posted on 2016-04-12, 13:52authored byBarry Bogin, Maria Ines Varela Silva
Our purpose in this chapter is to explain how human physical growth
reflects the biocultural environment in which groups of people live. We do
this in the context of our research on the physical growth and health of Maya
children and adults. The Maya are one of the native peoples of the Americas.
There are an estimated 7-8 million Maya living in Guatemala, the Yucatan
Peninsula and a few other areas of southern Mexico, Belize, El Salvador,
and western Honduras (Figure 1.1). The majority, about 6.5 million live in
the highlands of Guatemala (Bogin, 2012). These demographic statistics make
the Maya the most populous Native American ethnic group. To better
understand the Maya people we created the Maya Project, a blend of art and
science portraying the biocultural realities of the Maya in Mesoamerica. One
aspect of the Maya Project is a web site – http://mayaproject.org.uk. We will
highlight some aspects of the Maya Project web site in later sections of this
chapter. First we offer some explanation of the biocultural perspective of
human growth.
Funding
Many people are part of the Maya Project team. We especially
acknowledge Dr. Federico Dickinson, Dr. Maria Teresa Castillo-Burgette,
Dr. Hannah Wilson, Maria Luisa Avila-Escalante. Financial support for the
Maya Project comes from The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research, Santander Universities, Loughborough University, and
CINVESTAV-Medida.
History
School
Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Human growth : the mirror of the society
Volume
1
Pages
1 - 25
Citation
BOGIN, B. and VARELA SILVA, M.I., 2015. The Maya Project: a mirror for human growth in biocultural perspective. IN: Sikdar, M. (ed). Human Growth: the Mirror of the Society. Delhi, India: B.R. Publishing Corporation, pp. 2 - 23.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2015
Notes
This is a chapter from the book Human Growth: the Mirror of the Society