Scott Doebler

“The Lure of the Lowlands” is a forest history of the Southern Maya Lowlands, where modern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize meet, during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. It argues that Mayan-speaking Indigenous peoples and their sylvan ecosystems co-constructed a tropical forest world, which became the dominant power on the Yucatán Peninsula for centuries, connected widely with the Caribbean, and lured many people with its prosperity. By rejecting colonial archival biases about tropical forests and by carrying out deep archival research, this project reconstructs the historical ebb and flow of this tropical forest world over the early modern period and its sprawling web of entanglements.