As the only Nahua natural history produced during the colonial period, Book XI of the Florentine Codex, entitled “Earthly Things,” is an unparalleled register of sixteenth-century Indigenous science, or “ways of knowing and explaining the world.”  The result of a decades-long collaboration between elite-class male Nahua scholars and elders, and a Franciscan friar, Book XI offers rare insight into Nahua engagement with, and understandings of, the environment they inhabited in the Central Valley of Mexico. In my presentation, I analyze sixteenth-century Nahua science through a focus on Nahua principles, methods, and rationales of scientific investigation, as well as modes of communication related to scientific knowledge production, gathering, and dissemination. From this analysis, I argue that Nahua science in Book XI was 1) based on a blend of first-hand, embodied experiences and ancient authority; 2) concerned with predicting and influencing future outcomes; and 3) used to model an ethical framework that would ensure survival in an interconnected world. 

Kelly McDonough is Tomás Rivera Regents Professor in the in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research on Nahua intellectual history centers primarily on the identification and analysis of how Nahuas in Mexico produce, record, and disseminate knowledges. She is the author of The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico and  Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World around Them. 

This talk is part of the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine series (HSTEM talks).