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Great ethnobotanical collection online

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?

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Deconstructing an ancient Roman medicine

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.

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Historical plant images online

The discussion of plants in religious iconography which followed a recent post (see the Featured Comment box at right) triggered some googling, which eventually led to Plant Image:

Plant Image is a searchable database of plant images, focusing on the Cucurbitaceae and Solanaceae. Searches have been made from various sources including art (mosaics, paintings, and sculpture), illustrated manuscripts, and hand illustrated and printed herbals and books. We are concentrating our search on antiquity (Old and New World), medieval, and Renaissance sources but we intend to include more recent images as well. Bibliographic information on primary and secondary sources will be associated with each image and, in the case of herbals, associated text material will eventually be included. We hope to receive images and information from all persons interested in the Cucurbitaceae and Solanaceae, so that the database will be a living, dynamic document.

An effort well worthy of support.

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Featured: Agrobiodiversity in iconography

Boba sets Luigi right on the age of some bas reliefs:

The iconography of the date tree is Byzantine, as is the depiction of the lambs. Down the road a bit, in Ravenna, (which Venice supplanted as the premier Italian harbor on the Adriatic) is Sant Apollinare. It dates to the 6th century (500 CE) and has interesting mosaics on it.

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Belated news of the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium

I’m pretty sure we didn’t report on the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium 2010 “Food For Thought: 21st Century Perspectives on Plants and People” when it was held in September last year, which was very remiss of us. Anyway, you can catch up on the website, of course, but if you want the short version you should read the latest issue of The Plant Press, the Smithsonian’s botanical newsletter. Here, to give you a flavour, is how the symposium was advertized:

The Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, hosted by the Departments of Botany and Anthropology, will examine the 21st century transformation of the study of interactions between plants and people. The invited speakers will cover a wide range of topics: from the role molecular biology now has in elucidating crop domestication to the ways in which peoples across myriad ecosystems interact with specific plants and landscapes.

It certainly seems to have lived up to the billing. The Plant Press has a couple of shorter pieces that might also be of interest, on analyzing an ancient Roman medicine and on an historical ethnobotanical collection. I’ll probably blog about those separately later.