The colonization of North America by English speakers is one prominent example of a well-studied, historical connection between migration and ethnolinguistic frontier formation. Decades of historical research have shown, surprisingly, that while the borders separating Europeans and Native Americans were important, those that separated different British cultures were just as significant. Eastern North America was colonized by four distinct migration streams that originated in four different parts of the British Isles. When they touched down in eastern North America, they created four clearly bounded ethnolinguistic regions between about 1620 and 1750. The Yankee dialect was spoken in New England. The same region also had a distinctive form of domestic architecture—the salt-box clapboard house—as well as its own barn and church architecture, a distinctive town type (houses clustered around a common grazing green), a peculiar cuisine (often baked, like Boston baked beans), distinct fashions in clothing, a famous style of gravestones, and a fiercely legalistic approach to politics and power. The geographic boundaries of the New England folk-culture region, drawn by folklorists on the basis of these traits, and the Yankee dialect region, drawn by linguists, coincide almost exactly. The Yankee dialect was a variant of the dialect of East Anglia, the region from which most of the early Pilgrim migrants came; and New England folk culture was a simplified version of East Anglian folk culture. The other three regions also exhibited strongly correlated dialects and folk cultures, as defined by houses, barn types, fence types, the frequency of towns and their organization, food preferences, clothing styles, and religion. One was the mid-Atlantic region (Pennsylvania Quakers from the English Midlands), the third was the Virginia coast (Royalist Anglican tobacco planters from southern England, largely Somerset and Wessex), and the last was the interior Appalachians (borderlanders from the Scotch-Irish borders). Both dialect and folk culture are traceable in each case to a particular region in the British Isles from which the first effective European settlers came.15
The four ethnolinguistic regions of Colonial eastern North America were created by four separate migration streams that imported people with distinctive ethnolinguistic identities into four different regions where simplified versions of their original linguistic and material differences were established, elaborated, and persisted for centuries (table 6.1). In some ways, including modern presidential voting patterns, the remnants of these four regions survive even today. But can modern migration patterns be applied to the past, or do modern migrations have purely modern causes?
TABLE 6.1
Migration Streams to Colonial North America
The Causes of Migration
Many archaeologists think that modern migrations are fueled principally by overpopulation and the peculiar boundaries of modern nation-states, neither of which affected the prehistoric world, making modern migration studies largely irrelevant to prehistoric societies.16 But migrations have many causes besides overpopulation within state borders. People do not migrate, even in today’s crowded world, simply because there are too many at home. Crowding would be called a “push” factor by modern demographers, a negative condition at home. But there are other kinds of “push” factors—war, disease, crop failure, climate change, institutionalized raiding for loot, high bride-prices, the laws of primogeniture, religious intolerance, banishment, humiliation, or simple annoyance with the neighbors. Many causes of today’s migrations and those in the past were social, not demographic. In ancient Rome, feudal Europe, and many parts of modern Africa, inheritance rules favored older siblings, condemning the younger ones to find their own lands or clients, a strong motive for them to migrate.17 Pushes could be even more subtle. The persistent outward migrations and conquests of the pre-Colonial East African Nuer were caused, according to Raymond Kelley, not by overpopulation within Nuerland but rather by a cultural system of bride-price regulations that made it very expensive for young Nuer men to obtain a socially desirable bride. A bride-price was a payment made by the groom to the bride’s family to compensate for the loss of her labor. Escalation in bride-prices encouraged Nuer men to raid their non-Nuer neighbors for cattle (and pastures to support them) that could be used to pay the elevated bride-price for a high-status marriage. Tribal status rivalries supported by high brideprices in an arid, low-productivity environment led to out-migration and the rapid territorial expansion of the Nuer.18 Grassland migrations among tribal pastoralists can be “pushed” by many things other than absolute resource shortages.
Regardless of how “pushes” are defined, no migration can be adequately explained by “pushes” alone. Every migration is affected as well by “pull” factors (the alleged attractions of the destination, regardless of whether they are true), by communication networks that bring information to potential migrants, and by transport costs. Changes in any of these factors will raise or lower the threshold at which migration becomes an attractive option. Migrants weigh these dynamics, for far from being an instinctive response to overcrowding, migration is often a conscious social strategy meant to improve the migrant’s position in competition for status and riches. If possible, migrants recruit clients and followers among the people at home, convincing them also to migrate, as Julius Caesar described the recruitment speeches of the chiefs of the Helvetii prior to their migration from Switzerland into Gaul. Recruitment in the homeland by potential and already departed migrants has been a continuous pattern in the expansion and reproduction of West African clans and lineages, as Igor Kopytoff noted. There is every reason to believe that similar social calculations have inspired migrations since humans evolved.
Effects: The Archaeological Identification of Ancient Migrations
Large, sustained migrations, particularly those that moved a long distance from one cultural setting into a very different one, or folk migrations, can be identified archaeologically. Emile Haury knew most of what to look for already in his excavations in Arizona in the 1950s: (1) the sudden appearance of a new material culture that has no local antecedents or prototypes; (2) a simultaneous shift in skeletal types (biology); (3) a neighboring territory where the intrusive culture evolved earlier; and (4) (a sign not recognized by Haury) the introduction of new ways of making things, new technological styles, which we now know are more “fundamental” (like the core vocabulary in linguistics) than decorative styles.
Smaller-scale migrations by specialists, mercenaries, skilled craft workers, and so on, are more difficult to identify. This is partly because archaeologists have generally stopped with the four simple criteria just described and neglected to analyze the internal workings even of folk migrations. To really understand why and how folk migrations occurred, and to have any hope of identifying small-scale migrations, archaeologists have to study the internal structure of long-distance migration streams, both large and small. The organization of migrating groups depends on the identity and social connections of the scouts (who select the target destination); the social organization of information sharing (which determines who gets access to the scouts’ information); transportation technology (cheaper and more effective transport makes migration easier); the targeting of destinations (whether they are many or few); the identity of the first effective settlers (also called the “charter group”); return migration (most migrations have a counterflow going back home); and changes in the goals and identities of migrants who join the stream later. If we look for all these factors we can better understand why and how migrations happened. Sustained migrations, particularly by pioneers looking to settle in new homes, can create very long-lasting, persistent ethnolinguistic frontiers.
The Simplification of Dialect and Culture among Long-distance Migrants
Access to the scouts’ information defines the pool of potential migrants. Studies have found that the first 10% of new migrants into a region is an accurate predictor of the social makeup of the population that will follow them. This restriction on information at the source produces two common behaviors: leapfrogging and chain migration. In leapfrogging, migrants g
o only to those places about which they have heard good things, skipping over other possible destinations, sometimes moving long distances in one leap. In chain migration, migrants follow kin and co-residents to familiar places with social support, not to the objectively “best” place. They jump to places where they can rely on people they know, from point to targeted point. Recruitment usually is relatively restricted, and this is clearly audible in their speech.
Colonist speech generally is more homogeneous than the language of the homeland they left behind. Dialectical differences were fewer among Colonial-era English speakers in North America than they were in the British Isles. The Spanish dialects of Colonial South America were more homogeneous than the dialects of Southern Spain, the home region of most of the original colonists. Linguistic simplification has three causes. One is chain migration, where colonists tend to recruit family and friends from the same places and social groups that the colonists came from. Simplification also is a normal linguistic outcome of mixing between dialects in a contact situation at the destination.19 Finally, simplification is encouraged among long-distance migrants by the social influence of the charter group.
The first group to establish a viable social system in a new place is called the charter group, or the first effective settlers.20 They generally get the best land. They might claim rights to perform the highest-status rituals, as among the Maya of Central America or the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest. In some cases, for example, Puritan New England, their councils choose who is permitted to join them. Among Hispanic migrants in the U.S. Southwest, charter groups were called apex families because of their structural position in local prestige hierarchies. Many later migrants were indebted to or dependent on the charter group, whose dialect and material culture provided the cultural capital for a new group identity. Charter groups leave an inordinate cultural imprint on later generations, as the latter copy the charter group’s behavior, at least publicly. This explains why the English language, English house forms, and English settlement types were retained in nineteenth-century Ohio, although the overwhelming majority of later immigrants was German. The charter group, already established when the Germans arrived, was English. It also explains why East Anglian English traits, typical of the earliest Puritan immigrants, continued to typify New England dialectical speech and domestic architecture long after the majority of later immigrants arrived from other parts of England or Ireland. As a font of tradition and success in a new land, the charter group exercised a kind of historical cultural hegemony over later generations. Their genes, however, could easily be swamped by later migrants, which is why it is often futile to pursue a genetic fingerprint associated with a particular language.
The combination of chain migration, which restricted the pool of potential migrants at home, and the influence of the charter group, which encouraged conformity at the destination, produced a leveling of differences among many colonists. Simplification (fewer variants than in the home region) and leveling (the tendency toward a standardized form) affected both dialect and material culture. In material culture, domestic architecture and settlement organization—the external form and construction of the house and the layout of the settlement—particularly tended toward standardization, as these were the most visible signals of identity in any social landscape.21 Those who wished to declare their membership in the mainstream culture adopted its external domestic forms, whereas those who retained their old house and barn styles (as did some Germans in Ohio) became political, as well as architectural and linguistic, minorities. Linguistic and cultural homogeneity among long-distance migrants facilitated stereotyping by Others, and strengthened the illusion of shared interests and origins among the migrants.
ECOLOGICAL FRONTIERS: DIFFERENT WAYS OF MAKING A LIVING
Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, found that the borders of American Indian tribes rarely correlated with geographic borders. Boas decided to study the diffusion of cultural ideas and customs across borders. But a certain amount of agreement between ecology and culture is not at all surprising, particularly among people who were farmers and animal herders, which Boas’s North American tribes generally were not. The length of the frost-free growing season, precipitation, soil fertility, and topography affect many aspects of daily life and custom among farmers: herding systems, crop cultivation, house types, the size and arrangement of settlements, favorite foods, sacred foods, the size of food surpluses, and the timing and richness of public feasts. At large-scale ecotones these basic differences in economic organization, diet, and social life can blossom into oppositional ethnic identities, which sometimes are complementary and mutually supportive, sometimes are hostile, and often are both. Frederick Barth, after working among the societies of Iran and Afghanistan, was among the first anthropologists to argue that ethnic identity was continuously created, even invented, at frontiers, rather than residing in the genes or being passively inherited from the ancestors. Oppositional politics crystallize who we are not, even if we are uncertain who we are, and therefore play a large role in the definition of ethnic identities. Ecotones were places where contrasting identities were likely to be reproduced and maintained for long periods because of structural differences in how politics and economics were played.22
Ecotones coincide with ethnolinguistic frontiers at many places. In France the Mediterranean provinces of the South and the Atlantic provinces of the North have been divided by an ethnolinguistic border for at least eight hundred years; the earliest written reference to it dates to 1284. The flat, tiled roofs of the South sheltered people who spoke the langue d’oc, whereas the steeply pitched roofs of the North were home to people who spoke the langue d’oil. They had different cropping systems, and different legal systems as well until they were forced to conform to a national legal standard. In Kenya the Nilotic-speaking pastoralist Maasai maintained a purely cattle-herding economy (or at least that was their ideal) in the dry plains and plateaus, whereas Bantu-speaking farmers occupied moister environments on the forested slopes of the mountains or in low wetlands. Probably the most famous anthropological example of this type was described by Sir Edmund Leach in his classic Political Systems of Highland Burma. The upland Kachin forest farmers, who lived in the hills of Burma (Myanmar), were distinct linguistically, and also in many aspects of ritual and material culture, from the Thai-speaking Shan paddy farmers who occupied the rich bottomlands in the river valleys. Some Kachin leaders adopted Shan identities on certain occasions, moving back and forth between the two systems. But the broader distinction between the two cultures, Kachin and Shan, persisted, a distinction rooted in different ecologies, for example, the contrasting reliability and predictability of crop surpluses, the resulting different potentials for surplus wealth, and the dissimilar social organizations required for upland forest and lowland paddy farming. Cultural frontiers rooted in ecological differences could survive for a long time, even with people regularly moving across them.23
Language Distributions and Ecotones
Why do some language frontiers follow ecological borders? Does language just ride on the coattails of economy? Or is there an independent relationship between ecology and the way people speak? The linguists Daniel Nettle at Oxford University and Jane Hill at the University of Arizona proposed, in 1996 (independently, or at least without citing each other), that the geography of language reflects an underlying ecology of social relationships.24
Social ties require a lot of effort to establish and maintain, especially across long distances, and people are unlikely to expend all that energy unless they think they need to. People who are self-sufficient and fairly sure of their economic future tend to maintain strong social ties with a small number of people, usually people very much like themselves. Jane Hill calls this a localist strategy. Their own language, the one they grew up with, gets them everything they need, and so they tend to speak only that language—and often only one dialect of that language. (Most college-educated North Americans fit ni
cely in this category.) Secure people like this tend to live in places with productive natural ecologies or at least secure access to pockets of high productivity. Nettles showed that the average size of language groups in West Africa is inversely correlated with agricultural productivity: the richer and more productive the farmland, the smaller the language territory. This is one reason why a single pan-European Proto-Indo-European language during the Neolithic is so improbable.
But people who are moderately uncertain of their economic future, who live in less-productive territories and have to rely on multiple sources of income (like the Kachin in Burma or most middle-class families with two income earners), maintain numerous weak ties with a wider variety of people. They often learn two or more languages or dialects, because they need a wider network to feel secure. They pick up new linguistic habits very rapidly; they are innovators. In Jane Hill’s study of the Papago Indians in Arizona, she found that communities living in rich, productive environments adopted a “localist” strategy in both their language and social relations. They spoke just one homogeneous, small-territory Papago dialect. But communities living in more arid environments knew many different dialects, and combined them in a variety of nonstandard ways. They adopted a “distributed” strategy, one that distributed alliances of various kinds, linguistic and economic, across a varied social and ecological terrain. She proposed that arid, uncertain environments were natural “spread zones,” where new languages and dialects would spread quickly between communities that relied on diverse social ties and readily picked up new dialects from an assortment of people. The Eurasian steppes had earlier been described by the linguist Johanna Nichols as the prototypical linguistic spread zone; Hill explained why. Thus the association between language and ecological frontiers is not a case of language passively following culture; instead, there are independent socio-linguistic reasons why language frontiers tend to break along ecological frontiers.25
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 14
