Aztec Science by Helen Burgos-Ellis

Supported with ample iconographic, ethnohistoric, etymological, and scientific evidence, Aztec Science is a groundbreaking endeavor introducing a new and radical approach to the study of Aztec art. It demonstrates that the Indigenous peoples of ancient Mesoamerica recorded scientific information about plants in their material culture. The detailed analysis of plant imagery in Aztec art, including in manuscripts such as the Codex Borgia, reveals that the cultural importance of maize and other plants was closely linked to scientific concepts that were well known in central Mexico centuries before they were subsequently “discovered” in Europe.

For the Nahua, Helen Burgos-Ellis argues, maize’s significance went far beyond economic value and religious importance. In Nahua art, references to maize, grass, and Quetzalcoatl reflect historic and scientifically relevant information. These images and glyphs, when studied against the ethnohistoric and scientific record of central Mexicans’ vast knowledge of plants, indicate that the Nahua understood key concepts about the maize plant, including its genetic origin from a common grass, pollination process, life cycle, and sexual reproduction. Consequently, the cultural significance of maize for the Nahuas was deeply intertwined with scientific understanding.

Aztec Science is a radical departure from bulk of the scholarship on the Codex Borgia, which has primarily been understood to contain calendrical and ritual information rather than botanical content, and is of significant interest to Pre-Columbianists and students and scholars of ethnohistory, Indigenous history and culture, traditional ecological knowledge, art history, and the history of science and botany.