![[Hybrid Event] Lunchbox Talk: Botanical Birthrights & Bitter Roots: African American Herbal Medicine in the American South](https://researchweek.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/African-American-slavery-3.jpeg)
[Hybrid Event] Lunchbox Talk: Botanical Birthrights & Bitter Roots: African American Herbal Medicine in the American South
With Sierra Roark, Doctoral Candidate, UNC Department of Anthropology
Date: Thursday, October 13, 2022
Time: 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST
Location: Hybrid – Reeves Auditorium and Zoom webinar
Fee: Free, $5 suggested fee
As enslaved Africans were brought to North America, they transported environmental and medicinal knowledge alongside familiar plants. As African people, beliefs, and practices encountered Indigenous and European people and plants, a distinct variety of ethnomedicine emerged and allowed African Americans to both covertly and directly confront oppression. This talk will explore the basics of archaeobotany and will present a case study that illustrates how multidisciplinary lines of evidence can highlight historical instances of human resilience and resistance.
About the Speaker:
Sierra Roark is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill, specializing in historical archaeology and archaeobotany. Sierra’s work investigates the exchange of ecological knowledge and plant use in the American South and Mid-Atlantic. Her research explores human-environment relationships, well-being, and manifestations of identity and power using archaeological plant remains, material culture, ethnohistory, and other lines of evidence.