Vine of the Soul: Medicine Men, Their Plants and Rituals in the Colombian Amazonia. This item is unavailable.Vine of the Soul: Medicine Men, Their Plants and Rituals in the Colombian Amazonia

This book is the story of a time that was - a time when the Amazon Indian was free to roam the forest and rivers happy with their social institutions unencumbered by acculturation or the cultural destruction of their ancient societies and virgin forests. The story is told through over 160 black & white photographs taken by renown Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes during the '40s and '50s when he spent fourteen uninterrupted years living with the Indian tribes of the Amazon. Combining his scientific eye for documentation with a photographer's eye for lighting composition and character he created an extraordinary record of the medicinal plants and flora of the Colombian Amazon. Co-authored by Robert F. Raffauf an outstanding plant chemist VINE OF THE SOUL contains some of the most significant photographs on this subject ever taken accompanied by detailed descriptions of the Amazon Indians use of medicinal and other sacred plant substances with information on the bioactive chemistry and medicinal properties of their plants. The second edition contains a Preface by Wade Davis Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic Society; a Foreword by Sir Ghillean Prance Former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew England; and Epilogue by Michael Balick Director of Institute of Economic Botany NY Botanical Gardens. He was of course a great botanist arguably the most important Amazonian plant explorer of the 20th century. In over twelve years of nearly constant fieldwork he collected more than 20000 specimens discovered some 300 species new to science chronicled the use of more than 2000 novel medicinal plants. He mapped unknown rivers lived among unknown tribes became conversant in several indigenous languages. In time mountains would bear his name as would national preserves. For all who knew him he was a link to the great naturalists of the Victorian Age and a distant era when the neotropical rainforests stood immense inviolable a mantle of green stretching cross an entire continent. Wade Davis Explorer-in-Residence National Geographic Society from the Preface Thanks to the attention drawn to the Amazon Indians by Schultes and others the former President of Colombia Virgilio Barco returned over six million hectares of land to the Indians for their exclusive use. The Colombian Government further created a number of biological reserves bringing the total area under protection to more than 20000000 hectares

Known as the father of contemporary ethnobotany, he has carried out extensive field studies, particularly in the Amazon. He received numerous awards including the Cross of Boyaca, Colombia's highest honor, and the annual Gold Medal of the World Wildlife Fund. In 1987 he received the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and in 1992 he was awarded the Linnean Gold Medal, the highest award a botanist can receive. Dr. Schultes was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linnean Society of London, three Latin American Academies,