Native American Ethnobotany

This site is a mirror of the original Native American Ethnobotany (NAEB) database. The database compiles 45,000 uses of 4000 different plants by 300 Native American Tribes, as recorded in 200 distinct sources. It was built over decades, starting in the 1970s, spearheaded by the work of Daniel Moerman. You may be interested in Professor Moerman's book Native American Ethnobotany.

About this site

This site is unauthorized and has no affiliation with the original authors. It has been reconstructed from the publicly available NAEB site, and no guarantees are made as to its accuracy. It is provided in the interest of open science and the hope of being useful to future researchers. The original creators and maintainers of the NAEB database deserves all credit for this work. I hope only to provide a slight improvement in usability.

Unlike the official NAEB site, this website provides full query and download access to the underlying data. I have also normalized the metadata such as references, categories, and subcategories of use. Hopefully this will allow more detailed exploration of the data, as well as joining with other datasets like those maintained by Native Land Digital.

You can read more about my motivation if you're curious.

License

The original data does not seem to have an affiliated license. To the extent that I have any rights to this work, I dedicate them to the public domain under a CC0 1.0 license. You will have to decide for yourself what you are comfortable doing with this data.

About the data

There are 6 tables:

  1. uses the main table you are probably interested in. Each row here represents a single use for a single plant by a single tribe, as cited by a single source.
  2. species each row a species of plant, including scientific name, common names, and a USDA code for the species.
  3. tribes each row a tribe, with no metadata other than a name.
  4. use_categories five rows, each a high-level use (drug, food, fiber, dye, other).
  5. use_subcategories each row a more fine-grained set of uses.
  6. sources each source document, where rows correspond 1-1 with entries in the full bibtex bibliography. The refcode column is the bibtex citation-key.

You can access the full database in three ways:

  1. the online interface
  2. a sqlite3 database file (12 MB)
  3. a zipfile of all the csv files (1.7 MB).

The full reference list, in bibtex format, can be downloaded here.

Two quick examples of what's possible:

  1. All documented uses of plants as musical instruments.
  2. For each tribe, which source provides the highest number of uses?

Thanks

  1. The wonderful Datasette tool which powers this website.
  2. The online text2bib tool, which I used to generate a bibtex file from the original sources.
  3. The biblib library which is used to interact with the bibtex file.
  4. The original researchers and scholars who actually gathered this information, including Daniel Moerman and his collaborators, and the funders who made this work possible.
  5. Most of all, to the countless and unnameable individuals who figured out the uses for all these plants over millenia of human existence!

You can find more info here, including my email address. I'd love to know how you're using this and how it can be more useful, or any other comments or questions.

Native American Ethnobotany (NAEB)

A Database of Foods, Drugs, Dyes and Fibers of Native American Peoples, Derived from Plants.

Data source: Native American Ethnobotany Database · About: NAEB

naeb

49,842 rows in 6 tables

uses, species, use_subcategories, tribes, sources, ...