Did find your quote with google, at the top, it was rather generic. Interesting topic though.
They seem not to have left an archeological trail in the southwest, which is weird for planting cultures where groups live in areas for hundreds of years.
Here's a more indepth study,
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=454B4CC4FCF559EE4040978D8FE941D3.inst3_2b?docId=5002537802
The Yaqui are unquestionably Native Americans, native to an area of Mexico along the Rio Yaqui, some six hundred kilometers southwest of Tucson. The Yaqui presumably have been established in their Sonoran homeland "since time immemorial," legalistic terminology for a period antedating legal or other records, i.e., prehistoric times. However, the prehistoric archaeology of Sonora in general is poorly known and "the lower Yaqui valley is an archaeological blank" (Philips 1989: 387). Pottery-making rancheria peoples were present along most of the coastal area by around A.D. 300, but it is not clear that the ancestors of the Yaqui were among them (McGuire and Villapendo 1989: 166; Philips 1989: 386). We therefore can document the Yaqui's Sonoran residence only historically or on the margins of history, protohistorically (Sheridan 1981). The cultural position of the Yaqui is debated. As Riley (1981: 123) contends, "Sheridan treats the Yaqui as a southern extension of the Greater Southwest. My own inclination is to consider these northernmost Cahitan speakers as part of the barbarized northern fringe of the moderately high cultures of Sinaloa." (1)
On first encountering the people who called themselves Yoeme, the Spaniards called them Hiaqui or Yaqui, the name by which the tribe is identified in the historical record (Spicer 1980: 10). At the time of contact in 1533 they have been estimated as numbering approximately thirty thousand, and "the whole of the tribe lived concentrated in about 900 square miles--bottomlands from the mouth of the river at the Sea of Cortes along the shifting channel for some sixty miles upstream" (Spicer 1980:5). (2) The Yaqui had been established there long enough to develop a fierce attachment to the land, which they defended against Spanish intrusion and came to define as a "sacred tribal territory" (Spicer 1983: 250). Although concentrated in their valley, the Yaqui participated in a larger cultural and trade network reaching up into the American Southwest, what Charles Di Peso has labeled the Gran Chichimeca (Di Peso 1979).
Spanish colonial control created interconnections among the various groups of the region, including the Yaqui (Hinton 1983). Jesuit missionaries began work among the Yaqui in 1617 and later employed some of them to help expand their mission network to the north, including to the missions near Tucson (Officer 1987: 28). Whiting (1953: 6) notes, "It was customary in these frontier missions to bring a group of highly acculturated Indians ...
Read this entire Journal Article and more with a FREE trial.
