Reconsideration of the nomadic condition of the southernmost Guachichiles based on the relationship with their environment

BACKGROUND: The Guachichiles were a group of Chichimeca people that inhabited the southern and central parts of the Mexican Plateau. In the southern area of their distribution, they occupied and used the tunales, extensive forests of arborescent nopales (Opuntia spp.). Their pre-Columbian distribution was dissected by the Royal Silver Road established by the Spaniards, and this lead to them being main protagonists in the so-called Chichimeca War, during the sixteenth century. With very little first-hand documentation, the Guachichiles were described as savage, warring, primitive, hunting nomads, but little efforts have been done to understand their daily life habits. Based on the relationship of pre-Columbian southern Guachichiles with their environment, we re-valuate whether they were nomads, as the Chichimecas collectively have been labeled, or whether those living in tunales could live year-round in this habitat. As part of our analysis, we propose the primary plant and animal species that integrated their diet. METHODS: We draw information from a review of bibliographic sources, complemented with extensive searches in all pertinent Mexican archives. We carried out field work to define the geographical extent of the pre-Columbian territory of the southernmost Guachichiles, based on the Spanish Chronicles, remnant fragments of vegetation, landscape characteristics, and geographic names related with nopales. Using approaches from wildlife ecology, historical sciences and ethnobiological information on wild resources currently or recently used in the area, we proposed which resources were available to the southernmost Guachichiles, and how their primary diet might have been. RESULTS: The habitat of the southern Guachichiles, the tunal forest, was exuberant and rich in resources, having provided numerous plant products, of which tunas (prickly pears) and mesquite pods were of uttermost importance. At least 10 plant foods were available within the tunales. They would have consumed at least seven birds (including their eggs), six mammals, four reptiles, grubs, and honey, in addition to at least six vertebrate species hunted at the edges of the tunal with grasslands and shrublands or in more open patches of tunal. In addition to food, they prepared at least three alcoholic beverages, had access to two species of probable psychoactive beehive cacti and to one hallucinogenic mushroom species, and might have traded peyote from the north with outside-tunal Guachichiles. CONCLUSIONS: The rich habitat in which southern Guachichiles lived allowed them to be largely sedentary, but this required that they prevented other groups from gathering and hunting in their habitat. As a result of them living in and defending the tunales, the Guachichiles could have been divided into two or three habitat-driven groups: Tunal Guachichiles, and grassland and, or shrubland Guachichiles.