Arboreal Apogees: Maya, Spanish, and English Ecologies in Lowland Yucatán and Guatemala, 1517-1717
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Doebler, Scott
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 05, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Kathlene Baldanza, Major Field Member
Amara Solari, Outside Unit & Field Member
Ronnie Hsia, Major Field Member
Michael Kulikowski, Program Head/Chair
Matthew Restall, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Martha Few, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor - Keywords:
- Maya history
Spanish history
English history
early modern history
forest history
ethnohistory
tropical forests
Yucatán
Guatemala
environmental history
Southern Maya Lowlands
Laguna de Términos - Abstract:
- This dissertation is a forest history that examines the Southern Maya Lowlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that an early modern tropical forest world thrived at the base of the Yucatán Peninsula for two centuries. This tropical forest world, not Spanish colonialism or isolated English raids and settlements, dominated the Yucatán Peninsula during the early modern period, crushing all attempts to implement European rule there and controlling the overwhelming majority of its geographic area until at least the eighteenth century. It took a unique form: political, social, and ecological networks that were rooted in low-density urban areas, but also along dispersed, camouflaged, nimble, and intricate webs. Indigenous peoples, non-elites, and the tropical forests co-constructed these forest networks, and they were always in motion due to constant competitions at the local level over prestige, wealth, religious influence, and political ascendancy. The tropical forests themselves, as living ecosystems, actively participated, directing human inhabitants towards ecological relationships that favored continuity and collaboration with the forest world. Most of this dissertation follows the vicissitudes of this tropical forest world. It contends that the tropical forest world survived the Spanish invasion period, adapted to changes in the early modern Caribbean, swelled in importance during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and overcame another period of even greater Spanish violence at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Ecological relationships ultimately provided resilience and vitality, which maintained the vast space of autonomy right in the middle of colonial New Spain and the Western Caribbean, despite invasions, epidemics, forced relocations, forcible cultural change, and intense Indigenous slave raids by Spanish, Indigenous, and English groups. The power and prosperity of the tropical forests lured many outsiders into the interior, which deepened regional and global entanglements through quotidian transimperial and transcultural interactions, economic exchanges, migrations, and diasporas. The survival and vitality of this Indigenous, non-elite, and tropical forest space challenges long-held conceptions of the early modern period in the region. Scholars have assumed that the Southern Maya Lowlands, now one of the most remote and marginalized areas in the Americas, remained inconsequential after the Spanish invasions of northern Yucatán and highland Guatemala. However, rather than hiding in the woods, the Maya tropical forest world pulled the global to the local. Rather than giving way to Europeans, ecological partnerships vanquished their efforts, exploited them for everything of value, and overlapped with their institutions. Forest dwellers ultimately controlled their participation in the early modern world on their own terms. Successfully turning Spanish dreams of a colonial utopia into tropical forest nightmares left a deep archival legacy. Generations of Spaniards starved in the woods, failed to realize their imagined colonies, and complained bitterly about both tropical forests and their human inhabitants. Their misfortunes led them to conclude that human society and tropical forests were antithetical. These interpretations, which make up the vast majority of surviving primary sources about the region, are rooted in specific experiences with the unconquered tropical forest ecologies. They obscured a more positive, less Eurocentric history, which has substantial importance for our modern society wracked by deforestation and climate change.