Most international archaeological work in South America has concentrated on the Andes for various reasons. It’s more accessible, the ruins are more visible, there’s a better ethnohistorical record from the conquistadors, there’s variety over short distances because change in height makes vertical economies possible where different foods grow at different heights and they’re just the [...]

I thought this was an interesting video on hidden patterns in nature.

How can you say something is historically important or not unless you observe it? What happens if you set up conditions where you intentionally cannot observe a site’s historical importance? I said in the opening post that some sites might have been chosen as a deliberate trolling for comment, and I think the Svalbard Global [...]

It’s easy to pin scientific credit on a person. He or she usually has a name on the key publication, but how do you credit a place? Science is a human activity, so is it just the humans that matter or are there things were place contributes as much as people? While I was kicking [...]

TIME has recently published 100 greatest places in the world. The book is a collection of sites that, the editors argue, have had the biggest impact on world history. It’s excellent blog material because hardly anyone has read it (including me), any list will be personal and omit something someone feels is important and, following [...]

With a world full of fascinating life-forms, it’s always easy to find a gift for a botanist. There’s so many plants to choose from, but what can you get for a friend without green fingers? What can you get for someone who doesn’t merely lack gardening skills, but is a hazard to plant-life. While browsing [...]

You might put together a salad from what you’ve grown in your back garden, but it’s a surprisingly cosmopolitan meal. Tomatoes came from Mesoamerica and if you have potato salad, then you have the Incas of South American to thank. Recent research by Jules Janick and Harry Paris, Medieval Herbal Iconography and Lexicography of Cucumis [...]

Blog Action Day is an annual event that encourages bloggers to talk about a specific topic. This year the theme is Food and it seems like an excellent topic for botanical bloggers. The day is October 16, which gives everyone a week to prepare. Pat has agreed to post something and I’ll be having a [...]

I’ve been tidying up my online presence, RSS feeds and so on for the new academic year. I’ll be moving my life sciences posts to a professional account on Google Plus, http://gplus.to/drsalt In some ways this is the wrong way round as my PhD is not in Botany, but it helps dealing with students. Another [...]

Coming up in October we have a paper, ‘Flower power: its association with bee power and floral functional morphology in papilionate legumes‘ by Silvina A. Córdoba and Andrea A. Cocucci, in the journal. The paper examines if there’s any correlation between the strength of flowers and the strength of bees. Are they in an evolutionary [...]