NEW WORLD CROPS: ICONOGRAPHY AND HISTORY

Evidence of the introduction of New World plants in Europe, Asia, and Africa comes from the written record of explorers, correspondents, travelers, and botanists. However, the iconographic record of artists and illustrators in both the New and the Old World is a particularly valuable resource because it provides information on plant characteristics that are often incomplete in the written record and is particularly useful for such fields as taxonomy, genetics, crop domestication, crop evolution and genetic diversity. The New World civilizations developed an advanced agriculture and a rich source of iconographic evidence still survives despite the despoiling of many of their manuscripts by the conquistadores. Images of New World plants in the Old World are derived from illustrated manuscripts, herbals, paintings, and sculpture (Janick, 2007).