Domestication of Species and Landscapes in Mesoamerica

All over the world, humans incorporate into their context numerous species, more than 90% of them through gathering, hunting, or fishing. A smaller fraction, but that includes several thousands of species, are managed through silvicultural raising and cultivation techniques, and an even smaller fraction, estimated from 3000 to 7000 species, are under domestication. Humans construct their spaces of life by shaping the species and ecosystems they interact with. Such shaping is domestication and occurs at species and landscape levels. This chapter analyzes how domestication at both levels have been interconnected in Mesoamerica and how such interactions influence the construction of biocultural diversity. In Mesoamerica, these processes have an antiquity of more than 20,000 years, currently involving at least 750 native species of animals, 370 of fungi, numerous microorganisms and nearly 8000 species of plants. Production systems like milpa, home gardens, and diverse agroforestry systems have molded landscapes that harbor populations of thousands of species, influencing and being influenced by ecological and evolutionary processes, guided or incidental. Historical interactions with the whole neotropical area have also influenced the Mesoamerican management of species and landscapes. This chapter analyzes a panorama of these processes in the region.