Another Look at Tewa Origins: The Biological Evidence

Abstract

The following is a critical re-evaluation of the results and data pertaining to the analysis of biological relationships presented in a 2012 monograph on Tewa origins titled Winds from the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology by Scott G. Ortman. The present critique focuses on the biological evidence that ancestral Tewa populations of the Northern Rio Grande region (NRG) are the direct lineal descendants of Mesa Verde region residents from southwestern Colorado who migrated to the NRG around AD 1275, and that these Mesa Verde migrants formed the vast majority of the post-AD 1275 Tewa population in the NRG. The results of the re-evaluation presented here do not support these assertions. Instead, the results suggests that the pre-AD 1275 populations from the Mesa Verde region probably contributed to the genetic ancestry of multiple post-AD 1275 populations from different presumed ancestral ethnolinguistic groups throughout the Southwest.