RESUMO
ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Parallelisms between current and historical medicinal practices as described in the seventeenth century treatise Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (HNB) provide us with an overview of traditional plant knowledge transformations. Local markets reflect the actual plant use in urban and rural surroundings, allowing us to trace cross-century similarities of ethnobotanical knowledge. AIMS OF THE STUDY: We aim to verify in how far the HNB, created in seventeenth-century northeastern Brazil, correlates with contemporary plant use in the country by comparing the plant knowledge therein with recent plant market surveys at national level. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a literature review on ethnobotanical market surveys in Brazil. We used the retrieved data on plant composition and vernacular names, together with our own fieldwork from the Ver-o-Peso market in Belém, to compare each market repertoire with the useful species in the HNB. We analyzed similarities among markets and the HNB with a Detrended Correspondence Analysis and by creating Venn diagrams. We analyzed the methods of the different markets to check whether they influenced our results. RESULTS: Out of the 24 markets reviewed, the greatest similarities with the HNB are seen in northern Brazilian markets, both in plant composition and vernacular names, followed by the northeast. The least overlap is found with markets in the central west and Rio de Janeiro. Most of the shared vernacular names with the HNB belonged to languages of the Tupi linguistic family. CONCLUSION: The similarity patterns in floristic composition among Brazilian markets and the HNB indicate the current wider distribution and trade of the species that Marcgrave and Piso described in 1648 in the northeast. Migration of indigenous groups, environmental changes, globalized and homogenous plant trade, and different market survey methods played a role in these results. The HNB is a reference point in time that captures a moment of colonial cultural transformations.