It’s been a long time since we had a lab blog update! The pandemic, bringing projects to an end, teaching summer schools, and me (Fiona) in a management role meant some things had to give, and maintaining this site was one of them. You can’t do everything. I also took the decision to ease away from social media a couple of years ago and some of the FOMO and urgency of maintaining a presence and generating “content” fell away. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
However! I’m now on research leave (sabbatical, study leave) for the remainder of the year and will be doing a refresh of the site and some round-ups of where various projects are at. I’ll also be using this as a way to work through some exciting new ideas and directions in ethnobotany. I just came back from the International Botanical Congress in Madrid where I spent six days learning a HUGE amount and being immersed in ideas about people and plants, community botany, plant awareness, and delightfully geeky plant evolution. More on that soon.
For now, have a video I did a couple of months ago to celebrate the Human Relations Area Files 75th birthday. In it I talk about shiny pebbles, or “lustrous gravels“. It’s cross-cultural data collection work I did as part of the QUANTA project on the evolution of numerical cognition–more on that also to come!