Chicle and the San Pedro Maya of British Honduras

Summary

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological evidence suggests sapodilla (Manilkara zapota), constituted an important resource for the ancient Maya. They harvested its fruit, used its wood in construction, and extracted latex—better known as chicle—from the tree for a variety of uses, including as chewing gum. The ancient Maya’s management of the species may be responsible for its ubiquity near Maya ruins today. With the birth of the chewing gum industry in the United States in the late 1800s, chicle became an important commercial export for Guatemala, British Honduras, and the Yucatan. Coincidentally, the rise of the chicle industry corresponded with the resettlement of northwestern Belize by the San Pedro Maya, a group displaced by the Caste War in Mexico. Forced to pay rent for their lands, the San Pedro Maya turned to chicle harvesting in the early twentieth century to acquire cash. While chicle extraction was presumably easy to incorporate into their established routine of harvesting forest products, the adoption proved to be detrimental for the San Pedro Maya. In this paper, we examine historical information and archaeological data from Kaxil Uinic village to explore the relationship between the chicle industry and the San Pedro Maya of British Honduras during the early 1900s.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36107.0