Revisiting 170-year-old botanical collections in the Amazon with Indigenous communities
How can historical scientific collections help reconnect Indigenous communities with knowledge about their own environments and cultural heritage? Professor Luciana Martins is part of a research team revisiting botanical collections from the Amazon more than 170 years ago, working with Indigenous communities in the region to reinterpret these materials through contemporary knowledge and practice.
What is this research about?
In the 1850s, British botanist Richard Spruce spent 15 years travelling through the Amazon and Andes, collecting plant specimens and associated materials. Interested in the knowledge and practices of local communities, Spruce developed an early form of ethnobotanical research – the study of how people understand and use plants. However, the scientific practices of the period were shaped by unequal relationships with Indigenous communities.
Over 170 years later, the project revisits and reinterprets his extensive documentation through sustained dialogue with Indigenous peoples in the Rio Negro, including the Tukano, Desana, Piratapuia and Baniwa. The project forms part of a wider research programme that Professor Martins and colleagues have been developing with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew since 2015. Over that time, the programme has brought historical collections into dialogue with Indigenous communities and contemporary knowledge, producing resources including ethnobotany manuals, a teaching and learning toolkit, videos, a website and academic publications.
Why is this research important?
Over the last two centuries, Indigenous communities in the Rio Negro have faced significant threats to their livelihoods, cultures and survival, including slavery, missionary indoctrination, and increasing integration into market and urban networks. From the late 20th century, the rebuilding of malocas – ancestral Indigenous longhouses – became an important form of resistance to cultural repression. Today, Indigenous peoples and their territorial rights in Brazil remain under pressure, particularly from large-scale agribusiness and changes to legislation relating to human rights and environmental protection.
In this context, the historical collections held by museums and institutions in the global North can have a renewed role. Specimens and artefacts originally collected during colonial-era scientific exploration can become resources for reconnecting communities with knowledge about their social, cultural and natural environments. The research explores how these collections can support cultural resilience while also reconsidering the relationships through which they were originally created.
How is the research being conducted?
The project brings together British and Brazilian researchers with Indigenous communities in the Rio Negro, using a transdisciplinary approach that combines expertise across different areas of research and practice.
A key part of the methodology is a cross-collection approach, linking plant specimens with historical artefacts and the knowledge associated with them. Through sustained fieldwork in the region, the researchers are reconnecting Indigenous communities with historical objects, such as ceremonial attire, musical instruments, and pottery, while also documenting the ways plants are currently used in backyards, cultivated plots and surrounding forests.
The research considers questions including how plants are used and prepared, how knowledge is passed between generations and changes over time, and how plants are understood and classified in local languages and cultural traditions.
What has the research found so far?
Initial findings have identified a clear distinction between cultivated and non-cultivated plant species. The team have collected more than 300 plant specimens from the Uaupés region and surroundings of São Gabriel da Cachoeira on the Rio Negro, which are currently being scientifically identified, and their uses documented: medicine; food, spices, and condiments; construction materials; weaving fibers, pigments and tanning; gums, oils and balms; hunting and fishing.
The research is also examining the ways knowledge about plants is transmitted and transformed over time, alongside their wider cultural and cosmological associations and the systems of classification used in local languages. The team has recorded narratives of the origins of particularly useful plants, which are being illustrated collaboratively with Indigenous artists.
What impact could this research have?
Locally, the team is working to build the capacity of Indigenous researchers to collect and record ethnobotanical knowledge themselves. A key output of the current project will be an annotated edition of Spruce’s manuscript in English, Portuguese, Tukano and Baniwa, bringing the historical material together with current Indigenous biocultural knowledge and following local protocols for its documentation and dissemination. The resource is intended to be of value to communities beyond the Rio Negro as well.
The project also brings together researchers from the biological sciences, social sciences and humanities with museum curators, artists and Indigenous practitioners. This approach could provide a model for further collaborative work involving colonial-era collections held in museums and their communities of origin around the world.
Fact finder
- Full project title: Voices of Indigenous Amazonia: historical processes of sociobiodiversity in the face of the challenges of the Anthropocene
- Award holder: Professor Luciana Martins
- Research dates: 2025–2027
- Funding amount: £303,704
- Funder(s): NERC/UKRI
- Research partners: In the UK: UCL, University of Nottingham and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; in Brazil: Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (Belém), Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden, and Museu da Amazônia (MUSA)
