Commodities and Curiosities: Colonial Botany at Jamestown

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Opening the Vault: What Collections Can Say About Jamestown’s Global Trade Network", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Plants played an integral role in the colonization of North America. When colonists and investors realized that gold and other precious metals would not be viable for export, they turned their attention to other natural resources. It was in plants that the colonists found the answers to survival and economic success. Historical documents and archaeobotanical findings today offer scholars a glimpse at the vast array of human-plant entanglements of the seventeenth century, a time when advancements in publishing and an emphasis on classification propelled an interest in botany. As Native, European, and African peoples encountered one another, they shared, observed, modified, and rejected plants and ecological knowledge. These exchanges strengthened and created new alliances between individuals and groups and caused divisions and justified displacement. This paper contextualizes Jamestown’s role in colonial botany and presents preliminary data from macrobotanical analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Opening the Vault: What Collections Can Say About Jamestown’s Global Trade Network

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow