Native American Ethnobotany

About this book

Native American Ethnobotany is a comprehensive account of the plants used by Native American peoples for medicine, food, and other purposes. The author, anthropologist Daniel E. Moerman, has devoted more than 25 years to the compilation of the ethnobotanical knowledge slowly gathered over the course of many centuries and recorded in hundreds of firsthand studies of American Indians made over the past 150 years. This research has yielded a treasure-trove of information whose magnitude will surprise even those familiar with the anthropological and botanical literature: it documents Native American use of 4029 kinds of plants with a total of 44,691 usages.