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In The Beginning...
The modern history of systematic botany...in North America began when the...Europeans landed on these shores & began to collect objects of curiosity. It is imperative to use the term "modern," for long before colonization of the New World by Europeans, the Native Americans, who had arrived millennia earlier, had developed their own systems of classification, means of identification, & associated nomenclature.
Unlike that of their European counterparts, the Indtgenous Peoples knowledge was transferred by the spoken rather than the printed word & was mostly lost as their civilizations fell to invaders. To a great degree, it was not until the twentieth century that Native Americans were recognized as knowledgeable about their plants.
By then, European thought dominated botany, & the Native American's botanical understanding was passed on only in an occasional native name retained in a Latinized form.
