Society for Ethnobotany Daniel F. Austin Award The important cultural role of an ancient, endangered plant Under the Shade of Thipaak is the first book to explore the cultural role of cycads, plants that evolved over 250 million years ago and are now critically endangered, in the ancient and modern Mesoamerican and Caribbean worlds. This volume demonstrates how these ancient plants have figured prominently in regional mythologies, rituals, art, and foodways from the Pleistocene-Holocene transition to the present. Contributors discuss the importance of cycads from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including biology and population genetics, historical ecology, archaeology, art history, linguistics, and conservation and sustainability. Chapters pay special attention to the enduring conceptual relationships between cycads and maize. This book demonstrates how a close examination of cycad-human relationships can motivate conservation of these threatened plants in ways that engage local communities, as well as promote the significance of ancient and modern practices that unite nature and culture. Contributors: Francisco Barona-Gómez | Emanuel Bojorquez Quintal | Mark A. Bonta | Edder Daniel Bustos-Díaz | Dánae Cabrera-Toledo | Michael Calonje | Michael D. Carrasco | Angélica Cibrián-Jaramillo | Joshua D. Englehardt | Jorge González-Astorga | Naishla M. Gutiérrez-Arroyo | José Saíd Gutiérrez-Ortega | Thomas Hart | Jaime R. Pagán-Jiménez | Francisco Pérez-Zavala | Luis Rojas Abarca | Esteban Sánchez Rodríguez | Dennis William Stevenson | Amber M. VanDerwarker | Luis R. Velázquez Maldonado | Andrew P. Vovides

Maize has been described as a primary catalyst to complex sociocultural development in the Americas. State of the art research on maize chronology, molecular biology, and stable carbon isotope research on ancient human diets have provided additional lines of evidence on the changing role of maize through time and space and its spread throughout the Americas. The multidisciplinary evidence from the social and biological sciences presented in this volume have generated a much more complex picture of the economic, political, and religious significance of maize. The volume also includes ethnographic research on the uses and roles of maize in indigenous cultures and a linguistic section that includes chapters on indigenous folk taxonomies and the role and meaning of maize to the development of civilization. Histories of Maize is the most comprehensive reference source on the botanical, genetic, archaeological, and anthropological aspects of ancient maize published to date. This book will appeal to a varied audience, and have no titles competiting with it because of its breadth and scope. The volume offers a single source of high quality summary information unavailable elsewhere.

From the Foreword Umberto Quattrocchi has brought us some amazing and useful works through the various dictionaries that he has compiled. This time it is for two very important plant families the palms and the cycads that are synthesized here in these two volumes. Each entry is fascinating not just for the botany and full nomenclature of the plant species but for all the associated uses, folklore and interactions with other organisms. ...These entries are fascinating glimpses of natural history. ... Botanists, conservationists, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, geographers, bird watchers, naturalists, historians and those of many other disciplines will find these volumes a most valuable and useful resource. It is the sort of book that will be in frequent use in my library. ----- Professor Sir Ghillean Prance FRS, VMH, Former Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Following the same format as Umberto Quattrocchi’s highly praised and well-used previous works, The CRC World Dictionary of Palms: Common Names, Scientific Names, Eponyms, Synonyms, and Etymology brings together the vast and scattered literature on palms and cycads to provide better access to information on these economically important plants. Each genus and species has a detailed morphological description and includes a list of synonyms and vernacular names in many languages. Bibliographies accompany each entry which are comprehensive, up-to-date and multi-lingual. The detailed information for every entry on habitats, economic uses, historical and biographical data, botanical exploration, and linguistics will be useful for any library involved with botany, herbal medicine, pharmacognosy, medicinal and natural product chemistry, ecology, ethnobotany, systematics, general plant science, agriculture or horticulture. Umberto Quattrocchi is the author of the bestselling CRC World Dictionary of Plant Names, winner of the prestigious Hanbury Botanical Garden Award. His most recent multi-volume work, CRC World Dictionary of Medicinal and Poisonous Plants, received strong praise as being "... an unparalleled starting place—a tool of first resort for any thoughtful researcher. Quattrocchi and CRC have delivered a dictionary like no other, a learned finger pointing in the right direction." —John de la Parra, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, from Economic Botany, Vol. 68, 2014

This book addresses questions about theories of heritage, its methodologies of research, and where its boundaries lie with tourism, urban development, post-disaster recovery, collective identities, memory, or conflict. This book is a collection of heritage studies from a critical perspective as a product of the 2018 ACHS (Association of Critical Heritage Studies) Conference in Hangzhou, the largest conference of its kind in Asia. The contributors cover a wide spectrum of issues in heritage studies, such as heritage management, accessibility to heritage, heritage conservation and heritage policy, and heritage representation. It also examines the various contexts within which heritage emerges and how heritage is constructed within that context. Analyses are based on not only representations of heritage but also on the performativity. Explorations touch upon community involvement, landscape history, children’s literature, endangered food, architecture, advertisement, allotment garden, and gender and visual art. As heritage has always been a locus of contested verities, the book offers a variegated approach to heritage studies. It provides students and scholars new perspectives on heritage study.

Biocultural collections are plants and animals used by people, products made from them, and/or information and archives about them. They are numerous and diverse, including biological specimens, natural products (e.g., medicine, food, fiber, oil, latex, etc.) and cultural artifacts (e.g., clothing, baskets, weaponry, tools, etc.) from around the world. Biocultural collections benefit scientists, conservationists, development workers, teachers, students, and the general public. However, these collections are poorly curated and data based - if at all - making them largely inaccessible for research and reference. At a time when wild crop relatives, landraces, and knowledge about traditional plant uses are being lost at an alarming rate, our biocultural collections are also degrading and being orphaned or lost. Curating Biocultural Collections aims to address these issues and develop standards of curation, and help institutions to properly care for collections that have been severely neglected and under-utilized. Written and edited by experts from around the world, this book demonstrates that with proper curation, data basing, and on-line and physical access, these valuable resources can be used in research, conservation, development and education, and preserved for future generations. Kew Publishing in association with Missouri Botanical Garden Press