anthropology

Plants of the Gods is a richly illustrated, encyclopedic study of psychoactive, i.e. hallucinogenic, plants. It explores the plants’ science – the characteristics and chemistry – as well as the history, culture, and significance of each. For millennia, societies around the world have valued the beneficial qualities of their native flora, and many have revered those plants recognized to have spiritual and psychic effects. This is fascinating ethnobiology, relating botany to religion, folklore, rituals, and art.

This is a charming account of the author’s impressions of Central American natural and social geography in the early 20th century. Carleton Beals was a progressive journalist who traveled extensively throughout Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, during times of political and social strife in the 1920s and 30s. The Art Deco illustrations of Carlos Merida beautifully complement the picturesque descriptions of small village life and the tropics.

Note: From the library of Alexander Wetmore, Sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

This gilded and richly illustrated volume describes the 19th-century travels of explorer Jane Dieulafoy. Dieulafoy documented her explorations through what is now Iraq and Iran. Dieulafoy uses the expressive language of her time to describe the weather, people, cultures, and treasures she encountered. The volume includes many illustrations of the villages, ports, and bazaars she visited. The illustrations are prints from wood engravings based on the author’s photographs.

John Randolph Spears (b. 1850) was a well-traveled journalist at turn of the century, eventually writing nearly a dozen books, primarily on nautical and maritime themes. This early title is about the land, sea, flora, fauna, and cultures of South America’s southernmost region. The “gold diggings” from the title are mostly done on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego, where, after heavy storms, gold shows up on the black sands. The quest for gold often creates conflicts with indigenous communities of the area, which Spears takes great care to describe with sensitivity (for the times).

This book was written by Egyptologist Henri Brugsch in 1855. It was the first European attempt to study Demotic—the written and spoken language of the ancient Egyptian people. Brugsch’s project was recognized and supported by Frederick William IV, King of Prussia. He sponsored Brugsch’s visits to various European museums to view objects and monuments containing the Demotic language, in order to complete his knowledge of the subject. Brugsch then documented what he had learned in Grammaire Démotique. The book examines this dialect's grammar, syntax, and phonetics.

The British Punitive Expedition against the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 spawned an outpouring of curiosity about this African kingdom, its stunning bronze sculpture (confiscated booty), and its tyrannical king. H. Long Roth’s Great Benin is one of the classic pieces of literature written about Benin. It is not a product of direct observation—the author never traveled in West Africa—but rather of careful research on eyewitness accounts and museum collections.

Biologist Paul Ehrlich and director for the Center of Conservation Biology at Stanford University Anne Ehrlich dedicate this book, “To Homo sapiens, which through the extinction of others endangers itself;” an appropriate summary.  This husband and wife duo have spent decades warning about the dangers of overpopulation, and in Extinction they focus on the affect it can have on species’ populations, the environment, and, ultimately, humanity itself.  It is a straight-forward, compelling narrative that dissects why we should save even the lowliest of species, how we have threate

This hidden gem of a first edition is full of rich history, not only of the chivalric contests of the Middle Ages that it analyzes, but also of the history of the Smithsonian Institution and book history. Delving into the nitty-gritty of the sport over its half-millennium history, this book introduces important terminology used in the study of chivalry.

Published in 1857, this 70-page folio consists of originally hand-drawn sketches of the human skull by German anatomist Johann C. G. Lucae of the Frankfurt Senckenberg Institute of Anatomy. Lucae was well known for his craniology studies.

This rare catalogue of an exhibition in Paris in 1883 – held by only six libraries in the U.S. – provides descriptions and brief historical explanations of 102 antiquities from Mexico and the Yucatan that famed French archaeologist Désiré Charnay (1828-1915) acquired during an expedition of 1880-1882, including plans of newly discovered Toltec palaces, Aztec statues and funeral urns, and bas-reliefs found in Yucatan villages.

Léon de Rosny, a French ethnologist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote this volume describing a Native Central American object in the collection of a Spanish museum. In the 1860s, two fragments of ancient Mayan language surfaced in Spain. Léon de Rosny was one of the first scholars to suggest that both fragments⁠—the Cortesianus Codex described in this volume and the Troano Codex—were part of the same monumental artifact, later known as the “Madrid Codex.” The Codex Cortesianus, which de Rosny describes in this volume, is the smaller piece.