Fritz wins book award for ‘Feeding Cahokia’

Fritz wins book award for ‘Feeding Cahokia’

The Society for Economic Botany awarded Gayle J. Fritz, professor emerita of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, its 2020 Mary W. Klinger Book Award for “Feeding Cahokia.” The book emphasizes the importance of native crops that were domesticated by America’s first farmers long before corn became a staple food in what is now the U.S. Midwest.
‘Lost crops’ could have fed as many as maize

‘Lost crops’ could have fed as many as maize

For thousands of years, goosefoot and knotweed were grown as crops, possibly feeding as many indigenous people of North America as corn. But the domesticated forms of these lost crops became lost over the years, and now a Washington University in St. Louis archaeologist is trying to figure out why — and recreate them.
Wearing of the green

Wearing of the green

Who better to explain the meaning of the shamrock than an ethnobotanist born and raised in Ireland? Peter Wyse Jackson, the George Englemann Professor of Botany at Washington University in St. Louis, indulges our curiosity.

New book explains plants as medicines

A new book by botanists at Washington University in St. Louis enlightens both consumers of natural products and herbs and traditional physicians. Medical Botany, Plants Affecting Human Health, is the second edition of a 1977 book, Medical Botany, published by Walter Lewis, Ph.D., professor emeritus of biology, and Memory Elvin-Lewis, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and ethnobotany in biomedicine in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.