Published with Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives Milpa-Melipona-Maya: Mayan Interspecies Alliances Facing Agribiotechnology in Yucatan (original) (raw)
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Recent economic and environmental changes have severely threatened the ancient practice of Maya stingless beekeeping (Meliponiculture). My research in southern Mexico and northern Belize examines the factors that influence the resilience of Yucatec Maya stingless beekeeping where it still exists. The circumstances that surround the survival of this tradition involve a reliance on traditional Maya medical theory and reflect an overarching pattern of conflict and resistance that exists between indigenous subsistence and western capitalistic economies. Understanding the cultural context of stingless bee honey is critical for examining the implications of commercialization. Of special interest are the changing gender roles involved in meliponiculture.
Future with a Past: Future Scenarios of Development in Yucatan in ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas?
Humanities
Since the Green Revolution, the development of agriculture has been measured by the relation between the chemical input (fertilizers and pesticides) and yield. Other factors, such as deforestation, water pollution, biodiversity loss and the loss of human health, were not part of these calculations. With the advent of genetically modified monocrops in the 1990s, GM soy in particular, plantations took over larger surfaces of land, accelerating these negative processes on a previously unknown scale. It has become clear that if this type of agriculture persists, toxic plantations will soon consume the planet. One of the phenomena prompting this awareness in different places of the world was the death of bees. ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas?, directed by Adriana Otero and Robín Canul, relates the environmental conflict between GM soy growers in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, and Mayan beekeepers. Not long after the arrival of GM soy to Yucatan, the bees began to die. When their honey was rej...
THE DISCOVERY OF A BEEHIVE AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF APIARIES AMONG THE ANCIENT MAYA
Latin American Antiquity, 2018
Recently, an exceptional find was made by the Nakum Archaeological Project in an offering deposited deep within the architectural core of the Precolumbian Maya site of Nakum located in northeastern Guatemala. The form of the object and comparisons made to ethnographic analogs indicate that it is a clay beehive, most probably one of the oldest in the Maya area and in the whole of Mesoamerica. Whether the object was used for its intended function or is an emulation, or skeuomorph, of perishable counterparts, remains unknown. The importance of this find lies in the fact that beekeeping is an activity that is traced with difficulty in archaeology. The present paper discusses the discovery of this artifact at Nakum, which dates to the end of the Preclassic period (ca. 100 BC–AD 250/300), in a wider temporal and spatial context and provides new data on Precolumbian beekeeping. We use a broad comparative vantage, drawing on archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistorical sources to discuss Mesoamerican beekeeping and its role in both the daily and the ritual lives of the Maya.