Historical cache of medicinal plants.

To piece together a picture of the way people lived in the past, archaeologists and anthropologists have to do just that-pull together remains and artifacts that have been scattered by animals and the elements. That's why researchers at a meeting of the Society of Ethnobiology in Athens, Ga., last week were impressed to hear a report about a 17th-century medicine kit from the U.S. Southwest: The kit had survived in a dry rock crevice with most of its botanical contents intact.

Mollie S. Toll, an ethnobotanist at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, and her colleagues scrutinized the unusual collection of bundled stems, roots, and other plant parts contained in a pair of woven baskets. They identified at least 26 different types of nonedible plants, some of which grow far from the baskets' resting place in the Galisteo Basin southeast of Santa Fe.

"It's unusual to have so many plant materials together," says Toll. "Somebody had a list of plants and made sure they got them from a wide range of places." Whoever it was also seemed to have specialized knowledge of the plants' properties. The baskets included roots from two plants with strong, potentially toxic ingredients: wild iris and what appears to be jimson weed.

Carbon dating of the baskets suggests that the contents are about 350 years old, says Toll. Cultural and historical records suggest how some of the items were used. The baskets held pieces of osha root (Ligusticum porteri), an important multipurpose medicinal plant in the region, skewered on a stick. Bundled leaves of silvery scurf pea (Psoralea argophylla), tied with a split yucca leaf, could have been used as a deodorant. A tea from the roots of gayfeather (Liatris punctata) is supposed to be good for throat ailments.

Several pieces of bark and root could not be identified, and other items remain a mystery. The baskets included two corn husk packets, one wrapped like a party cracker with most of its contents missing, the other a tamalelike mass of clay and sand.

"It's impressive as a finding," says Richard I. Ford, an ethnobiologist from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who specializes in the Southwest. Ford says the baskets probably belonged to native Tewa-speaking people of the region, although Toll says the material could be Spanish in origin.