Karen Adams loves what she does. She says she wishes she had known about
ethnobotany when she was in high school. "That would have been a hoot, and
I would certainly have been more focused as I went through school."
Adams is an archeobotanical consultant in Tucson, Arizona. She has no problem
focusing now that she has found a career that she loves. "The hardest decision
I have to make now is knowing when to say no. There are so many great projects.
It's hard to turn them down when you are working on something else."
It's easy to understand why Adams loves her job if you listen to her talk
about it. "When you are an ethnobotanist, you can spend a lot of time in the
field. I spend half of my day in a laboratory setting and half of my time
is out on the landscape," she explains.
"If I'm on the landscape, I'm walking the land and looking at plants. I'm
trying to figure out what they are, and what they are doing at the moment
or what parts humans can use. I'm also trying to figure out what land forms
they occupy, like wet places, or steep slopes, valley bottoms or mountains,"
she says.
Adams works in a subspecialty of ethnobotany. Archeobotany is the study
of prehistoric plants. "When I am indoors, I work with the prehistoric record
of archeological plant remains. I am looking at the burned plant materials
that archeologists have retrieved. I try to identify them and define what
prehistoric humans were doing with these plants. Do they represent food, fuels
or construction materials?"
The job is like trying to solve a mystery. "The prehistoric record is like
puzzle pieces, and you don't get all of them. You're trying to sketch ancient
lifeways and you don't get all of the pieces of the puzzle," she says.
"It's up to you to do your best and figure out how to take your best shot
at saying something meaningful of the past. So you're trying to unravel a
mystery. I have been able to do some modern interviewing of people who are
probably the descendants of the prehistoric groups that I am interested in.
That's a real treat."
But Adams says there are drawbacks to the type of work she does. "There
are certain tediums of my job. A prehistoric sample that I get could look
like a bag of coffee grounds. Each little piece is a bit of charcoal or a
little seed," she says.
"I have to put that material bit by bit under the microscope and very slowly
look at it, and turn it over to try to identify it. I'm looking for identifiable
items. That can be very time-consuming and eventually it can get tedious."
Robin Marles is an associate professor of botany. He finds other aspects
of the field distasteful. "Dealing with radical activists who do not understand
the value of ethnobotanical research can be very frustrating."
Although the work seems routine in some ways, there are exciting and sometimes
strange experiences. Marles says his strangest experience was in the Amazon
jungle of eastern Ecuador.
"Two medicine men were conducting a healing ceremony under the influence
of a psychoactive herbal drug called 'ayahuasca' [spirit vine]. They believe
it gives them psychic powers to diagnose serious illnesses. The drug makes
their eye pupils open wide, so they cannot tolerate bright lights," he says.
"I had a television film crew there making a special show for the Canadian
TV program The Nature of Things and the U.S. PBS program Nova.
"The setting was a traditional house made of bamboo canes. The roof was
thatched with palm leaves. It was raised on stilts above the jungle floor
to keep it safe from flooding. The night scene of aboriginal healers chanting,
whistling, and shaking rattles over their patients by the light of a couple
of candles -- while high-tech sound equipment and television cameras with
specially filtered electric lights recorded everything from the shadows --
was a very weird experience."
Marles' most exciting moment was learning that a herb called feverfew had
helped to reduce the number and severity of migraines his sister suffered
from. He and his colleagues had worked together on the research of that herb.
But there is more importance to Marles' work than just PBS documentaries
and helping migraine sufferers. "My traveling and experiences with different
cultures have given me wonderful insights into human nature," he says.
"For example, I have been privileged to see some of the incredible diversity
of plant and animal life in different parts of the world. I have also seen
the way people come together despite their differences. My life has been really
enriched by these experiences."