Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Beekeeping in Yucatán is a prime example of how the entangled ecologies among bees, humans, and plants were transformed over the last 2,500 years to create a shared heritage and vibrant array of communities of cultural practice. The stingless Melipona bees native to Mesoamerica supplied honey and wax to markets and consumers throughout the Mesoamerican world. After the Spanish invasion, the introduction of new plants, domesticates, and bee species from Europe, Africa, and Asia fomented new ecologies, social networks, commodity chains, and shifts in cultural practices. Beekeepers confronted a wide range of global technological and political-economic changes that shaped the historical contingencies of the last 500 years. The reproduction of traditional ecological knowledge, agroforestry, and environmental management needed to sustain beekeeping is currently at the forefront of grassroots conservation efforts to stop deforestation and the use of the herbicide glyphosate on the Yucatán peninsula. Participants offer new studies and insights about variation in multispecies ecologies, sustainability initiatives, iconography, the production, distribution, and consumption of honey, wax, and other bee products in the past and the present.