Tracing the History of the Taruma People through Plants, Their Names, and Uses

Abstract This article explores what plants, their names and uses can tell us about the history of the speakers of Taruma, a language isolate of Guyana. We identified Taruma plant taxa from photographs taken by Taruma speakers and learners, and compared the names and uses of the plants they recorded to those of other Indigenous people to identify knowledge that Taruma speakers share with other nations. Our outcomes show the potential of combining botany and linguistics to shed light on the past and serve as a proof-of-concept of the remote method for documenting plant knowledge. We offer linguistic evidence of a Taruma migration and discuss the unusually high rate of loans in Taruma, considering factors such as the strategic location of the Taruma homeland on the Amazon, the subsequent migration into a new linguistic landscape in Guyana, and a past hunter-gather mode of interactions with the environment.