Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Early Botany and Indigenous Plant-Related Knowledge

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation improvement grant supports a project in the history of botany. Specifically, it will examine intercontinental plant transfer during the early colonial period. It aims to use this critical period in the history of science to bring attention to how Indigenous people in the Hispanic world made key contributions to modern botany, as well as exploring how earlier societies dealt with the rapid influx of new information in an Information Age of their own. Many plants are familiar to global audiences, including marigolds from Mexico, citruses from China, lilies from South Africa, and many more. Most of these plants became familiar to global audiences only after the rise of the colonial empires, when regular cross-oceanic voyages made the transfer of plants, animals, people, and information around the world faster and easier than ever before. The results of this project will illustrate the many ways in which people have understood the natural world over time, recognizing the continued co-existence of multiple worldviews in different places. By providing public outreach based in the modern botanical garden, this project will help the public and students connect this period in history to the physical and intellectual world they live in today. In tracing the movement of plants and plant-related knowledge in the early modern Spanish empire, this project brings together archaeological, anthropological, and historical information to better understand how plants moved around the Atlantic. By comparing printed botanical texts with archaeological and documentary evidence about where plants were grown, this project provides new tools for investigating how people thought about plants outside official circles. This space-based method has potential for broader application in extending the history of science to include more groups who did not produce written works in the Western tradition. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.