Subject: [permaculture] Native American Ethnobotany database

From: Steve Diver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 20:14:01 -0500

Add this database to the Permaculture Library:

1.

Native American Ethnobotany
A Database of Foods, Drugs, Dyes and Fibers of Native
American Peoples, Derived from Plants.
http://herb.umd.umich.edu/

Dan Moerman
Professor of Anthropology
University of Michigan-Dearborn

About:
Native American Ethnobotany database
http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~dmoerman/about_ethnobot.pdf
and
http://www.umd.umich.edu/database/herb/about_ethnobot.html

Excerpts:

This database is the result of a series of efforts over 25 years. A book
based on the data base has been published by Timber Press, in Portland
OR in 1998.

The book was given the Annual Book Award of the Council for Botanical
and Herbarium Libraries in 2000.

In 2002, the database had about 80,000 hits.

As noted, In the spring of 2003, substantial revisions of the database were
made, revising its looks, and adding links to the US Department of 
Agriculture
PLANTS database. This means that complete botanical information on useful
plants, plus pictures, range maps, and endangered status, are 
immediately available

The database now contains 44,691 items. This version added foods, drugs,
dyes, fibers and other uses of plants. This represents uses by 291 
Native American
groups of 4,029 species from 243 different plant families.

About half of them are medicinal.

2.

Edge: The Third Culture:  Dan Moerman
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/moerman.html

DAN MOERMAN is William E Stirton Professor of Anthropology University
of Michigan-Dearborn. His first work related to health emerged during his
dissertation research with a rural black population in coastal South 
Carolina
in the early 1970s.  

St. Helena Islanders told him of their complex theory of health involving a
subtle system of pressures and flavors of the blood which, if things 
went badly,
could cause various illnesses which they treated with a series of plants
(called "weeds") gathered from fields or planted in their gardens.  

Since then, he has done research primarily in two areas -- medicinal plants
(primarily of Native American peoples who originated the uses of most of
the plants used by the Islanders), and of the impact on health of the
knowledge and understanding of it that people have.

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