Basic Biographical Information
Barbara Pickersgill is a British horticultural botanist and geneticist. She was born (13 May 1940) and raised in Yorkshire, England, and obtained her B.Sc. degree in Horticultural Botany from the University of Reading in 1962. Immediately thereafter she pursued her Ph.D. in Botany at Indiana University, Bloomington, under the supervision of Charles B. Heiser, Jr., with a thesis entitled The Variability and Relationships of Capsicum chinense Jacq. that she defended in 1966. Upon her return to England, she was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Agricultural Botany at the University of Reading, UK. She retired in 2005.
Barbara Pickersgill’s work with Capsicum chinensestimulated a lifelong interest in determining the origins and dispersals of Neotropical crops, later expanded to the rest of the world with her numerous students. Her interests in the use and conservation of crop genetic resources also involved her with the International Board for Plant...
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References
Casas, A., B. Pickersgill, J. Caballero & A. Valiente-Banuet. 1997. Ethnobotany and the process of domestication in the xoconochtli Stenocereus stellatus (Cactaceae) in the Tehuacán Valley and La Mixteca Baja, Mexico. Economic Botany 51: 279-292.
Chacón S., M.I., B. Pickersgill & D.G. Debouck. 2005. Domestication patterns in common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) and the origin of the Mesoamerican and Andean cultivated races. Theoretical and Applied Genetics 110: 432-444.
Chacón S., M.I., B. Pickersgill, D.G. Debouck & J. Salvador Arias. 2007. Phylogeographic analysis of the chloroplast DNA variation in wild common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Plant Systematics and Evolution 266: 175-195.
Pickersgill, B. 1969a. The archaeological record of chili peppers (Capsicum spp.) and the sequence of plant domestication in Peru. American Antiquity 34: 54-61.
- 1969b. The domestication of chili peppers, in P.J. Ucko & G.W. Dimbleby (ed.) The domestication and exploitation of plants and animals: 443-450. London: Duckworth.
- 1977. Taxonomy and the origins and evolution of cultivated plants in the New World. Nature 268: 591-595.
- 2007. Domestication of plants in the Americas: insights from Mendelian and molecular genetics. Annals of Botany 100: 925-940.
- 2009. Domestication of plants revisited – Darwin to the present day. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 161: 203-212.
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Clement, C.R. (2014). Pickersgill, Barbara. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_834
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