Introduction

There are many examples of archaeological and linguistic evidence each corroborating hypotheses of the other discipline. Scholars have explored this relationship between archaeology and historical linguistics in the Americas, where much of what we know about diachronic language change prior to European contact has come from thorough documentation of daughter languages. This thorough documentation enables historical reconstructions in the absence of written documents for societies that had no known writing systems. Most of the Indigenous languages of North America fall into this category, including the languages of this chapter: Algonquian languages, Mobilian Jargon, and its lexifiers (for example, Natchez). Our knowledge of Algonquian language change stems from the documentation efforts of early scholars like Leonard Bloomfield (1946). Campbell and Kaufman (1976) determined that the archaeological civilization known as the Olmec included speakers of Mixe-Zoquean languages (see also Campbell 1997: 12). Aztec (Hill 2017), Mayan, and Andean archaeological findings have also been connected to known language families, and are discussed further in Section 2. For some reason that remains unexplained, the ancient archaeology of North America has received less public attention than have the ancient histories and archaeology of Mesoamerica and South America. However, some of the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica and adjacent regions in southern North America—for example, Aztec, Maya, and Zapotec—were contemporaneous with the complex interaction spheres of North America, including the Adena, Hopewell, and the Cahokia (Townsend 2004: 12). While extensive valuable scholarship has been done on the historical linguistics of North America (Goddard 1996; Campbell 1997; Mithun 1999), and the archaeology of North America (Theler and Boszhardt 2003; Carr and Case 2005; Spence and Fryer 2005; McCoy et al. 2017), there has yet to be much discussion attempting to connect the two fields.

Denny (1989: 91) proposed that speakers of Algonquian languages were connected to the mound-builder archaeological sites in the Northeast of North America. He cites Goddard (Denny 1989: 92) as proposing Proto-Algonquian to have split approximately 1000–500 bce (Denny 1989: 91). This would place Proto- Algonquian speakers at the time of the Middle Woodland Hopewell. Drechsel (1997) has been one of the few to engage in this important discussion. He proposed that Mobilian Jargon, a trade language of North America, was originally spoken in pre-European contact situations (1997: 292).