Ethnobotany and Economic Botany: Human Uses of Plant

Catalog description

Course explores the human uses of plants for food, fiber, medicine, and spirituality among the Worlds cultures. Ethnobotany draws from among several disciplines, including botany, anthropology, ecology, geography, and chemistry. Areas of investigation include the Neolithic revolution, plant domestication, medicinal and psychotropic plants, shamanism, paleoethnobotany, extinction in the Anthropocene, ethnolinguistics, bioprospecting, and methods of traditional and modern agriculture. We examine the ethnobotany of cultures in coastal California and the Amazon Basin.