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

这项博士论文改进基金支持植物学历史的一个项目。具体来说，它将研究早期殖民时期的洲际工厂转移。它的目的是利用科学史上的这一关键时期，让人们注意到西班牙世界的土著居民如何对现代植物学做出重要贡献，并探索早期社会如何在他们自己的信息时代处理快速涌入的新信息。许多植物为全球观众所熟悉，包括墨西哥的万寿菊、中国的柑橘、南非的百合花等等。这些植物大多是在殖民帝国兴起之后才为全球观众所熟悉的，当时定期的跨洋航行使植物、动物、人类和信息在世界各地的传递比以往任何时候都更快、更容易。这个项目的结果将说明随着时间的推移，人们理解自然世界的多种方式，认识到多种世界观在不同地方的持续共存。通过提供以现代植物园为基础的公共宣传，该项目将帮助公众和学生将这一历史时期与他们今天生活的物质和智力世界联系起来。为了追踪近代早期西班牙帝国的植物运动和与植物相关的知识，该项目汇集了考古学，人类学和历史信息，以更好地了解植物如何在大西洋周围移动。通过将印刷的植物学文献与关于植物生长地点的考古和文献证据进行比较，该项目为调查人们在官方圈子之外对植物的看法提供了新的工具。这种基于空间的方法有可能在扩展科学史方面得到更广泛的应用，以包括更多在西方传统中没有产生书面作品的群体。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.