 
When Dr. Melvin R. Gilmore was hired in 1929, he was instructed to develop a laboratory for the identification of archaeological plant remains from North America. At the time, this laboratory became unique in the world. To create the laboratory, Gilmore had to assemble a comparative collection of taxonomically authenticated wood, seeds, and domesticated plant parts and files about their uses by American Indians. His task was enabled with the addition, in 1931, of Dr. Volney H. Jones, first as an assistant and later his successor in the laboratory. Together, they built the largest ethnobotanical collection in North America. The collections in the laboratory continue to grow in North America and elsewhere in the world where the Museum conducts archaeological research as generations of graduate students submit plant material collected during their investigations.
One of the earliest research projects conducted at the Ethnobotanical Laboratory began in 1954 and continued until 2004. The project, an initiative started by Volney Jones, was to create a "Compendium of Data on Economic Botany of the Southwest." Through funding by the University's Graduate School, Vorsila Boher and Jones were able to start a punch card system for creating a taxonomic list of economic plants from the Southwest that could then be cross-indexed by native tribe and category of use. For over 30 years and through various funding sources, data were collected by using the punch card technology. Finally, in 2004, Richard I. Ford, the Director of the Ethnobotany Laboratory, began the long and arduous task of digitizing the information. The result of over 4 years of work has culminated with the creation of the "Southwest Traditional Ethnic Group Plant Use Database". Please click here (pdf file) for more information on the history of the creation of the database and its importance in ethnobotanical research. To access and search the database, please click the link below:
Search the Southwest Traditional Ethnic Group Plant Use Database
The Ethnobotany Laboratory remains unique because of its extensive collection of archaeological and systematic comparative plant parts from around the world and the ethnographic examples of how these plants are collected, stored, processed, and utilized by traditional cultures. The ethnobotanical collections are used in formal courses and for individual research. Annually, some 30 external visitors consult the ethnobotanical collections for research.
The research results from use of the collections are numerous and varied. Many research papers have been published and the Ethnobotanical Laboratory Report series lists 596 papers that use the collection to confirm archaeological plant identifications and their interpretation. The ethnobotanical collections are used throughout the year for dissertation research and for undergraduate Honors thesis.
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