ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Sound of Aztec Botany

• In Event: Listen: Sound Science Across Time 1

English Abstract

The Cruz-Badiano Codex is a historic document that reveals the structure and logic of what we might call a pre-Colombian Aztec botanical system. Written in Nahuatl by an Aztec physician in 1552, the codex focuses on the healing uses of 184 plants but also reveals the contours of Aztec botanical classification and taxonomy. Many marvelous assertions have been made about the codex, but, for the purposes of this talk, I am interested in one observation made by William Gates, the first translator of the Codex into English. In his 1939 monograph, An Aztec Herbal: The Classic Codex of 1552, Gates writes, “apart from the four above major artificial Classes, the plant-world was described [by the Aztecs] according to the way it was observed by our sight, taste, touch, smell, and even in the few such cases, as where it was crepitans, rustling, by our hearing” (xviii). Gates’ suggestion that the Aztec used the sound of plants to aid their understanding of the plant-word raises multiple questions: what were the “few such cases” Gates had in mind? And what did Aztec botany know about plants because it listened?

In this talk, I share early results from phase one of a research project designed to identify the sounds associated with the 184 plants named in the Cruz-Badiano Codex. I will also describe and solicit feedback on phase two of the project: the designing and planting of a garden that will exhibit those plants and their sonic expressions.

Author

• Justin Linds, Princeton University