Biography

Argentine ethnobotanist. Raul Martínez Crovetto studied in Buenos Aires and graduated as an Agronomic Engineer from the university of this city (UBA) in 1945. He quickly took to botany and had already published on the topic of agrostology in 1942 before his graduation.

Although interested in many fields of botany, including taxonomy, phytogeography and ecology, Martínez Crovetto dedicated his life's study to ethnobotany and applied and economic botany, in which he published extensively from 1947 onwards. Prior to his work, little was known about many indigenous Argentine groups, especially those in Chaco, on which he focused much of his work and published his Estudios Etnobotánicos in 1964. Other regions in which Martínez Crovetto worked include the Guaranítica and the far south (Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego), contributing huge amounts to the knowledge of local groups here as well.

Beginning with the study of fruits and seeds eaten natively in Argentina he began to branch into all aspects of anthropology, becoming particularly interested in traditional games and sports and in music (indeed he composed music himself, playing the guitar and singing as a hobby). From 1959 until his retirement in 1983 Martínez Crovetto worked as a lecturer in systematic botany and phytogeography for the Faculty of Agronomy at the National University of the North-East (UNNE) in Corrientes. In 1967 he created the journal Etnobiológia of which 14 volumes were published and which included a lot of his work on yerba mate which interested him during this period. During his life Martínez Crovetto published over 50 papers on a range of subjects was also a pioneer of ethnographic methods; he was said to possess an extremely modest personality.

Sources:
Arenas, Pastor, 1988, "Homenaje: Raul Nereo Martínez Crovetto (1921-1988), Su Contribution a la Etnobotánica y a los Estudios Americanistas", Parodiana 5(2): 505-519.