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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them

Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them

McDonough, Kelly S.

Hardcover

Native American HistorySports GeneralIndigenous Studies

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0816550395
ISBN13: 9780816550395
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: May 21 2024
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.45
Height: 1.02 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.06
Language: English

Winner 2025 Bryce Wood Book Award

This is a book about how Nahuas--native speakers of Nahuatl, the common language of the Aztec Empire and of more than 2.5 million Indigenous people today--have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. It is a deep dive into Nahua theoretical and practical inquiry related to the environment, as well as the dynamic networks in which Nahuas create, build upon, and share knowledges, practices, tools, and objects to meet social, political, and economic needs.

In this work, author Kelly S. McDonough addresses Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources including the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century collaboration between Indigenous and Spanish scholars considered the most comprehensive extant source on the pre-Hispanic and early colonial Aztec (Mexica) world.

In Mexico today, the terms Indigenous and science and technology are rarely paired together. When they are, the latter tend to be framed as unrecoverable or irreparably damaged pre-Hispanic traditions⁠, relics confined to a static past. In Indigenous Science and Technology, McDonough works against such erroneous and racialized discourses with a focus on Nahua environmental engagements and relationalities, systems of communication, and cultural preservation and revitalization. Attention to these overlooked or obscured knowledges provides a better understanding of Nahua culture, past and present, as well as the entangled local and global histories in which they were--and are--vital actors.

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