Atoll Research Bulletin No. 361 Batiri Kei Baravi: the Ethnobotany of Pacific Island Coastal Plants By
ATOLL RESEARCH BULLETIN NO. 361 BATIRI KEI BARAVI: THE ETHNOBOTANY OF PACIFIC ISLAND COASTAL PLANTS BY R R THAMAN ISSUED BY NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A. MAY 1992 BATIRI KEI BARAVI: THE ETHNOBOTANY OF PACIFIC ISLAND COASTAL PLANTS1 R.R. ~harnan~ Jonathan Sauer (1961) remarked, in his Coastal Plant Geography of Mauritius, that the chance to study the coastal vegetation there was like being "admitted to a field worker's paradise" and stressed that "most tropical coasts are beautiful and exciting, particularly to people concerned with natural processes . .." The same can certainly be said for the tropical coasts of the often Edenized islands of the Pacific Ocean. Their "beauty and excitement" is considerably enhanced, however, when one is also "concerned" with cultural processes and ethnobotany, in particular, the immense cultural utility of coastal plants, a factor which strongly influences the distribution and character of plant communities. Because the use of plants, in particular, wild plants is so clouded in antiquity and so intimately associated with cultural origins, ethnobotanical research can shed considerable light on the the origin and nature of pre-European contact Pacific island societies. Ubiquitous coastal plant communities, because they are among the most useful, the most familiar to new settlers, and most subject to disturbance because of the attractiveness of coastal areas for human habitiation and development, would seem to be a particularly important focus for ethnobotanical studies. There is, however, a relative paucity of Pacific-wide systematic ethnobotanical studies, with most prehistories, ethnographies and ethnologies of the area having focused on aspects such as settlement sequence and routes, carbon dating, blood groups and physical types (human genetics), material technology, linguistics, social organization, cosmogeny and major agricultural and food systems.
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