Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
While we’re on the subject of radicchio diversity, old Roman medicines and the like, we were pleased to be sent a link to Renaissance Herbals, a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma. There are some lovely images to peruse and use, like this one, of wild chicory, Cichorium intybus.:
One could complain, of course, that the links between the illustrations and other sorts of information are non-existent. But hey, you can’t have everything.
What I missed when I wrote about the 2000-year-old Roman pills a couple of days back is that the research was highlighted by Discover magazine as one of the Top 100 Stories of 2010. In addition, Emanuela Appetiti, one of the researchers involved, kindly pointed me to a story at AoLNews which has lots more photos and another one in the Washington Post. She also gave me this nice bit of news:
…I am happy to inform you that Alain Touwaide and myself, along with Rob Fleischer, the geneticist who did the DNA analysis of the ancient medicines, will be in Rome in mid-May 2011 (on the occasion of the “Night of the Museums”) to present at “La Sapienza” University this research. For the first time, we’ll be all there: the three of us and the staff of the Soprintendenza di Firenze, who did the archeaological digging and first analysis. The event in Rome will be on May 14, 2011, at the faculty of Letters.
Looking forward to that. In the meantime, here’s a very recent interview with Alain Touwaide, courtesy of the BBC. Thanks, Emanuela.
Test question (no prizes): What’s the link between avocados and orchids?
Another great find from the recent issue of The Plant Press I blogged about yesterday is the Smithsonian’s website on Edward Palmer:
Edward Palmer (1831-1911), often regarded as “the father of ethnobotany,” gathered extensive natural history collections in North and South America during the late nineteenth century and established standards for plant collecting and reporting, particularly for plants useful to people. His scientific framework is still used today. This new Botany website, Edward Palmer Collections provides a window into the Palmer Collection to communities where Palmer originally collected, as well as to scientists and the general public.
Palmer held posts both as ethnologist for the Smithsonian and as USDA plant collector, and the connections between his botanical and anthropological materials are fascinating, and nicely highlighted on the website. Now, is anyone going to try to get DNA out of his corncob?
As promised earlier, here’s a little something on recent efforts to deconstruct an ancient Roman medicine. The short piece in The Plant Press which initially intrigued me eventually led to the website of the Institute for Preservation of Medical Traditions, a fascinating organization of which I was entirely ignorant. It has some more information and some photographs, and in an easier to handle form than the pdf you get The Plant Press in. It will do while I try to locate the published paper.
It seems that in 1974 a 2000-year-old Roman shipwreck was found off the coast of Tuscany. It the course of excavating it, various remains were recovered which pointed to the presence of a physician on board. Among these were a water-proof tin container with what looked like pills inside. In 2004, fragments of these reached Alain Touwaide and Antonella Appetiti at the Institute for Preservation of Medical Traditions, who started to analyze their organic and inorganic composition. They teamed up with geneticist Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian to identify the botanical constituents of the tablets using the latest DNA fingerprinting technology.
First results seem to indicate that the tablets contained at least carrot, radish, parsley, celery, wild onion, and cabbage, that is, simple plants to be found in the garden. There was probably also yarrow and the more exotic hibiscus, possibly introduced in the Mediterranean area from Asia. Significantly, all the components of the pills identified so far (be they vegetal or inorganic) can be found in the ancient medical texts that the scholars in the Institute have been locating in manuscripts preserved in collections worldwide, transcribing and digitizing, studying and databasing for decades, all activities that contribute to the Institute’s program aimed at recovering the medical heritage of the ancient Mediterranean world.
This is apparently the first time that archaeological remains of ancient medicines have been found, let alone their ingredients identified.