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7 books match the query 'Corn'
Aztec Science
The Genetic Origin of Maize, Pollination, and Plant Sexuality Recorded in ArtHelen Burgos-Ellis
University Press of Colorado, 2026
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.
Midwest Maize
How Corn Shaped the U.S. HeartlandCynthia Clampitt
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Our Precious Corn
YukwanénsteRebecca M. Webster
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother
Indigeneity and Belonging in the AmericasRoberto Cintli Rodríguez
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Follow it he did, and his book Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother changes the way we look at Mexican Americans. Not so much peoples created as a result of war or invasion, they are people of the corn, connected through a seven-thousand-year old maíz culture to other Indigenous inhabitants of the continent. Using corn as the framework for discussing broader issues of knowledge production and history of belonging, the author looks at how corn was included in codices and Mayan texts, how it was discussed by elders, and how it is represented in theater and stories as a way of illustrating that Mexicans and Mexican Americans share a common culture.
Rodriguez brings together scholarly and traditional (elder) knowledge about the long history of maíz/corn cultivation and culture, its roots in Mesoamerica, and its living relationship to Indigenous peoples throughout the continent, including Mexicans and Central Americans now living in the United States. The author argues that, given the restrictive immigration policies and popular resentment toward migrants, a continued connection to maíz culture challenges the social exclusion and discrimination that frames migrants as outsiders and gives them a sense of belonging not encapsulated in the idea of citizenship. The “hidden transcripts” of corn in everyday culture—art, song, stories, dance, and cuisine (maíz-based foods like the tortilla)—have nurtured, even across centuries of colonialism, the living maíz culture of ancient knowledge.
Plants from the Past
Works Of Leonard W. Blake & Hugh C. CutlerLeonard W. Blake and Hugh C. Cutler; With an Introduction by Gayle J. Fritz and Patty Jo Watson
University of Alabama Press, 2001
Plants from the Past is a fascinating, comprehensive record of the work of two dedicated plant scientists who were instrumental in the establishment of archaeobotany and paleoethnobotany as vigorous subdisciplines within American archaeology. Hugh Carson Cutler and Leonard Watson Blake worked together for many decades at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, identifying and interpreting plant remains from archaeological sites all over North America.
Covering a period of 30 years and tracing the development of the study of plant remains from archaeological sites, the volume will give archaeologists access to previously unavailable data and interpretations. It features the much-sought-after extensive inventory "Plants from Archaeological Sites East of the Rockies," which serves as a reference to archaeobotanical collections curated at the Illinois State Museum. The chapters dealing with protohistory and early historic foodways and trade in the upper Midwest are especially relevant at this time of increasing attention to early Indian-white interactions.
The editors' introduction provides coherence and historical context for the papers and points to the book's potential as a resource for future research. Graced by Dr. Blake's brief introductions to each chapter, Plants from the Past neatly compiles the earliest research in archaeobotany by two originators of the science.
The Origins of Southwestern Agriculture
R. G. Matson
University of Arizona Press, 1991
The Struggle for Maize
Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican CountrysideElizabeth Fitting
Duke University Press, 2011