The Contested Mosaic: Landscape and Livelihood in the Lacandon Rainforest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper I explore the complex regional agroecological history of interaction of global and local social and biophysical forces that shape the landscape of an important tropical forest region of Mexico. This research contributes to the effort to improve our understanding of the determinants of land-use and land-cover change by focusing on the tensions between local collective-action goals and higher-level—regional, national, and global—institutions. The Lacandon Rainforest of Chiapas is the largest piece of tropical evergreen forest remaining in North America and, as such, contains an important proportion of Mexico’s biodiversity. The forest has been disturbed by extensive cattle production and extensive agrarian colonization by Maya people from surrounding regions during the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century the principal threat to the forest has been the expansion of oil palm plantations for biofuels and the promotion of industrial ecotourism. The conservation of this forest cover and the restoration of extensive degraded areas in this region, the result of misguided development policies, could have a significant impact on large-scale processes of environmental change during the current century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32777