The Journal of California Anthropology

The ethnographic division of Baja California Sur has been universally based upon the territorial extension of the two basic languages of the region, Guaycura and Pericu (Massey 1949; Jimenez Moreno 1974), heretofore derived from Jesuit missionary reports and observations made between 1684 and 1767. Such documents have served to establish the shores of the Bahia de La Paz within the linguistic and cultural extension of the Guaycura (Waicura) group. A detailed study of earlier observations by Spanish navigators to the area between 1596 and 1684, however, may well indicate that such was not always the case, and that demographic change occurred in the La Paz region between its initial discovery in 1535 and its settlement by Jesuit missionaries in 1720.