page_title: Huastec people
section_title: Huastec–Maya separation
hierarchical_section_title: Huastec people / Migration history / Huastec–Maya separation
caption_attribution_description: English: Replica of bas relief image in Metro Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The accompanying plaque reads "STELA DE HUILOCINTLA - Huasteca culture - Late Classic Period - Description: Replica from Huilocintla, Veracruz. An animal licking up the blood of the mouth of a priest who sacrificed himself."
context_page_description: The Huastec or Téenek, are an indigenous people of Mexico, living in the La Huasteca region including the states of Hidalgo, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas concentrated along the route of the Pánuco River and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
  There are approximately 66,000 Huastec speakers today, of which two-thirds are in San Luis Potosí and one-third in Veracruz, although their population was probably much higher, as much as half a million, when the Spanish arrived in 1529.
  The ancient Huastec civilization is one of the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. Judging from archaeological remains, they are thought to date back to approximately the 10th century BCE, although their most productive period of civilization is usually considered to be the Postclassic era between the fall of Teotihuacan and the rise of the Aztec Empire. The Pre-Columbian Huastecs constructed temples on step-pyramids, carved independently standing sculptures, and produced elaborately painted pottery. They were admired for their abilities as musicians by other Mesoamerican peoples.
context_section_description: Proto-Maya, the common ancestor of all Maya languages, was probably spoken in west-central Guatemala, around the highland pine-oak forests of the Cuchumatanes mountain chain:  north of the Motagua and Grijalva river valleys, through patches of cloud forest, and down to the edge of the tropical forest lowlands near the Ixcán and Chixoy (Negro) rivers, which flow into the Usumacinta River. Evidence that this region was the Maya "heartland" include its being located near the center of present-day language diversity of the Maya language family (and therefore requiring the minimum number of moves to place the languages in their current locations), the fact that proto-Maya included words for flora and fauna from both highland and lowland areas, and the debatable idea that it is easier for a group of people to spread from a highland region to a lowland one than vice versa. Not all archaeological evidence agrees with this conclusion: there are older, unbroken ceramic traditions from Loltun Cave in Yucatán, as well as Cuello in Belize, which suggest alternative Maya homelands.
  Whether the proto-Huastecs split from the rest of the Maya in 2200 or in 1200 BCE, the separation occurred at least a millennium before the rise of classic Maya culture.  It is no surprise, therefore, that the word "to write" is different in proto-Huastec (θuc-) and in the other Maya language branch (c’ib).
  2000 BCE is a reasonable date for the Huastec/Maya split, and the slopes of the Cuchumatanes range as a reasonable location for the speakers of proto-Maya, it seems likely that the split occurred after these proto-Maya speakers (or a portion of them) began to migrate north, probably along the Usumacinta River, and before the two groups resulting from the split began to move in opposite directions: the proto-Huastec speakers moving northwest (and, soon thereafter, the proto-Chicomuceltec west into the Chiapas highlands), and the proto-Yucatec/other Maya-speakers spreading northeast (one branch of which became Chontal, presumed by many from its widespread loan words and hieroglyphic evidence to be the dominant language of the classic Peten Maya heartland) (see Fig. 1).  While we have no direct archaeological evidence to explain the split itself, we can assume by linguistic evidence that contact was soon cut off between the two groups, despite there being no geographical feature that would automatically isolate them from each other.
  The intervening feature, then, was likely a powerful linguistic-cultural group.  What group occupied the Usumacinta River-Gulf Coast lowlands (mainly in today's Mexican state of Tabasco) between 2000 BCE (when the proto-Huastecs began their journey) and 1000 BCE (by which time the proto-Yucatecs had arrived in Yucatán, the Chicomuceltecs had been isolated from the Huastecs, and the Huastecs were arriving in central Veracruz)?  Most scholars propose that this region was inhabited by speakers of the Mixe–Zoque family.  While speakers of Mixe–Zoquean languages are today confined to the mountains of northeast Oaxaca, along the backbone of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and into extreme western Chiapas, it is likely that they once occupied the entire Gulf Coast lowland from the isthmus to the Tuxtla mountains – in other words, the Olmec heartland, soon dominated by the presumably Mixe–Zoque-speaking Olmec civilization of about 1400 to 500 BCE.  One line of evidence that the Olmecs spoke Mixe–Zoque are the words that the proto-Huastecs borrowed from proto-Mixe–Zoque as they passed through the southern Gulf lowlands; for example, ciw, meaning "squash."  
  Thus, there is some reason to ascribe the linguistic isolation of early Huastecs from other Maya speakers to proto-Olmecs speaking a Mixe–Zoque language, themselves recently arrived after migrating northward from the Soconusco region of the Pacific coast and across the isthmus of Tehuantepec. There is much stronger evidence that the push for the Huastecs’ further migration up the Gulf coast was caused by the active presence of the early Olmecs (c. 1400 to 1100 BCE) of San Lorenzo and asso
caption: Replica of bas relief image in Metro Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The accompanying plaque reads "STELA DE HUILOCINTLA – Huasteca culture – Late Classic Period – Description: Replica from Huilocintla, Veracruz. An animal licking up the blood of the mouth of a priest who sacrificed himself."
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