Ethnobotany

Citation gap: This page currently lacks lead-specialist citations because the named lead authorities for Indigenous-Americas medicine (Vogel, Moerman) are shelved in the Library but not yet extracted. The page is built from Gilmore’s 1919 Bureau of American Ethnology monograph. See WISH_LIST.md.

Ethnobotany is the study of how particular peoples use, name, classify, and live with the plants of their region. It grew out of late nineteenth-century anthropology, when American researchers began to record the plant knowledge of Indigenous peoples whose territories the United States was rapidly enclosing. Early ethnobotanists treated this knowledge as a practical resource that might serve industry, medicine, or agriculture; later workers recognized it as a body of natural science in its own right, with its own taxonomies, ecologies, and pharmacologies. The field now sits at the intersection of botany, anthropology, linguistics, and pharmacology, and its source material is most often a community whose relationship to its plants long predates the researcher’s arrival.

Origins and Definition

The term “ethno-botany” was coined by John W. Harshberger in 1895. Melvin Gilmore, working for the Bureau of American Ethnology among the Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee, Dakota, and Winnebago between 1909 and 1914, opened his 1919 monograph Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region by quoting Harshberger’s working definition: ethnobotany seeks out the plants that “primitive races” have found useful, “in order that perchance the valuable properties they have utilized in their wild life may fill some vacant niche in our own.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) The framing is unmistakably extractive — knowledge collected from one people for the eventual benefit of another — and it shaped the discipline’s first generation.

Gilmore opened by indicting European colonizers for failing to undertake any thoroughgoing survey of North American flora or to learn from Indigenous botanical knowledge, “choosing instead to exterminate the native and supplant it with European species.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) In the conclusion he went further, arguing that ethnobotanical fieldwork was the recovery of “a system of natural science which never came to maturity, being cut off in its infancy by the superposition of a more advanced stage of culture by an alien race upon the people who had attained the degree of culture we have here seen.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Methodology

Early ethnobotany rested on three operations: collecting voucher specimens, working with named informants who could identify plants in situ and supply names and uses, and reconciling Indigenous identifications with Linnaean taxonomy. The botanical explorer John Bradbury, traveling near present-day Homer, Nebraska in 1810, recorded an early instance of the method when an Omaha elder rode up to inspect his collection and asked, in fur-trade French, whether each plant was “bon pour manger” or “bon pour medicine”; Bradbury found that Omaha women had names for every plant in his bag.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) This is the kernel of the later ethnobotanical interview — the researcher displays specimens, the informant assigns names and use categories. The practice of gathering botanical knowledge through informants on campaign is much older: Theophrastus, writing in the fourth century BCE, relied on men who had accompanied Alexander the Great into India in 327-326 BCE for descriptions of Indian plants such as the fig tree, though he noted that his sources had not obtained local names for many of the trees they encountered.(Stapley, 2024)

Gilmore inferred from his Missouri River fieldwork that Plains-tribe knowledge of plants was unevenly held, as “certain persons in every tribe or social group, from taste and habit, would come to possess a fund of such knowledge, and to these all simpler folk, or those more occupied with other things, would resort.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) These specialists added “the weight and dignity of ceremony and circumstance” and taught disciples through private field excursions on plant characteristics and uses.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Categories of Plant Use

Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) was one of three trees that pervaded the Plains tribes’ range, and they ascribed to it communion with the Higher Powers, viewing it as withdrawn, dark, and still, like an Indian wrapped in his robe.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Material culture is shaped by what grows. Eastern woodland tribes built bark-covered log frames because timber was abundant; Nebraska tribes, working in sparse-timber prairie, built earth lodges of timber frames thatched with prairie grass and covered with sod.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Plant aesthetics also followed regional habit: Plains people admired wildflowers in situ but did not pluck them for adornment, though seeds were widely worked into beads and pendants.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Phytogeography and Anthropogenic Plant Migration

Gilmore documented one instance of this adaptive knowledge in the case of the Dakota, who had relied on wild rice (Zizania aquatica, called psin) in their eastern lake-region homelands; when Chippewa pressure armed with French firearms drove them westward onto the prairie, they substituted Psoralea esculenta (tipsinna) as their primary vegetal staple, and the linguist J. R. Walker proposed that the Dakota name tipsinna may itself derive from psin, preserving in its etymology the memory of this forced substitution.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

A finding that emerged from Gilmore’s fieldwork — and that has remained a recurring theme in ethnobotany since — is that human populations are not passive inhabitants of a region’s flora but active agents in shaping it. He argued that the chief means by which Native peoples affected the floral balance of the prairie was fire: regular burning of the grasslands “was effective in retarding the advance of woodland with all its associate flora and very probably even drove back the forest line and exterminated some areas which, previous to any human occupancy, had been possessed by forest growth.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

John Josselyn’s New Englands Rarities Discovered documented the first wave of this process in North America: he listed not only what settlers found growing but what had appeared since they arrived with cattle, including stinging nettles, dandelion, chickweed, and plantain — the last of which the Indigenous inhabitants called “English-Man’s Foot,” marking it as an introduced plant that followed colonizers wherever they went.(Stapley, 2024)

Plant migration was likewise shaped by human movement. Gilmore found thickets of Prunus americana (American plum) at every site of original Pawnee earth-lodges in Oklahoma, sprung from the dried plums Pawnees carried south when removed from Nebraska in 1875.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) He proposed that the anomalous Nebraska distribution of Lobelia cardinalis — confined to the ancient domain of the Pawnee Nation, where it functioned as a love-charm ingredient — could be explained by deliberate introduction by Pawnee medicine-men.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) In his concluding chapter he generalized: “human agency [is] the efficient factor in the migration of some species of wild plants, or plants growing without cultivation. If this be the true explanation it affords the key to the heretofore puzzling isolation of areas occupied by certain species.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) The argument anticipates a body of late twentieth-century work on anthropogenic plant geography.

Indigenous Taxonomy and the Question of Folk Science

Ethnobotanists have long debated whether Indigenous plant nomenclature constitutes a “taxonomy” in any sense comparable to Linnaean classification. Gilmore took the modest position that Plains-tribe nomenclature showed at least the beginnings of one: “The names applied to plants show in many instances a faint sense of relationship of species to species.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) He credited his informants with practical competence in what he called the “incipiency of phytogeography, plant ecology, and morphology,” and argued that the large number of species used and their many uses showed considerable development of practical plant economy.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

The relationship of ethnobotanical knowledge to agricultural domestication is also contested. Gilmore noted that no native wild plants of the Missouri River region were domesticated by Plains tribes prior to European contact — the cultivated crops were maize, beans, squash, gourds, watermelons, and tobacco, all of probable Mexican origin.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) He proposed a structural reason: “the necessary incentive was lacking, in that the natural product of each useful native plant was always available” through the tribes’ semiannual hunting trips through several phytogeographic provinces.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) After contact, with movement restricted by the reservation system and natural supplies depleted, Gilmore reported finding “in every tribe the incipient stage of domestication of certain wild fruits, roots, and other plant products” — a real-time window, he argued, onto the prehistoric processes that produced Europe’s and Asia’s familiar crops.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Deep History and the Antiquity of Plant Knowledge

Gilmore himself offered an inference about the depth of this knowledge: from the general popular familiarity with indigenous plants documented in his catalog, he concluded that the tribes encountered at European contact must have been settled in the Missouri River region for many generations, and that they had given sustained, close attention to the floral life of that region across that entire span.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) The number of species drawn from distant mountain, woodland, and southwestern desert environments further indicated that these peoples had also traveled and traded extensively, carrying plant knowledge and plant materials across wide geographic ranges.

Ethnobotanical work in the later twentieth century has placed plant-medicine knowledge on a much longer chronological scale than Gilmore’s monograph could reach. The Canadian Herbalist’s Association of Alberta curriculum, drawing on archaeological literature, notes that humans have been hunter-gatherers for approximately 99.5 percent of human history, with roughly one million years of foraging and only five thousand years of agrarian society.(Willard, 2021) A Neanderthal burial site in northern Iraq, approximately 60,000 years old, contained pollen from eight plant species, seven of which are still used medicinally — including marshmallow, yarrow, and ephedra.(Willard, 2021) A separate Neanderthal recovered from a peat bog was found to have medicinal herbs in his stomach.(Willard, 2021) Ötzi the Iceman, dated to approximately 5,300 years ago, was carrying birch polypore mushroom and had bracken fern in his stomach — both consistent with self-medication for the intestinal parasites he was found to harbor.(Willard, 2021) He also carried Fomes fomentarius — a fungus that grows on birch and contains the antibiotic substance polyporic acid — threaded onto fur strips and worn on his wrist, suggesting medicinal use of antimicrobial fungi in prehistoric Europe.(Stapley, 2024) Archaeological work at the Glastonbury Lake Village, occupied from approximately 250 BCE until its abandonment due to flooding, yielded approximately forty identified plant species including chickweed, parsnip, nettle, bogbean, mustard, and large quantities of hazelnut shells — an evidence base for reconstructing the dietary and possibly medicinal plant repertoire of an Iron Age settlement.(Stapley, 2024)

These findings shift the temporal frame of ethnobotany. The discipline is not only the study of present-day Indigenous knowledge; it is also the only available method for reading the medical practice of populations that left no texts.

Historiographic Caveats

Gilmore’s monograph remains the canonical primary source for early-twentieth-century Plains-tribe ethnobotany, but several features of his account require care. His vocabulary (“primitive,” “aboriginal,” “infancy of culture”) reflects period anthropology and should not be naturalized. His framing of Plains plant knowledge as an early stage of European natural science presumes a unilinear developmental model that current ethnobotanists generally reject. His readiness to identify cross-cultural parallels to the European doctrine of signatures — he applied the term, for instance, to the Omaha use of Pepo foetidissima root, where the part of the root corresponding to the affected part of the patient’s body was used — may be a retrospective projection of a European interpretive frame onto practices with their own indigenous logic.

His informant relations also varied in depth. Some Pawnee medicine-men showed him bags of pulverized Arisaema corm but declined to disclose its full use; he obtained the disclosure later from another informant. The book is, in places, a record of what specialists chose to share with a federal anthropologist of European descent in the years immediately after the Plains tribes had been confined to reservations — not a complete account of what was known.

See Also

• Native American Medicine
• Materia Medica
• Botanical Medicine
• Doctrine of Signatures
• Colonial Medicine
• American Medicine
• Shamanism

Sources

[Auto-generated from evidence IDs in frontmatter]

Editorial Notes

Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work, collected from inline markers in the body and frontmatter.

Historiographic Caveats