Cooley, Mackenzie (Author)
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 112
Issue: 1
Pages: 45-67
Publication date: 2021
Language: English
Giant bones unearthed throughout the Mesoamerican countryside provoked early modern thinkers to grapple with the earth’s ages, partially syncretizing Nahua histories of human conquest with Spanish colonial medicinal and natural historical knowledge. European naturalists’ willingness to accept the giant remains required them to embrace localized Mesoamerican cosmologies. The fossilized landscape provided evidence that conquest and eradication had happened before at the hands of the peoples whom the Spaniards had conquered in turn. Lost from early modern collections and failing to translate far beyond New Spain during the sixteenth century, the giant remains highlight the possibilities and challenges of integrating Mesoamerican knowledge into the global history of science, with an emphasis on emplaced thinking, medicine and the body, and deeper temporal frameworks. Moving beyond itinerary histories to globalizing cosmologies in the history of science can better explain the compromises Europeans and Mesoamericans were required to make to enter into a syncretic intellectual contract, as well as the non-European concept of time that came with local reckonings with the human and more-than-human natural world.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Soeren Urbansky;
(2020)
Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border
Book
Mark Thurner;
Juan Pimentel;
(2021)
New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities
Book
W. George Lovell;
(2015)
Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500-1821, Fourth Edition
Book
Peter Bellwood;
(2004)
First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies
Book
Headrick, Daniel R.;
(2010)
Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present
Book
Stearns, Peter N;
(2010)
Globalization in World History
Book
Katie Barclay;
Peter N. Stearns;
(2022)
The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World
Book
Eric Porter;
(2024)
A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport
Book
Stephen V. Bittner;
(2021)
Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar
Article
John Cropper;
(2024)
‘Growing a World Wonder’: The Great Green Wall and the History of Environmental Decline in the Sahel, 1450–2022
Book
Reinert, Sophus A.;
(2011)
Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy
Article
Karol Witkowski;
Konrad Meus;
(2024)
The Oder-Vistula-Dniester Canal - the infrastructural legacy of the Habsburg Empire
Book
Mathieu, Jon;
Boscani Leoni, Simona;
(2005)
Die Alpen! Zur europäischen Wahrnehmungsgeschichte seit der Renaissance/Les alpes! Pour une histoire de la perception européenne depuis la Renaissance
Book
Charlotte Sleigh;
(2017)
The Paper Zoo: 500 Years of Animals in Art
Book
Paola Giacomoni;
(2019)
Il nuovo laboratorio della natura. La montagna e l'immagine del mondo dal Rinascimento al Romanticismo
Book
Anderson, John G. T.;
(2013)
Deep Things out of Darkness: A History of Natural History
Book
Robert Clancy;
(2021)
The Long Enlightenment: Australian Science from Its Beginning to the Mid-20th Century
Book
Edgington, John;
(2013)
Who Found our Ferns? A History of the Discovery of Britain's Ferns, Club Mosses, Quillworts and Horsetails
Book
Camarasa, Josep M.;
Catalá-Gorgues, Jesús Ignacio;
(2007)
Els nostres naturalistes. En el tercer centenari del naixement de Linné i Buffon
Book
Clarke, Peter;
Claydon, Tony;
(2010)
God's Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World
Be the first to comment!