| William Archer was a Mexican-American botanist, plant pathologist, and prospector of medicinal plants. He was director of the Nevada Indian Medicine Project, which tested many thousands of plants for medicinal properties before WWII, the results of which were published as Medicinal Uses of Plants by Indian Tribes of Nevada in 1941. Archer did similar prospecting for useful plants in the Amazon and in Ethiopia, eventually returning to Nevada. In the 1920s Archer worked as a plant pathologist with USDA, and explored in South America in the early '30s. Later in his career he was a plant taxonomist and curator of the herbarium of the U.S. National Arboretum (1947-1964), and a volunteer archivist at the Smithsonian Institution until his death in 1973. |
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