Botanical Archaeology Q & A with Nikki Hill, tomorrow, online. Come on out and talk wild tending with us.
Hey ya’ll,
Greetings from Bisbee, AZ where I’m posted up for an extended weekend. I’ve never been to this quirky little mining town until now.
I haven’t published a writing piece in a few weeks, as many of them are in motion and unfinished, and I’m currently doing a lot of camping off grid, but I thought I’d put it in your ear that I’m hosting a cool thing tomorrow with a dear friend Nikki Hill, online, via ZOOM.
If you’re a fan of the Ground Shots Podcast, a podcast project I’ve hosted for over 6 years, you have likely listened to an episode with Nikki.
The first two I did with her were on the topics of wild-tending and invasive plants, alongside Gabe Crawford. She also hosted an episode with Gabe and our friend Kollibri terre Sonnenblume (with me only introducing the episode) interviewing the invasion biology historian Matt Chew Phd. a few years ago, which is a favorite geeky episode of mine. This last summer I hosted a conversation with her and our friend Sigh Moon after she published her piece ‘Botany as Archaeology: To Stop a Lithium Mine’ on a hot day at a place in Oregon where we were gathering wild plant seed to replant elsewhere (and replanting on site too).
That episode of the podcast is the most relevant to the Q & A I am hosting, because in the episode we get deeply into the concept of land tending within the framework of botanical archaeology, especially as it relates to Nevada and across the west, but ‘botanical archaeology’ can be applied anywhere, and land-tending is a practice that is also an ongoing life philosophy. It really is just a way of life that people have lived for a very long time in co-creation with ecologies. Interestingly enough, ecology as a field still inherently separates humans from the rest of life, even if humans are acknowledged as being players, but how strange is it that it often writes a story as a work outside of people, just by the fact that the field even exists at all?
Botanical archaeology is the idea that plants are ‘the living legacy of human interaction over time.’ By having the right eyes, ears, observations skills on the land, and some knowledge of history, we can start to surmise the history of what took place on a piece of land by what we see there. By how we see the plants growing, where they are growing and moving. Why is this important? Because its is one way we can advocate for the protection of landscapes, and by recognizing these living legacies we can participate in them, feel connection to them and see life in a way we have been taught to forget. Many of us anyway.
Often we think of archaeology as something only found in the solid artifacts of human culture, left behind, whatever is left. But, if historically people were nomadic more often than not in many places, would they have had with them items that were as easy to leave behind? Or heavy or breakable? Would they have built as solid of structures to live in? Not always. Sure there are plenty of ‘hard’ artifacts that people historically left behind whether they were sedentary, nomadic or semi-nomadic. But plenty is gone, or unnoticed. What we do have is the ‘gardens’ folks planted in their movements, because seeds, corms, tubers and bulbs are often made to be moved and make nutrients that can survive the ordeal. It isn’t a crazy idea ultimately to think that as people moved across the landscapes they were intimately bound to, they moved their food, medicine and fiber plants too to enrich their lives.
Nikki is hosting a free learning and field research experience called the Lithium Lands Fellowship this coming April, where she is taking a small cohort of students out to Nevada to scout for wild gardens on lithium mining claims and beyond. The idea is to create some data and records of observations for the future in case it ever came to that point, but also to just see the gardens, love and appreciate them, and teach the students how to take this tool of seeing elsewhere. April is a great time for the flowering of some of these roots so it will be a time to really see who is on the land. The Southwest and West has seen a lot of moisture this winter as well, so perhaps there will be extra blooms this year, we shall see!
The Q & A is by donation starting at $5 and up and all of the proceeds will go towards Nikki’s fellowship which she is hosting voluntarily and for free. The idea is to give the students a stipend for their help and pay for some of the meals and transport to the locations where they will be scouting, collection herbarium specimens and doing storytelling work.
Here’s the link to sign up for the session if your interested in coming out online (6-:7:30 PM Mountain Standard Time). Just pick a donation amount, check out, and you should get a ZOOM link to the class via email. I’ll be recording it too and sending the recording out to anyone who has signed up.
Comment if you have any questions. I’ll see you there!