contend that Huachuca agaves--much like the Hohokam agaves-- were prehistorically cultivated in field landscapes and perhaps genetically domesticated at sites now part of Southeastern Arizona. Instead, we suggest that it may belong to a second, distinctive but complementary agave management system in curious tension with that of the Hohokam. Our review of Athapaskan and Uto-Nahua oral histories indicates that neither cultural-linguistic group currently identifies the Huachuca agave traditions as part of their own field agriculture. There is little archaeological evidence to suggest that Huachuca agaves were grown on terraces of the tradition that involved other anciently-cultivated agaves in southern Arizona or adjacent Sonora. As we will discuss in detail below, none of their genetically-distinctive clones remaining in grasslands, savannas and woodlands exhibit the morphological and chemical traits characteristic of nearly all other domesticated agaves. Instead, we propose that Huachuca agaves were transplanted for use by indigenous families who were primarily hunter-gatherers during the proto-historic or historic eras, yet were never extensively cultivated nor genetically selected for field crop production. We hypothesize that they may have undergone a proto-domestication process of natural selection in their translocated habitats, but that process was arrested by their stewards' abandonment of or forced departure from these areas of agave utilization. Our fieldwork identified several ecological, ethnobotanical and archaeological correlates of Huachuca agave populations. We found archaeological evidence of some Huachuca agave populations associated with roasting pits, agave knives and pigment-grinding slab metates, as well as with the particular plant species (beargrass, sotol, lemonade berry) required for traditional agave processing. They occur both altitudinaOy above and below wild Agave parryi ssp. parryi populations in the same geographic range. Nevertheless, these archaeological sites generally lacked any agricultural terrace features, pottery vessels, biological remains of other prehistoric crops, or larger "trough" metates used for grinding maize or seeds of other cultivated food crops. We provisionally concur with Gentry that the distribution of Huachuca agave clones appears to have been influenced by cultural diffusion, either by Western Apaches (Nde) bands in the 18th or 19th century, or earlier, by a mobile group called the Jocome in early Spanish documents, which some scholars identify as Athapaskan and others as Uto-Nahua. Notably, Padre Eusebio Kino reported that a Jocome leader was among those who attacked the sedentary Sobaipuri O'odham community of Santa Cruz de Gaybanipitea on the San Pedro River in the spring of 1698, suggesting that the Jocome of that era were at least allied with the 500 Apaches involved with this raid, and not with the O'odham themselves (Seymour 2016). Other highly-mobile Athapaskan hunter-gatherers--including those who largely roamed east of the Rio Grande until the 1740s--might have included the Inadahine "Mescal People" (Mescalero Apaches), and ancestors of those who became the two most south-westerly bands of Hai'iaha or Tcice "Red Pigment People" (Chiricahua Apaches) as they were later called in the nineteenth century. We conclude that Huachuca agaves were transplanted and maintained ex situ beyond their natural range, but that they do not at all fit the pattern of advanced domestication and terrace cultivation of the particular agaves grown by other Uto-Nahua peoples. If this pattern is verified, the Huachuca agave tradition might represent a tradition of agave "wifery" unique to the Sky Islands and the northern Sierra Madre Occidental, and distinctive from Hohokam use of other agave species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]