Athabaskan

Photographs and documentary accounts relating to Geronimo’s 1886 attempted surrender at the Cañon de los Embudos site are used to explore the archaeological nature of structure or hut imprints. These primary written and visual sources provide a basis for understanding the extremely unobtrusive nature of these shelter remains. Archaeological footprints from this site today reveal that house construction patterns are consistent with mobile groups in general when under circumstances similar to those at the surrender site.

This dissertation presents a linguistic description of the phonology and morphology of Tanacross Athabaskan, an endangered language spoken by approximately sixty persons in eastern interior Alaska. There is little extant documentation of Tanacross; hence, this description is based primarily on data gathered from first-hand field work.

Tanacross is typical of the Athabaskan family in its typological characteristics. There is a relatively small phonemic inventory, and most of the phonemic contrasts are neutralized outside the stem-syllable onset position. The lexicon is relatively small, consisting of perhaps six thousand distinct morphemes. Noun morphology is relatively straightforward, with few active morphological processes. In contrast, verb structure is extremely complex, consisting of a possibly discontinuous root morpheme together with a string of inflectional and derivational affixes which combine via an elaborate system of non- concatenative templatic morphology. The verb word may stand alone as entire utterance. Members of other minor word classes tend to be monomorphemic.

Tanacross exhibits several unique properties which distinguish it from neighboring Athabaskan languages and invite further study. Tanacross is unique among the Alaska Athabaskan languages in having high tone as the reflex of Proto-Athabaskan constriction. In addition, more than any other tonal language in Alaska Tanacross has preserved segmental information lost via apocope through an elaborate system of compound tone. Tanacross also has many unique phonetic features, including the loss of suffix vowels and the devoicing of stem-initial fricatives. Tanacross morphology reflects its transitional status between the (historically) conservative languages of the lower Tanana river and the innovative languages of the Tanana and Yukon uplands.

A large mountainside Apache residential site in the Peloncillo Mountains of southern Arizona lies in the heart of historically documented Chiricahua Apache territory. The Hormiguero site
represents an encampment at an important caching location. This category of residential site has not been previously described archaeologically. Ethnographic data are enlisted to understand this unique type of Apache residential site and a previously unknown cache form—the platform cache. Archaeological evidence can be combined from a number of sites with caches like these at the Hormiguero site and across geographic zones to interpret aspects of cultural identity and chronology including the presence of ancestral Apaches in southern Arizona as early as the 14th century A.D.

Contradictions exist among primary sources as to the locations of historical Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache encampments. Modern elders state that residential sites were situated in low settings at the base of elevated landforms, whereas textual
sources and archaeology suggest otherwise for much of the historic period and before. This contradiction is resolved when it is realized that Chiricahua cultural-specialist knowledge relating to key aspects of landscape use pertains to the last 25 years before Geronimo’s final surrender and removal to the east. This was a time of substantial and increased pressure from the American military using more effective tactics following
the Civil War. These tactics included cooperation with Mexico, use of Apache scouts, deeper penetration of the mountains, and more persistent pursuit. Land claims interviews of Chiricahua informants from the 1950s mention this shift from high to low and the reason for it. This case study illustrates the importance of (a) seriating source material rather than assuming long-term continuity, (b) subjecting all sources, including elder knowledge, to standard forms of criticism, and (c) analyzing differences
between informant factions.