Subsistence hunting and conservation

Abstract

The Maya civilization was one of the most important throughout the Americas. Today, Mayans still exist as a cultural group in Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Guatemala. The contemporary Mayan people of the Yucatán Peninsula live in a modern world; however, they still retain their language, customs and ancestral knowledge. Several studies have highlighted how this cultural group uses its natural environment and transforms it according to a complex knowledge of nature and natural systems. This knowledge is expressed in the use they make not only of plants and animals, but also of entire ecosystems. These relationships are the result of thousands of years of Mayan co-habitation with their environment. The aim of this chapter is to characterize subsistence hunting by Mayan people in the Yucatán Peninsula as a form of biodiversity utilization. Subsistence hunting is not an activity isolated from other forms of resource use, which creates a dynamic that has rarely been studied. The complex interplay of natural, social and economic conditions makes it difficult to assess the intensity of extraction and its impact on wildlife populations. Given that challenge, this chapter emphasizes the importance of sociocultural context and the multiple use character of animal and plants resources to effectively assess sustainable extractive use of fauna in future studies of the region.