Exploring, Constructing and Commodifying the Underground: An environmental history of cave diving in the Yucatan Peninsula

• In Event: Landscapes and Peoples in Yucatán, 1500-Present

Abstract

The Yucatan Peninsula is home to a complex waterscape that contains no major rivers or surface water bodies. Instead, beneath the region’s surface is a riddle of flooded caves which form part of the world’s most extensive aquifer system. This system are directly linked by dispersed water sinkholes, known as cenotes, which pierce through the surface of the land and ocean floor. For the Maya, cenotes were not only vital sources of potable water, but also they were understood to be entrances to the mythical underworld where chaaks [rain gods] dwelt. More recently, this subterranean world has become a popular destination for cave diving explorers who, with technological and scientific innovations in underground exploration, have helped to produce the underground as a new ‘legible nature’, opening up epistemological spaces for economic, social and political calculation.

In this paper, we reconstruct this history of subterranean exploration – examining how the 20th century ushered in an era in which the mapping and exploitation of the underground became increasingly intensive. From diving to recover Maya artefacts in the (infamous) Sacred Cenote in 1909, to the commodification of aquifer with cave diving tours in the 21st century, we argue that new cave technologies and exploration narratives have driven vertical territory expansion in the region – both as a physical practice and a social construction – which in turn has critically shaped water governance regimes in the region. We illustrate how analyses of human engagements with the subterranean ‘vertical third dimension’ can provide new understandings into the nature of social relations and the ways in which landscapes - above and below the ground - have been colonised, exploited, transformed, and given meaning.

Authors

• Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita, Sustainability Research Centre, University of the Sunshine Coast

• Paul Munro, University of New South Wales