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Spanish documents concerning the Southwestern United States show that after A.D. 1600, the Apache, Athapaskan-speaking Native Americans, inhabited Southwestern locations in sizable numbers. [hl:3]Traditional interpretations[/hl:3] of the rapid spread of these Athapaskan speakers across this region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assume that Apaches moved into largely unoccupied territory. However, existing data fail to confirm that the Apache were actually moving across this territory in the large numbers suggested by post-1600 Spanish documents. An explanation for this [hl:2]discrepancy[/hl:2] may lie in sixteenth-century Spanish expeditionary narratives that, despite their uneven quality and tendency to exaggerate, generally suggest that much of the Southwest was inhabited by non-Athapaskan speaking, mobile hunter-gatherer Native American groups who had once been sedentary pueblo-dwellers. If Athapaskan speakers such as the Apache routinely assimilated indigenous hunter-gatherer populations, as they did during the seventeenth century in the La Junta region, then the large number of people that the post-1600 Spanish documents identified as Apache may actually include indigenous groups who were assimilated by the Apache.
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The author of the passage would most likely agree with which of the following statements about the spread of the Athapaskan language across the Southwest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
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The "discrepancy" refers to the
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The author of the passage suggests which of the following about the "traditional interpretations" ?
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