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Tyler Fellow Update: Deirdre Moore

Posted On November 16, 2015 | 15:29 pm | by meredithb | Permalink

Deirdre Moore, 2015–17 Tyler Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies, has spent the last month working in the archives of the Royal Society in London, building on work she has already completed in Mexico. Here is her research report:

I started the first year of my Tyler Fellowship at the beginning of this fall. This month, I have been exploring eighteenth-century documents in the archives of the Royal Society. In particular, I’ve been studying an image sent to Hans Sloane in 1730 that depicts indigenous methods of breeding cochineal in Oaxaca, Mexico. It has been helpful to compare these reports with my previous work of growing cochineal in the same area of Mexico. One of the main focuses of my research is on the indigenous understandings of the reproductive cycle of cochineal. At the Royal Society, I’ve been able to locate notarized documents relating to the generation and life cycle of cochineal that were created in Oaxaca nearly three hundred years ago. It has been great to have a chance to track down documents that ended up on the other side of the Atlantic. Thank you to Dumbarton Oaks for making this research opportunity possible.