When the South Texas Plains first entered into written history in the 16th century, hundreds of small, highly mobile groups of hunting and gathering peoples ranged across southern Texas and northeastern Mexico. The seasonal rounds of some extended to the margins of the Gulf Coast; others periodically probed the higher country on the southern part of the Edwards Plateau. Many spent their summers among the enormous fields of prickly pear cactus on the South Texas Plains, harvesting the ripe fruits and joining with others in work, trade, and celebration.

 

 

These groups varied in size, often seasonally, as small family bands of a few dozen people came together with other bands who all spoke the same dialect and, collectively saw themselves as one people, or what the Spanish often called naciones, and we might call tribes. Examples of relatively large named groups that we know the most about are the Payaya of the Medina River valley, the Pacuache along the Nueces River, and the Mariames along the lower Guadalupe River and farther inland to the west. There were dozens and dozens of others, most of which we know almost nothing about except maybe a name.

 

 

Collectively, all these groups have come to be known as Coahuiltecans, but they spoke diverse dialects and languages, some of which were distantly related to one another at best. Some of the major languages were Comecrudo, Cotoname, Aranama, Solano, Sanan, as well as Coahuilteco. Some groups got along with one another and shared partially overlapping territories, particularly in the prickly pear season. Other groups were sworn enemies of one another or simply had such widely separated territories and language differences that they rarely came in contact. Although all were hunters and gatherers, some derived their main livelihood from quite different resource bases at various times of the year. In other words, the term Coahuiltecan masks considerable ethnic and behavioral diversity.

 

 

In this exhibit set we use the term Coahuiltecan in its proper sense, a geographic catch-all that could also be described as "the native peoples of south Texas and northeastern Mexico." As explained in the Native Peoples Main section, the term is greatly misused and misunderstood. For better or worse, Coahuiltecan is ingrained in both scholarly and popular literature and all we can do is try to explain what it means and use it correctly. It is simply a geographic term that encompasses virtually all of the diverse human groups who called the South Texas Plains, including its western segment in adjacent northeastern Mexico east of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range.

 

 

Like the colorful and distinct patchwork pieces of a quilt, many of the diverse "Coahuiltecan" groups derived from different sources but all were tied to a common backing—the land and its resources. The stories of the native peoples are all the more remarkable when we consider that many of the native peoples of the South Texas Plains may well have been direct linear descendants of the Paleoindian peoples who came to the region more than 13,000 years before, and whose descendants stayed on. That fascinating inference is based on the linquistic diversity of the Coahuiltecan groups, and the fact that several of the region's languages are unique and not closely related to any languages elsewhere in the world. Said otherwise, places where language "isolates" are spoken are likely places where people lived continuously for thousands of years. A better known example of this phenomenon is Basque, a language isolate spoken in the Pyrenees in north-central Spain.