Hey guys for those who are interested. These are some of the fruits available in Belize and their season. Hope it is helpful. Will be updating this...

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Maya Ethnobotany

Complete inventory, Fruits nuts, root crops, grains, construction materials, utilitarian uses, sacred plants, sacred flowers

This opus is a progress report on over thirty years of studying plants and agriculture of the present-day Maya with the goal of understanding plant usage by the Classic Maya. As a progress report it still has a long way to go before being finished. But even in its unfinished state, this report provides abundant listings of plants in a useful thematic arrangement. The only other publication that I am familiar with which lists even close to most of the plants utilized by the Maya is in an article by Cyrus Lundell (1938).

  • Obviously books on Mayan agriculture should have informative lists of all Maya agricultural crops, but these do not tend to include plants used for house construction.
  • There are monumental monographs, such as all the trees of Guatemala (Parker 2008) but they are botanical works, not ethnobotanical, and there is no cross-reference by kind of use. You have to go through over one thousand pages and several thousand tree species to find what you are looking for.
  • There are even important monographs on Maya ethnobotany, but they are usually limited to one country, or one theme, often medicinal plants.
  • There are even nice monographs on edible plants of Central America (Chízmar 2009), but these do not include every local edible plant, and their focus is not utilitarian plants at all, nor sacred plants. La flora silvestre de Guatemala, by Luis Villar Anleu (2008), is another helpful publication, but our goal was to list every category: wild and domesticated, edible and utilitarian, and sacred (even if not eaten or used for construction).

There are plenty of other lists of all Maya whatever else, but for one single resource, which lists all plants: food, construction, sacred flowers, etc; such a list is not widely available (or if available is kept well hidden). The most inspirational list I have found is over seventy years ago, namely that already mentioned, of Cyrus Lundell. It has at most several hundred plants; I have not counted all the plants I have found, but I estimate the quantity in this report by FLAAR is over 400 plants.

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