艺廊生平与创作
瓦斯特克族是墨西哥的原住民，在历史上，他们建立自己城市的地区主要为现今墨西哥巴纽科河流经的伊达尔戈州、韦拉克鲁斯州、圣路易斯波托西州、塔毛利帕斯州，以及墨西哥湾沿岸。有人（尤其是他们自己）也叫他们“Teenek”。
瓦斯特克族在前哥伦布时期是属于中部美洲文明的一部分。据考古学对其遗址的研究，发现瓦斯特克文明可追溯至公元前10世纪，然而他们的全盛时期是特奥蒂瓦坎文明衰落至阿兹特克帝国崛起之间的后古典时期。在前哥伦布时期，瓦斯特克人共建造了阶梯金字塔上的神殿、雕刻独立座落的雕像，并制造了精心彩绘的陶器。然而瓦斯特克人虽然建立了文明，建造了城市，他们却很少穿衣服。另外在当时其他中部美洲民族的眼中，他们也是受赞赏的天生音乐家。
大约在公元1450年，瓦斯特克人被阿兹特克统治者蒙特苏马一世所领导的军队入侵，并开始向阿兹特克帝国纳贡，然而他们仍保有相当自主的自治政府。
之后瓦斯特克人在公元1519年到1530年代之间被西班牙人征服。在罗马天主教入侵后，瓦斯特克人也终于开始被要求穿上衣服。
语言
瓦斯特克语至今仍在使用，尤其是在农村地区，瓦斯特克人也还保有他们的传统音乐及舞蹈。瓦斯特克语与其他一些马雅语族的语言有某些共通点，说明了史前时期这些民族之间的关连。据20世纪晚期的统计，瓦斯特克语在墨西哥的使用人口约为8万人。
摘自维基百科「瓦斯特克族」，按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，繁体已转简体，去掉了参考文献、外部链接等尾部小节和表格，其余文字未作改动。
中文条目比较短，展开看英文维基百科的条目（英文原文）
The Huastec or Téenek (contraction of Te' Inik, "people from here"; also known as Huaxtec, Wastek or Huastecos) are an indigenous people of Mexico living in the Huasteca, which includes the administrative divisions of Hidalgo, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas concentrated along the route of the Pánuco River and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
There are approximately 66,000 Huastec speakers today, of which two-thirds are in San Luis Potosí and one-third in Veracruz, although their population was probably much higher, as much as half a million, when the Spanish arrived in 1529.
The Huastec civilization was one of the Mesoamerican cultures of the Pre-Columbian era. Based on archaeological remains, they are thought to date to approximately the 10th century BCE. However, their most productive period of civilization is usually considered to be the Postclassic era, between the fall of Teotihuacan and the rise of the Aztec Empire. Pre-Columbian Huastecs constructed temples on step-pyramids, carved independently-standing sculptures, and produced elaborately painted pottery. Other Mesoamerican peoples admired them for their musical abilities.
Around 1450, Aztec armies defeated the Huastecs under the leadership of Moctezuma I; the Huastecs thereafter paid tribute to the Aztec Empire but retained substantial local self-government.
The Huastecs were conquered by the Spanish Empire between 1519 and the 1530s. After the Spanish Conquest, many Huastecs were sold as slaves in the Caribbean by the Spanish.
The first grammatical and lexical description of the Huastec language accessible to Europeans was by Andrés de Olmos, a friar who wrote the first such grammars of Nahuatl and Totonac.
Migration history
Splitting from the rest of the Maya
Studies of language change, especially glottochronology (that is, words changing in form or being replaced by borrowed synonyms), have given linguists the tools to estimate the point in time when many pairs of languages diverged from their common ancestral tongue. The procedure depends on the assumption that languages change, in the absence of widespread literacy, at a constant rate.
Of all the languages descended from Proto-Mayan, the proto-Huastecan language was the first to split from Mayan proper. The second split, in the non-Huastecan main branch, was between proto-Yucatecan, now spoken across the Yucatán Peninsula, and the ancestors of all other Maya languages. The only other language, besides Huastec, which arose from proto-Huastecan was Chicomuceltec (also called Cotoque), a language once spoken in Chiapas near Comitán, but now extinct.
Linguists have approximated that the precursor to the language of the Huastecs diverged from the Proto-Mayan language between 2200 and 1200 BCE. Linguist Morris Swadesh posited the later date as the latest possible time for this split to have occurred, and gave the Huastec/Chicomuceltec inik ("man") versus other-Maya winik as a typical contrast. McQuown suggests 1500 BCE, Manrique Castaneda 1800 BCE, and Dahlin 2100 BCE as the most likely dates for the split. Kaufman's proposed date of about 2200 BCE would require two regular phonological (sound) changes that are attested in all Maya languages, "r" changing to "y" and "q" to "k", to have happened independently after the split, in both the Huastec/Chicomuceltec branch and in the branch of all other Mayan languages.
Robertson's work on verb affixes in the Mayan languages implies that the Huastecs were in contact with the proto-Tzeltal branch of Mayan. In Proto-Mayan, absolutives could be marked either by a prefix or a suffix, depending on the presence of a tense/aspect marker. This feature was retained in Q'anjob'al (a Maya language, spoken in the Cuchumatanes mountains of Guatemala), but lost in other branches. (Yucatecan always uses a suffix for absolutives, while Kʼicheʼ always uses a prefix.) Huastec appears to have been influenced by proto-Tzeltal, resulting in such innovations as the preposition ta, used with the object of a verb in the third person. If, as seems likely, the Huastec-Maya split occurred around 2000 BCE, the Huastecs probably did not travel far from the Guatemala-Chiapas borderlands until after 1100 BCE, more or less, by which time the proto-Tzeltalans had been established as a separate branch.
节选，摘自英文维基百科「Huastec people」，按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用。