Cross-Cutting Crops and Culture: Coping with overlaps, time, and fuzzy boundaries in an ethnobotanical garden Catherine Callaway, UC Berkeley This interactive session is a space to puzzle out the limits of language and spatial representation in a botanical garden’s ethnobotanical collection. Plants aren’t versed in borders, and their diversity and distribution is such that overlapping geographic ranges and dispersal over time make it difficult to find intelligible yet true ways to represent the history of humans and our crop plants in a museum setting. Beginning with an overview of crop plants’ origins from around the world from an ethnobotanist’s perspective and transitioning into a small-group session of ideation and problem-solving, we will tackle these problems from a cartographer’s perspective.
Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:20am CDT Commons
