American plant taxonomist and economic botanist. Hugh Cutler was especially recognised for his work with archaeological remains of maize and other economic crops in the American Southwest and Central and South America. Born in Milwaukee, Cutler took his bachelor's and master's degrees in botany at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He gained his PhD from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1939.
With his then new wife, Marian Cutler (née Cornell), he travelled in 1940 to the south-western United States, Mexico and Guatemala, collecting wild varieties of Tripsacum and cultivated maize, including archaeological samples. The trip inspired him to devote the rest of his career to economic and archaeological botany, and much of his research during the 1940s was focussed on South America, with trips to Peru, Bolivia and Brazil undertaken from 1941-1947 while he was a research associate at Harvard University Botanical Museum. The trips to Peru and Bolivia were supported by Guggenheim fellowships, while 1943-1945 saw Cutler assigned to the U.S. Rubber Development Corp in northern Brazil as part of the Second World War effort, identifying rubber tree groves from the air.
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. He joined the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1953, where he served until his retirement in 1977. Developing his expertise in palaeoethnobotany, he began teaching this subject in 1969 at Washington University.
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. As well as his career in botany, Cutler was an enthusiastic sailor and boat builder, and a proficient goldsmith.
Sources:
D.L. Browman, 1999, "Hugh Carson Cutler", Society for American Archaeology Bulletin, 17(1): 23
L.K., 1999, "Obituary: Hugh Carson Cutler 1912-1998", Economic Botany, 53(1): 119-120.
