For too long, the Gulf Coast of Mexico has been dismissed by scholars as peripheral to the Mesoamerican heartland, but researchers now recognize that much can be learned from this regionÕs cultures. Peoples of the Gulf CoastÑparticularly those in Veracruz and TabascoÑshare so many historical experiences and cultural features that they can fruitfully be viewed as a regional unit for research and analysis. Native Peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico is the first book to argue that the people of this region constitute a culture area distinct from other parts of Mexico. A pioneering effort by a team of international scholars who summarize hundreds of years of history, this encyclopedic work chronicles the prehistory, ethnohistory, and contemporary issues surrounding the many and varied peoples of the Gulf Coast, bringing together research on cultural groups about which little or only scattered information has been published. The volume includes discussions of the prehispanic period of the Gulf Coast, the ethnohistory of many of the neglected indigenous groups of Veracruz and the Huasteca, the settlement of the American Mediterranean, and the unique geographical and ecological context of the Chontal Maya of Tabasco. It provides descriptions of the Popoluca, Gulf Coast Nahua, Totonac, Tepehua, Sierra „Šh–u (Otom’), and Huastec Maya. Each chapter contains a discussion of each groupÕs language, subsistence and settlement patterns, social organization, belief systems, and history of acculturation, and also examines contemporary challenges to the future of each native people. As these contributions reveal, Gulf Coast peoples share not only major cultural features but also historical experiences, such as domination by Hispanic elites beginning in the sixteenth century and subjection to forces of change in Mexico. Yet as contemporary people have been affected by factors such as economic development, increased emigration, and the spread of Protestantism, traditional cultures have become rallying points for ethnic identity. Native Peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico highlights the significance of the Gulf Coast for anyone interested in the great encuentro between the Old and New Worlds and general processes of culture change. By revealing the degree to which these cultures have converged, it represents a major step toward achieving a broader understanding of the peoples of this region and will be an important reference work on these indigenous populations for years to come.

In the last century historians and anthropologists interested in northwestern Mexico knew that Indians had inhabited four large islands in the Gulf of California. Since 1900 ethnohistorical and archaeological research has expanded knowledge of Indians on both sides of the Gulf. Much of that information pertains to the people living on the peninsula and mainland, and touches only incidentally on the islands. In this volume, Thomas Bowen presents historical and archaeological evidence for human use of 32 major Gulf islands. Native people may have played a significant role in shaping island ecosystems. Chronological data from the southern Gulf establishes a time depth for native people of ten millennia. New information from Seri oral history indicates Seri voyages far beyond Isla Tiburón, and Bowen shows the traditional assumption -- that most islands were beyond the range of native people – is wrong. Indians knew and exploited nearly every significant island in the Gulf. Bowen’s work touches on the question of initial human entry into the Americas. The Gulf may occupy a pivotal position in human dispersal in the Americas, and it is possible that evidence of this process has been preserved on some Gulf islands.

For too long, the Gulf Coast of Mexico has been dismissed by scholars as peripheral to the Mesoamerican heartland, but researchers now recognize that much can be learned from this region’s cultures. Peoples of the Gulf Coast—particularly those in Veracruz and Tabasco—share so many historical experiences and cultural features that they can fruitfully be viewed as a regional unit for research and analysis. Native Peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico is the first book to argue that the people of this region constitute a culture area distinct from other parts of Mexico. A pioneering effort by a team of international scholars who summarize hundreds of years of history, this encyclopedic work chronicles the prehistory, ethnohistory, and contemporary issues surrounding the many and varied peoples of the Gulf Coast, bringing together research on cultural groups about which little or only scattered information has been published. The volume includes discussions of the prehispanic period of the Gulf Coast, the ethnohistory of many of the neglected indigenous groups of Veracruz and the Huasteca, the settlement of the American Mediterranean, and the unique geographical and ecological context of the Chontal Maya of Tabasco. It provides descriptions of the Popoluca, Gulf Coast Nahua, Totonac, Tepehua, Sierra Ñähñu (Otomí), and Huastec Maya. Each chapter contains a discussion of each group’s language, subsistence and settlement patterns, social organization, belief systems, and history of acculturation, and also examines contemporary challenges to the future of each native people. As these contributions reveal, Gulf Coast peoples share not only major cultural features but also historical experiences, such as domination by Hispanic elites beginning in the sixteenth century and subjection to forces of change in Mexico. Yet as contemporary people have been affected by factors such as economic development, increased emigration, and the spread of Protestantism, traditional cultures have become rallying points for ethnic identity. Native Peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico highlights the significance of the Gulf Coast for anyone interested in the great encuentro between the Old and New Worlds and general processes of culture change. By revealing the degree to which these cultures have converged, it represents a major step toward achieving a broader understanding of the peoples of this region and will be an important reference work on these indigenous populations for years to come.

In 1981, UT Press began to issue supplemental volumes to the classic sixteen-volume work, Handbook of Middle American Indians. These supplements are intended to update scholarship in various areas and to cover topics of current interest. Supplements devoted to Archaeology, Linguistics, Literatures, Ethnohistory, and Epigraphy have appeared to date. In this Ethnology supplement, anthropologists who have carried out long-term fieldwork among indigenous people review the ethnographic literature in the various regions of Middle America and discuss the theoretical and methodological orientations that have framed the work of areal scholars over the last several decades. They examine how research agendas have developed in relationship to broader interests in the field and the ways in which the anthropology of the region has responded to the sociopolitical and economic policies of Mexico and Guatemala. Most importantly, they focus on the changing conditions of life of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. This volume thus offers a comprehensive picture of both the indigenous populations and developments in the anthropology of the region over the last thirty years.

An incredibly detailed account of Indigenous lifeways during the initial rounds of European exploration in south-central North America. Several hundred tribes of Native Americans were living within or hunting and trading across the present-day borders of Texas when Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions washed up on a Gulf Coast beach in 1528. Over the next two centuries, as Spanish and French expeditions explored the state, they recorded detailed information about the locations and lifeways of Texas’s Native peoples. Using recent translations of these expedition diaries and journals, along with discoveries from ongoing archaeological investigations, William C. Foster here assembles the most complete account ever published of Texas’s Native peoples during the early historic period (AD 1528 to 1722). Foster describes the historic Native peoples of Texas by geographic regions. His chronological narrative records the interactions of Native groups with European explorers and with Native trading partners across a wide network that extended into Louisiana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Foster provides extensive ethnohistorical information about Texas’s Native peoples, as well as data on the various regions’ animals, plants, and climate. Accompanying each regional account is an annotated list of named Indigenous tribes in that region and maps that show tribal territories and European expedition routes. “A very useful encyclopedic regional account of the Europeans and Native peoples of Texas who encountered one another during the relatively unexamined two hundred years before the Spanish occupation of Texas and the French establishment of Louisiana.” —Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Native peoples living around the Gulf of Mexico had much in common, from the time of the earliest hunter-fisher-gatherers onward. There have been hypotheses of prehistoric interaction between the southeastern United States and Mesoamerica, but explorations of the processes have been few. This volume chronicles the archaeological continuities and discontinuities along the Gulf Coast from Archaic through Postclassic/Mississippian times and later, including shell mounds/middens and estuarine adaptations, subsistence similarities, the relationship of early settlement and sea level rise, cultural complexity, early monumental construction, long-distance exchange relations, and symbolism and iconography. Many debatable issues are explored. Northeastern Mexico is a region relatively remote from the Mesoamerican heartland, as is coastal Texas from the southeastern United States. The connecting area of the south Texas/Mexican coast may have been too inhospitable for much habitation, thus inhibiting interaction, yet some artifact types and styles, not to mention food crops, crossed these boundaries. The long-distance diffusion of ideas of sociocultural complexity, food production, and monument construction are reexamined in Gulf Coast Archaeology with new data and wide geographic prespectives. This book is an important contribution to the hypothesis of prehistoric culture contact and interaction between native groups in North America and Mesoamerica, which has been an openly debated topic over the last century.

Second place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2003 Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City. The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca. This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.

Archaeology of Northern Mesoamerica comprises the tenth and eleventh volumes in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, published in cooperation with the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University under the general editorship of Robert Wauchope (1909–1979). Volume editors of Archaeology of Northern Mesoamerica are Gordon F. Ekholm and Ignacio Bernal. Gordon F. Ekholm (1909–1987) was curator of anthropology at The American Museum of Natural History, New York, and a former president of the Society for American Archaeology. Ignacio Bernal (1910–1992), former director of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico, was director of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico and also a past president of the Society for American Archaeology. Volumes 10 and 11 describe the pre-Aztec and Aztec cultures of Mexico, from central Veracruz and the Gulf Coast, through the Valley of Mexico, to western Mexico and the northern frontiers of these ancient American civilizations. The thirty-two articles, lavishly illustrated and accompanied by bibliography and index, were prepared by authorities on prehistoric settlement patterns, architecture, sculpture, mural painting, ceramics and minor arts and crafts, ancient writing and calendars, social and political organization, religion, philosophy, and literature. There are also special articles on the archaeology and ethnohistory of selected regions within northern Mesoamerica. The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.

Describes the history and culture of the Native peoples of the regions on either side of the border with Mexico