People of the Desert and Sea Ethnobotany of the Seri Indians

About this book

Originally published in 1991, this book is made available again as part of The University of Arizona Press Century Collection. People of the Desert and Sea is an ethnobotanical study that explores plant use by the hunting-and-gathering Seri Indians of Sonora, Mexico.

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Biography

Richard S. Felger has published extensively on desert plants, their uses, and new food crops around the world. His field of expertise is the flora and economic botany of the Sonoran Desert region. He has studied the relationship between the Seri Indians and the plants and animals in their region of northwestern Mexico for more than two decades. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona and in 1980 was appointed a research scientist at the Office of Arid Lands Studies, University of Arizona.

Mary Beck Moser began studying the Seri language in the early 1950s when she and her husband, the late Edward W. Moser, made their home in the Seri village of El Desemboque. Working with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, she wrote a number of linguistic and anthropological papers and completed her husband's translation of the New Testament into Seri. In the early 1980s Mrs. Moser continued her work with the Seri in various areas of study, including an extensive dictionary of the language. She is a graduate of the University of North Dakota.