People, Plants, and Pests: Desiccated Macrobotanicals at Bartram’s Botanical Garden

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In recent years, archaeobotanists have explored the potential of desiccated assemblages cached by rodents in historic standing structures. This paper analyzes one such dataset from Bartram’s Garden, established in 1728 in Philadelphia. The Bartram family, along with at least one enslaved and one indentured worker, cultivated over 2,000 native North American and imported plant species over 122 years. Examining the material traces of plants at the garden as collected by rodents provides an opportunity for grappling with both the global scale of plant migration, and the hyper-local scale of plant, animal, and human interactions in the garden. Considering these scales together is critical for understanding botanical gardens as a both loci and agents of environmental change in the 18th and 19th century Middle Atlantic. Despite the fact that gardens are known to have been vectors for invasive species during European settlement of North America, archaeologists have yet to study how they were a part of the changing environment of the American colonies and Early Republic. Exploring these questions is a critical step towards examining the material conditions of botanical gardens and understanding the new relationships that were made possible between species in those spaces.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38008.0