>>23829226cont:
>>23826629>>23826633>>23826643I've actually heard mixed things about the agricultural productivity of Chinampas, some papers say they wouldn't have had been able to grow more food then traditional fields and would have been used more as sort of home gardens for specialty crops as opposed to where dietary staples were grown. Other sources say they're extremely agriculturally productive though, I need to look into it more
In any case, yes, they're very cool they're essentially artificial islands that act as hydroponic farms while retaining the local ecology and they can also be used to just create more land for urban expansion
And yes, the Aztec had very developed botanical sciences: in addition to Chinampas, they also had elite botanical gardens built into palaces and royal estates that beyond as sites of leisure, also also served as sites where plants and flowers were collected, bred, and experimented on to test them for medical and aesthetical properties as well as to categorize them. There was a huge spice, herb, and aromatic industry/trade, same for shampoos, soaps, colognes, toothpastes, lotions, and medical products made from them. Francisco Hernandez de Toledo, the personal royal court physician and naturalist to Philip II, traveled to Mexico and admitted that Aztec botanical and medical sciences surpassed his own
>>23826638>>23826662Comparing them to Bronze age civs is apt in some ways like engineering, metallurgy (they did smelt bronze), maths etc, but the biggest Mesoamerican cities larger then the biggest Bronze age Eurasian cities (The largest in each was Tenochtitlan with 200k vs Uruk with 40k, though there are caveats and nuances I can clarify on), Mesoamerican waterworks I'd also wager was more developed and as noted above their botany and medicine was cutting edge even by 16th century standards. Tenochtitlan also did have the first universal public schooling system in history, at least depending on how you define that
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