|
2016
15 August. Job on offer in our team, closes 16 September. 16 June. New paper in Journal of Museum Ethnography on the history of economic botany collections. 25 May. New paper on Iron Age archaeobotany at Tille Höyük, Turkey. 3 May. New blog post: Unpacking tapa: the science and culture of Pacific barkcloth 4 March: New grant 'Mobilising the value of biocultural collections in Brazil'' British Council/Newton Fund (Institutional Skills) 11 February: 6 (short) chapters in beautifully illustrated new book The Botanical Treasury: Cinchona; Lagenaria siceraria; Paper Mulberry; Wheat, Saccharum officinale, Zea mays. To see inside book: Amazon 2015 23 November: New paper Potpourri as a sustainable plant product: identity, origin, and conservation status 30 October: New grant The flora of ancient Iraq: a scientific approach to ancient texts see News 15 October: Royal Society of Biology Award: Curating Biocultural Collections: see News 12 June: Major AHRC-funded project to study Pacific barkcloth: see press release |
I work at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, as Team Leader for Economic Botany and curator of the Economic Botany Collection (EBC).
As the photograph above hints, the EBC is extraordinarily varied in its holdings, aspiring to represent all uses of all plants in all places. While it might never have quite completed that task, the efforts of curators and collectors since 1847 make the EBC a wonderfully rich resource for research and teaching on many aspects of botany, history, anthropology and art and design. After a decade working in it, I feel I have barely scratched the surface. This website allows me to talk about my work at greater length than on Kew's official site (here is my Kew page), but readers will probably find it useful to see the official EBC pages, and perhaps my other personal site covering my past career in archaeobotany. Above all, I hope these pages will encourage students and other researchers interested in using the EBC to contact me to discuss how we can work together. |
