Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Indian Ocean Trade and Botanical Treatises: a New Historiographical Approach to the Pre-colonial Environment of the Nilgiri Mountains of South India

The Nilgiris are a massif of about 2400 km² located at the intersection between the Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, forming part of the Western Ghats with a unique combination of ecosystems and a complex ethnic mosaic. Despite its rich archaeological heritage, the pre-colonial history of this region is as unknown as its pre-colonial environment: the systematic introduction of allochthonous botanical species from the early 19^th century on has triggered transformations which are progressively obliterating the ancient ecological configuration of the area.

Since the antiquity spices and medicinal plants from the Western Ghats have been the object of intensive trade activities across the Indian Ocean, with the ports of Malabar working as emporia - Muziris and later on Calicut, incidentally very close to the Nilgiris, being two of the most renowned.

Identifying and collecting plants for trade could not have happened without the knowledge and collaboration of the foragers living in the areas where these precious items would grow.
Compendia composed right before the rise of the plant colonialism era, like the “Colloquies on the Simples, Drugs and Materia Medica of India” (1568) by Garcia da Orta and the “Hortus Indicus Malabaricus” (1678-1693) by Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, both relying on ethnoiatrical knowledge, are proposed by the Nilgiri Archaeological Project (2021-2026) as tools to possibly reconstruct the ancient environment of the Nilgiris part of the Western Ghats. This paper will illustrate the preliminary results of this investigation at the crossroad between environmental history and Traditional Ecological Knowledge.