The Tzeltal Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico, regularly gather wild mushrooms as a supplement to the staple diet of corn and beans, especially during the rainy season months from June to December. Fieldwork over 18 months was conducted in the Tzeltal Maya communities of Oxchuc and Tenejapa with the goal of exploring ethnomycological knowledge in the Highland region. Thirty pile sort interviews supplement more than 200 semi-structured interviews concerning the names, uses and folk classification of mushrooms. This paper describes the ways in which the structure of the Tzeltal system of ethnomycological classification conform to the general principles of classification proposed by Berlin (1992).
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