I looked at the article and some of his more extended pieces. As I often do-- once I see one or two ridiculous and/or false statements, I give upon the writer because he/she cannot be trusted on the easily verifiable there is no reason to believe the more controversial claims.

here goes

1) "(The Totonacs spoke a dialect of Nahuatl like the Aztecs.)" First, nahuatl is a language not a dialect it is a language in the Uto-Aztecan language family; and Totonac belongs to the Totonac-Tepehua language family, a language isolate unrelated to any other language.

2)"Around 850 BC new people arrive in Florida possibly from Mexico or Central America. We know this because of something they brought with them: corn. Large amounts of corn pollen were discovered at the Fort Center site in south Florida near Lake Okeechobee. The pollen was found both in the soil and embedded in the paint on buried artifacts thus archaeologists have been able to rule out the possibility of modern contamination.

This is a complete enigma because corn is not found any where else in the southeast until over 1500 years later. Thus how was corn, a native plant of Mexico, present in Florida in 850 BC? If it had arrived through overland trade networks one would expect to find evidence of corn all over the southeast long before it shows up in Florida but we don’t. Therefore we know something else about these immigrants: they arrived by boat."

False. Claim that there was no corn in the Eastern US before AD 650 (1350 BP), i.e. 850 BC +1500 years

Brown, C. H. 2006 “Glottochronology and the chronology of Maize in the Americas,” in J. Staller, R. Tycot, and B. Benz eds. Histories of Maize, 647-663 NY: Academic Press

p. 657 Maize probably reached the American Southwest by 4000 BP and macrobotanical evidence from the Holding site near St. Louis, Missouri, attests to maize in Eastern North America as early as 2150 BP.

Blake, M. 2006 “Dating the Initial Spread of Zea mays,” in Staller, pp. 55-72

Table 4.1 p. 58 Direct radiocarbon dates maize

State site date BP
NM Tornillo shelter 3175+/-240
NM Bat Cave 3010+/- 150
NM Fresnal Shelter 2945+/-55
AZ Milagro 2930+/-45
IL Cahokia 2077+/- 70
TN Ice House Bottom 1775+/-100
OH Harness Mount 1730+/-85

Hill, J. 2006 "The Historical Linguistics of Maize Cultivation in Mesoamerica and North America," in Staller pp. 631-645

p. 632 "Linguistic evidence attests to the diffusio of maize vocabulary, probably alongside maize cultivation itself, from the core Mesoamerican language families in two cases: from Northern Uto-Aztecan into Kiowa-Tanoan on the Colorado Plateau about 3000 years ago, and from the Mayan languages into Xincan-speaking commmunities of Guatemala, at an undetermined date.. . . In the eastern United AStates, maize vocabulary can neither be reconstructed for the language families of the region, nor can any maize vocabulary of the eastern languages be linked to Mesoamerican or Southwestern sources."

4. As usual words and languages are picked helter-skelter to try to "prove" a connnection and linguistic niceties like glottal stops are ignored.

"Is there any linguistic evidence that connects Hitchiti speakers to Mesoamerica? Indeed, there is. In Hitchiti, the word ‘chiki’ means ‘house.’ It also means ‘house’ in the Totonac language on the Gulf Coast of Mexico just north of the Yucatan. (The Totonacs spoke a dialect of Nahuatl like the Aztecs.) In the Itza Maya language just south of the Totonacs, the word ‘chiki’ means ‘woven basket.’ Both the Totonac and Maya words derive from the same root word which has an association with “weaving with reeds.” Interestingly all of these cultures, Totonac/Maya/Hitchiti, built their houses by the wattle and daub method. This method requires weaving thin branches or reeds between upright poles forming the house walls which are then covered with a layer of mud or plaster. Therefore these houses could be considered ‘woven containers’ just as a basket is a ‘woven container.’ Thus the Itza Maya word and the Totonac word are, in fact, related.

The etymologies are from An Etymological Mayan dictionary at
[www.famsi.org]

1) the Itza are NOT "just south of the Totonac" they are many miles away, 2) Totonac and Maya are not related so the word "chikin" does not come from the same root, 3) The word for "basket" in Itza Maya is NOT "chikin" it is "xak" in proto_Yucatec it is "*xaak". The word in the Cholan family of languages for basket is borrowed from Nahuatl (chikiwi-tl) "*chiki" BUT in Maya the word has a consonant called a glottal stop at the end i.e. Chorti "chiki7" and Chol "chikib7." The Chol and Chorti are NOT the Itza.


Bernard