Ethnobotany of the Criollos of argentinian Subhumid Chaco III: medicinal plant uses and knowledgement

Abstract

It has recently been shown that the Creoles of the Argentine Subhumid Chaco constitute a new biocultural complex, whose medical ethnobotany is unknown to us. The objective of this work is to describe and analyze in its precise socio-cultural context the knowledge and medicinal uses of plants for this biocultural complex and compare them with those obtained for other Criollos groups of the Argentine Gran Chaco. The data were obtained first-hand throughout six field works carried out between 2017 and 2022, in the surroundings of Juan José Castelli and Miraflores, north-central Chaco province, Argentina. The methodology used for this and in the analysis of the data was that corresponding to classical ethnobotany. A total of 721 ethnobotanical data on medicinal uses of plants were recorded corresponding to 200 species (of which 79% are native) belonging to 62 botanical families. These were recorded from 1,485 individual reports from the interviewed collaborators, which refer to a total of 135 types of therapeutic indications, classified into 15 subcategories of medicinal use. Despite the similarities found at the level of medicinal flora when comparing the data with the Creoles of the Humid and Semi-arid Chaco, the medicinal uses of the plants were substantially different. These differences would not be due to distinctions in the flora of each phytogeographic district, but rather to different cultural practices among the Creoles that inhabit them. These results confirm the distinctive condition of the biocultural complex of the Creoles of the Subhumid Chaco and, as a consequence, highlight their originality.