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Landscape with Bees: Beekeeping at Hacienda San Pedro Cholul, Yucatán, Mexico

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Abstract

We examine how beekeeping and the production of honey and wax on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula was transformed in the wake of the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion and industrial revolution. Honey and wax produced from stingless bees (Melipona beecheii) were key commodities circulated throughout the prehispanic, colonial, and postcolonial periods. European honeybees (Apis mellifera) were introduced by the late nineteenth century, as demand for honey and wax transformed ecologies, technology, vegetative communities, and beekeeping practices. We compare archaeological, paleoethnobotanical, and soil chemical evidence of an apiary, likely for Apis mellifera, with documentary evidence for mixed species beekeeping at Hacienda San Pedro Cholul, a henequen plantation situated on the outskirts of Mérida.

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Acknowledgments

A preliminary version of this article, Landscape with Bees: Apiculture in Yucatán after the Spanish Invasion, was presented at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, April 10–14, 2019, in Albuquerque, NM (tDAR id450615) as part of the symposium entitled “After Cortés: archaeological legacies of the European invasion in Mesoamerica.” Funding for archaeological investigations at San Pedro Cholul, Héctor Hernández Álvarez, Principal Investigator, was provided by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), Proyecto Ciencia Básica, Grant 258270. All data and information from the Proyecto Arqueológico San Pedro Cholul are curated by Héctor Hernández Álvarez, Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida, México. We thank Tomás Gallareta Negrón, co-director and research scientist, and the staff at Kaxil Kiuic Biocultural Reserve in Oxcutzcab, Yucatan, for providing a tour of Xocneceh and for facilitating conversations with contemporary beekeepers as part of a New Mexico State University Faculty Led International Educational Program in 2016.

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  1. Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Km1 Carretera Mérida-Tizimín s/n, Cholul, 97305, Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico

    Héctor Hernández Álvarez

  2. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Puget Sound, 1500 N. Warner St., 98416, Tacoma, WA, USA

    Mario Zimmermann

  3. Department of Anthropology, New Mexico State University, PO Box 30001, 88003, Las Cruces, NM, USA

    Rani T Alexander

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Hernández Álvarez, H., Zimmermann, M. & Alexander, R.T. Landscape with Bees: Beekeeping at Hacienda San Pedro Cholul, Yucatán, Mexico. Int J Histor Archaeol 27, 841–864 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-022-00679-y

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