Pericú

The Pericú (also known as Pericues, Cora, Edues) were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape Region, the southernmost portion of Baja California Sur, Mexico. They have been linguistically and culturally extinct since the late 18th century.

The southern edge of the Baja California Peninsula, from Cabo San Lucas east to Cabo Pulmo, together with the large Gulf of California Islands of Cerralvo, Espíritu Santo, La Partida, and San José, have been recognized as aboriginal Pericú territory. William C. Massey (1949) thought that the eastern portion of the Cape Region, including Bahía las Palmas and Bahía Ventana, was occupied by a Guaycura group known as the Cora. Subsequent reexamination of the ethnohistoric evidence suggests that Cora was synonymous with Pericú (Laylander 1997).

The status of the La Paz area is uncertain. Massey assigned it to two Guaycura groups, the Cora and the Aripe. W. Michael Mathes (1975) argued that it had belonged to the Pericú in the 16th and 17th centuries but was taken over by the Guaycura some time between 1668 and 1720. An alternative interpretation is that it was disputed ground between the Pericú and Guaycura throughout the early historic period.

Evidence concerning the language spoken by the Pericú is limited to a handful of words plus fewer than a dozen place names (León-Portilla 1976). Jesuit missionaries recognized Pericú as a language distinct from Guaycura. Massey (1949) suggested that Pericú and Guaycura had together constituted a Guaycuran language family, but this seems to have been based purely on their geographic proximity.

The archaeological record for Pericú territory extends at least as far back as the early Holocene, about 10,000 years ago, and perhaps into the late (Fujita 2006). The distinctive hyperdolichocephalic (long-headed) skulls found in Cape Region burials have suggested to some scholars that the ancestors of the Pericú were either trans-Pacific immigrants or remnants of some of the New World's earliest colonizers (González-José et al. 2003; Rivet 1909). The distinctive Las Palmas burial complex, involving secondary burials painted with red ochre and deposited in caves or rockshelters, was particularly noted (Massey 1955). The continued use of the atlatl and dart alongside the bow and arrow as late as the 17th century, long after their replacement in most of North America, has been used to argue for an exceptional degree of isolation in southern Baja California (Massey 1961).

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