CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES AND FUTURE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Future research on Culle should focus on heretofore unaddressed areas; among these, anthroponymy stands out. The information contained in indigenous last names has proven valuable for the study of the history of Andean languages. While some last names that can be attributed to Culle survive to this day (for example, Quino, Sirumbal, Huanambal), the richest sources for research are to be found in the archives, in the form of censuses and tallies of indigenous populations recorded at different points along the region’s colonial and republican history. Such sources demand a more thorough and detailed philological analysis than they have as of yet been subjected to (Rojas 2013). Also in the domain of onomastics, while the study of place names has been particularly intense and productive in the case of Culle, more so than for other Andean languages, as was seen in Section 3, a state-of-the-art review is needed for an updated panoramic of what has been found and what requires further research and clarification.

Another important task is the systematization of the various lexical lists available for the language, as these are based on differing collection, identification, and orthographic criteria. Completing this task will support better discrimination between words of Culle origin and those taken from Quechua. Lexical studies devoted to specific cultural areas—such as traditional weaving—have proved fruitful, but similar efforts must be carried out in other semantic fields that favor the retention of indigenous words, e. g., agriculture, vernacular health wisdom, and child-rearing.

Besides such academic needs, there is a growing interest among the residents of different cities in the northern Peruvian Andes in recovering the linguistic knowledge linked to Culle and to the cultural manifestations associated with it. One example of this are the decades-long efforts by school teachers in the region to emphasize, as an instructional activity, representations of the mythological foundation of Huamachuco compiled in the sixteenth-century Relación agustina (San Pedro 1992 [1560]). Although those representations give priority to the names of the huacas (deities) as recorded in the colonial-era document, the costumes and rituals strongly resemble those used in the Inti Raymi, the solar festivity performed yearly in Cusco, a contact zone for Spanish and Southern Quechua. Here we have a parallel example, in the broader cultural field, of how certain characteristics that can be attributed to Culle are at times mistaken for Quechua, as we saw in Section 3. It may be possible for interdisciplinary academic efforts to identify and discuss this tendency towards the “southernization” of indigenous features from this region, a type of bias seen not only in linguistics but also in material culture studies (Sillar and Ramón Joffré 2016).

As a caveat to all this, we must note that research projects in the academic sphere should not allow themselves to be determined by existing social enthusiasms around legacy languages. In recent years, for example, a trend has been observed to inflate the ancient indigenous language’s geographic and political reach, to the point that, in some formulations, its distribution ends up covering both northern and southern areas for which no sufficient evidence is at hand. A case in point is the postulate of a “Culle macro-language” (Paredes Estela 2020), with dialects for the Cajamarca region from which certain toponyms are supposed to derive; those toponyms, however, are better explained by a hypothetical Cajamarcan indigenous language, independent from Culle, as posited by Torero (2002) and argued more recently by Ramón and Andrade (2021). With regards to the south, there is also an occasional tendency to postulate Culle influences on Quechua morphology and lexicon without sufficient empirical evidence (Paredes Estela 2020).

To summarize, an effort to better connect specialist initiatives with region’s growing interest in this extinct language is needed, without casting aside the standard criteria for academic research and debate. Lastly, a careful study of local initiatives concerning the region’s indigenous language and culture is also required, in a similar vein to those currently underway for Mochica areas (Eloranta and Bartens 2020; Tavera Peña 2022). Despite pronounced differences in the documentation and register of these two indigenous languages, the “Mochica rennaissance” evident in recent decades in Peru’s northern coastal region can provide a significant source of inspiration for Culle-related initiatives.