TEPIMANS, YUMANS, AND OTHER HOHOKAM

The Proto-Tepiman speech community-that is, the community that spoke t he language ancestral to all the contemporary Tepiman languages-can be located at the northern end of the present-day Tepiman range, perhaps as far north and west as the Gila-Colorado confluence, and probably w ithin the Hohokam region, during the Hohokam time period in the first millennium A.D. Evidence for the northern location of Proto-Tepiman in cludes, first, attestation of language contact with Proto-River Yuman, including data from phonology, syntax and lexicon. This evidence sugg ests that the Hohokam were a multi-ethnic community; we present eviden ce that by the fourteenth century this multi-ethnic system probably in cluded speakers of Zuni. Second, the greatest internal diversity in Te piman is among the northernmost varieties. Third, we can reconstruct a word meaning ''saguaro cactus,'' a plant not found south of Ciudad Ob regon, Sonora, for Proto-Tepiman. While the linguistic evidence strong ly suggests the involvement of the Proto-Tepiman speech community in t he Hohokam system, the evidence provided by contemporary Upper Piman l anguages (Akimel O'odhan [Pima] and Tohono O'odham [Papago]) neither c onfirms nor excludes the involvement of speakers of these languages in the core Hohokam complex in the late prehistoric period.