Hugh Carson Cutler

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Hugh Carson Cutler
Hugh Cutler demonstrating flotation at Point of Pines Field School in Arizona 23 June 1957.
Boatman and Botanist. Colorado River Trip, 1940-08-20, photo by Barry M. Goldwater, Huntington Library, The Otis Marston Colorado River Collection

Hugh Carson Cutler (8 September 1912,

Milwaukee, Wisconsin – 12 September 1998, Topeka, Kansas) was a plant taxonomist, economic botanist, plant collector, and pioneer of paleoethnobotany.[1][2]

Biography

Cutler graduated from the

Lee's Ferry, Arizona, through Grand Canyon to Lake Mead.[2][4]

On 26 August 1940 Cutler married Marian W. Cornell (1917–2015).

Rubber Development Corporation under the auspices of the Board of Economic Warfare. He flew in blimps over northern Brazil and identified wild rubber trees that could be harvested by ground parties.[2]

After teaching at Harvard for a year after the war, Cutler was appointed Curator of Economic Botany at the Field Museum in Chicago. From this time onwards his most important work was in archaeological botany, especially in analysing prehistoric remains of maize and squashes from the American Southwest and Mexico. During this tenure he forged many links with archaeologists and became well known for developing techniques for recovering floral materials from ancient remains.[1]

In 1953 Cutler resigned from the Field Museum of Natural History and that same year became Curator of Economic Botany at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Cutler was back on the Colorado River the next year after befriending river runner Otis Marston. Culter joined Marston and others on 1954, 1956, and 1957 Grand Canyon river runs. On the 1956 river trip, the twin outboard motorboat Cutler was riding in flipped in Lava Falls Rapid, the first record of a boat flip at that rapid. On the 1957 river trip, the Colorado River in Grand Canyon peaked at 124,000 cubic feet per second, the highest flow ever recorded that was run by river runners in Grand Canyon. On all these river trips, Cutler collected plant specimens. He retired from the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1977.[2]

Upon his retirement his archaeological maize and cucurbit collection was sent to the Illinois State Museum in Springfield and is now curated as the Cutler-Blake Collection (whose title also honours Cutler's co-author Leonard Blake). His collection of more than 12,000 ears of ethnographic maize was transferred to the Department of Agriculture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.[1]

Hugh and Marian Cutler's son William Cornell Cutler was born in 1946.[2][5]

The standard author abbreviation H.C.Cutler is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[6]

Selected publications

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Cutler Hugh Carson (1912–1988)". Global Plants, JSTOR (plants.jstor.org).
  2. ^
    doi:10.5334/bha.09102
    .
  3. ^ a b "Hugh Carson Cutler". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
  4. ISBN 978-0990527022
  5. ^ a b "Marian Cutler". Midwest Cremation Society, Inc. 24 August 2015.
  6. ^ International Plant Names Index.  H.C.Cutler.
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