Globe amaranth flowers retain their color even after drying, embodying their Greek name meaning ‘unfading.’
When we chose a name for UNM’s digital humanities studio, we wanted something that captured both the promise and the paradox of working with technology in the humanities. We landed on amaranth—a name with roots stretching back thousands of years, carrying meanings that still resonate today.
The word comes from the Greek amarantos (ἀμάραντος), meaning “unfading” or “one that does not wither.” The Greeks associated amaranth with immortality. They hung wreaths of it in temples, used it to decorate images of the gods, and placed it on tombs as a symbol of eternal remembrance. According to legend, amaranth flowers sprang from the blood of Adonis when he died, and garlands of amaranth adorned the mourning of Achilles.
There’s a playful irony in naming a digital humanities studio after a symbol of permanence. Digital technology is notorious for its rapid obsolescence—file formats become unreadable, platforms disappear, links rot, and today’s cutting-edge tool becomes tomorrow’s abandoned project. We hope our work with open source tools and sustainable processes lengthens the lifespan of our projects. But we also acknowledge the contradiction: we’re building with materials that fade faster than the ancient flower ever did.
A Flower That Never Fades
In Aesop's fable *The Rose and the Amaranth*, the rose acknowledges its brief beauty while the amaranth replies: 'I am immortal and dost never fade, but bloomest for ever in renewed youth.'
Milton’s Immortal Amarant
The association between amaranth and immortality found its way into English literature through John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). In Book III, Milton describes angels in heaven casting down their crowns, woven with “amarant and gold”:
Immortal amarant, a flower which once
In Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life,
Began to bloom; but soon, for Man’s offence,
To Heaven removed, where first it grew, there grows
And flowers aloft shading the Fount of Life…
William Blake’s illustration for Paradise Lost (1808). Milton imagined amaranth as a heavenly flower, removed from Eden after the Fall.
Milton imagines amaranth as originally growing in the Garden of Eden, near the Tree of Life. After humanity’s fall, God transplanted it to heaven, where it continues to bloom eternally, shading the “Fount of Life.” The angels weave it into their crowns precisely because it never fades.
This imagery captures something important about what we try to do in digital humanities: create work that endures, that remains accessible and meaningful long after its creation. We may not achieve immortality, but we can aspire to projects that outlast the platforms they’re built on.
Sacred Grain of the Americas
But amaranth isn’t just a symbol from Greek mythology and English poetry. It’s also a plant—or rather, a family of more than sixty plant species—with a remarkable history in the Americas.
Amaranth grain, cultivated in the Americas for at least 8,000 years, was a dietary staple rivaling corn in importance.
Archaeological evidence suggests that people in Mesoamerica began cultivating amaranth around 6000 BCE, making it one of the oldest domesticated crops in the Western Hemisphere. By the time the Aztec Empire rose to power in the fifteenth century, amaranth—known as huāuhtli in Nahuatl—had become one of the three primary tribute crops, alongside maize and beans. Some scholars estimate that amaranth provided up to 80% of the Aztec diet’s caloric energy.
The Aztecs didn’t just eat amaranth. They considered it sacred. During religious festivals, they mixed amaranth flour with honey (and sometimes blood from ritual sacrifices) to create a dough called tzoalli. They shaped this dough into figures of their gods, particularly Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun. At the end of the festival of Panquetzaliztli, priests would break apart the amaranth statues and distribute pieces to the people, who consumed them as a form of communion with the divine.
The Forbidden Grain
When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the sixteenth century, they immediately recognized amaranth’s spiritual significance—and saw it as a threat to their mission of Christian conversion.
The practice of shaping amaranth into gods and consuming it as communion struck the Spanish as a demonic parody of the Eucharist. In their campaign to suppress indigenous religion, colonial authorities banned the cultivation of amaranth. The punishment for growing or possessing the grain could be severe: some accounts describe offenders having their hands cut off.
Survival in Secret
Despite the prohibition, amaranth never disappeared. Indigenous farmers continued cultivating it in secret, preserving seeds in hidden gardens, passing knowledge from generation to generation. The grain survived in remote mountain villages and marginal lands where colonial oversight was weak.
This history of suppression and survival resonates with broader patterns in the humanities. Powerful institutions often try to control what knowledge gets preserved and transmitted. Sometimes the most important cultural materials are the ones that persist despite official neglect or active destruction.
not sure
A Modern Revival
For centuries, amaranth remained a marginal crop, known mainly to indigenous communities and a few botanists. That began to change in the 1970s, when the American health food movement rediscovered this “ancient grain.”
Modern amaranth products marketed as superfoods. The grain’s complete protein profile and high nutrient density have fueled its commercial revival.
Nutritional analysis revealed what indigenous peoples had known for millennia: amaranth is remarkably nutritious. Unlike most grains, it contains all nine essential amino acids, making it a complete protein—rare for a plant food. It’s rich in iron, magnesium, phosphorus, and fiber. It’s naturally gluten-free. In an era of increasing interest in plant-based diets and sustainable agriculture, amaranth seemed almost too good to be true.
Today, amaranth is cultivated commercially on several continents. You can find it in health food stores as flour, puffed cereal, or whole grain. In Mexico, street vendors still sell alegría—“joy”—a traditional candy made from popped amaranth and honey, connecting modern consumers to a treat the Aztecs would have recognized.
The grain that colonial powers tried to eradicate is now marketed as a “superfood.” What was once forbidden is now fashionable.
Superfoods and Superweeds
The same qualities that make amaranth valuable as a crop—its hardiness, its rapid growth, its ability to thrive in poor conditions—also make its weedy relatives formidable agricultural pests.
Here is where amaranth’s story takes an unexpected turn. While cultivated amaranth species have been rediscovered as superfoods, their wild cousins have become something else entirely: superweeds.
Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, can grow up to three inches per day and reach heights of seven feet, overwhelming crops like cotton and soybeans.
Palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri), commonly known as pigweed, is native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. In its natural habitat, it’s just another plant. But in agricultural fields, it’s a nightmare.
A single Palmer amaranth plant can produce 400,000 seeds. It grows up to three inches per day, quickly overtaking crops and reaching heights of six to eight feet. In cotton fields, it can destroy harvesting equipment. Some Georgia farmers have simply abandoned fields to the weed.
The real crisis began in 2006, when populations of Palmer amaranth started showing resistance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the world’s most widely used herbicide. The resistance spread rapidly. Scientists discovered that resistant plants had amplified their EPSPS gene—the enzyme that glyphosate targets—sometimes producing over a hundred copies instead of the usual one or two. The plants simply overwhelm the herbicide with sheer genetic abundance.
The Contradictions Humanists Explore
With over sixty species, amaranth ranges from sacred grain to superfood to agricultural pest---embodying the contradictions that make humanities inquiry essential.
Growth from Variety
This brings us back to why we chose amaranth for a digital humanities studio.
Hopi Red Dye amaranth, used for centuries to color traditional piki bread and textiles. The same plant family provides food, medicine, dye, and symbolic meaning.
Amaranth represents the inherent contradictions that humanists explore. The same plant family gives us sacred grain and stubborn weed, superfood and superpest, ancient tradition and modern biotechnology problem. One species feeds people; another resists every attempt to control it. The meaning depends entirely on context—who’s growing it, where, and why.
Throughout history and into the present, people have used dozens of amaranth species for an astonishing range of purposes: food, medicine, dye, religious ritual, and decoration. The Hopi used red amaranth to color their traditional piki bread. Ayurvedic practitioners prescribed it for inflammation and digestive troubles. Ancient Greeks hung it in temples; modern farmers curse it in their fields.
This diversity of uses—and meanings—makes amaranth a fitting metaphor for digital humanities work. Over the last few decades, a new set of digital tools and techniques has emerged to provide humanists with many options for projects and research. Text analysis, mapping, visualization, digital archives, 3D modeling, virtual reality—the possibilities multiply every year. Like amaranth itself, digital humanities grows in many directions, adapts to many contexts, and serves many purposes.
The Promise and the Paradox
We don’t pretend that digital projects achieve immortality. File formats change. Platforms shut down. Funding ends. Even well-maintained projects eventually face the question of what happens next. The digital realm is, in many ways, the opposite of unfading.
But the aspiration matters. We try to build projects that outlast their initial funding, that remain accessible after the conference presentation, that can be preserved and migrated and kept alive. We work with open source tools and sustainable practices precisely because we’ve seen what happens when projects depend on proprietary platforms or abandoned software.
We chose amaranth because it captures both the hope and the irony of working at the intersection of technology and the humanities.
The name also reminds us that preservation isn’t just a technical problem. The Spanish couldn’t eradicate amaranth because people cared enough to keep growing it, even at great personal risk. Digital projects survive when communities care enough to maintain them. The tools matter, but the commitment matters more.
Finally, amaranth reminds us that context determines meaning. A plant that’s a sacred food in one setting becomes an invasive pest in another. A digital tool that empowers one community might surveil another. The humanities help us think through these contradictions, to ask not just “what can we build?” but “what should we build?” and “for whom?”
Growing Something Together
Alegría, or ‘joy,’ a traditional Mexican candy made from popped amaranth and honey—a treat that connects modern consumers to ancient foodways.
So that’s why we’re called Amaranth.
We’re a studio that helps bring technology and the humanities together. We work with students, faculty, and communities to create digital projects—websites, archives, visualizations, interactive stories—that make humanities research accessible and engaging. We try to build things that last, knowing that nothing digital truly lasts forever.
We’re named for a flower that symbolizes immortality, a grain that sustained civilizations, a plant that refuses to die no matter how hard you try to kill it. We embrace the contradictions because the humanities have always lived in contradiction: between past and present, preservation and change, the universal and the particular.
If you’re interested in working with us, come by the studio. Let’s grow something together.
Sources and Further Reading
Aesop. “The Rose and the Amaranth.” Aesop’s Fables.
Kauffman, C.S., and L.E. Weber. “Grain amaranth.” Advances in New Crops. Timber Press, 1990.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667.
Sauer, Jonathan D. “The Grain Amaranths and Their Relatives: A Revised Taxonomic and Geographic Survey.” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 1967.
