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Ancient Seeds of the Native American Indians.
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A rare archive of ancient seeds harvested by American Indians are preserved — and planted — at the Science Museum.
The drawers in the seed archive of the Science Museum host a variety of rare vegetables — some hundreds of years old.
Heirloom corn has a lot to offer modern food consumers, he noted. In addition to fuller flavor, heirloom corn tends to be more nutritious than today’s commercial corn, which is grown primarily for carbohydrates and sugar, according to Shoemaker. “Some of the [heirloom] seeds have been tested, and they were a lot higher in minerals than modern seeds,” he said.
Seeds in space
The Ethnobotany Project has even sent seeds into space, aboard last year’s shuttle Atlantis, to test the extent to which germination will occur in a microgravity and soil-less environment.
The seed archive and the research activity it has inspired are unusual, according to Shoemaker. “I don’t know of other museums doing this.”
Most of the seeds in the collection were gathered by one man: Twin Cities dentist and amateur anthropologist Wesley Hiller. Hiller’s fascination with ancient indigenous plant species spurred him to travel the Great Plains, the Great Lakes and the Southwest, collecting ancestral seeds from native people and archaeological digs and carefully cataloguing his specimens. Starting in the 1930s, he spent years building the collection, which was donated to the Science Museum in 1977.
Hiller’s seeds continue to get kid-glove treatment at the museum, where the archive is maintained in a carefully controlled environment. “They have to have a consistent temperature, under very tight controls — plus or minus only 2 degrees [Fahrenheit],” said Hoff.
Each specimen is numbered and tagged, and when seeds are planted in the project garden, it’s under strict “deaccession” guidelines (a museum-world term that refers to controlling how items in a collection are removed from the collection). At the Science Museum, no more than 10 seeds per species in the archive are planted at a time.
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