Timothy C. Plowman Economic Botany Collection

INTRODUCTION

Named for The Field Museums late curator, ethnobotanist Timothy C. Plowman, the economic botany collections at The Field Museum are rivaled by few institutions in the world. Comprehensive collections of economic plant materials such as these are rare. The collection encompasses a vast variety of materials: gums, resins, cereals, sugars, spices, medicinal plants, fibers, oils, waxes, tannins, dyes, starches, timbers and cabinet woods.

Above: Vials of plant oils collected over the last century. For example, the collection includes lavendar oil obtained in India in 1905.

Specimens represent both the raw materials such as seeds and stems, as well as the finished product, or products at various stages of manufacture. Recently, the collection was further enhanced by the acquisition of 2,000 pharmaceutical specimens from the College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois, Chicago.

The Timothy Plowman collection includes over 12,000 specimens, the first of which were acquired from the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Gifts from the national exhibits of British Guiana, the Phillippines, Japan, Brazil, Burma and India greatly enriched the collection. Specimens also were acquired from various other expositions, such as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904) and the Paris Exposition (1915), as well as numerous Field Museum sponsored expeditions.

Above: Unfinished and finished basketry products.

A recent grant from Abbott Laboratories funded the construction of new storage facilities for the economic botany collection. This new housing facility and a computerized database make the collection easily accessible to students, scientists and interested visitors.

The collection documents the past, present and current uses of plants around the world and can provide valuable information for future developments in such areas as agriculture, medicine and the textile industry. The Timothy C. Plowman collection is a useful research tool for botanists, anthropologists, archaeologists, pharmacologists and historians and provides fascinating examples for The Field Museum's public programming in economic botany.

Above: A Field Museum employee assisting in the rehousing and cataloguing of the collection

More about the collection

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