The Young Forest: Arboreal Buffer Zones, Indigenous Resilience, and Multispecies Communities in the Eighteenth-Century Maya-Caribbean Borderlands

Join us for the next session of the Entangled Histories Seminar Series 2026–2027 with Scott Doebler (University of Wyoming, Laramie).

Explore how the post-1697 Maya forest evolved not as a conquered colonial space, but as a "young forest" where Indigenous resilience, arboreal buffer zones, and multispecies communities intertwined across imperial lines.

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Abstract

This environmental history paper explores the period following the 1697 invasion of the Petén, Guatemala, known among archaeologists and historians as the conquest of the last Maya kingdom. The year 1697 is often marked as the end of Maya independence and the beginning of Spanish colonial rule. However, the evidence for a complete breakdown of autonomous Indigenous society in the Petén is weak. A closer look at archival materials written in Spanish, English, and Yucatec Maya, held by institutions in Guatemala and Spain, shows that southern Mexico and northern Guatemala converted into a complex borderland space that overlapped Spanish colonial settlers and eighteenth-century Caribbean dynamics with older Indigenous styles of sociopolitical organization, environmental relationships, and multispecies community construction. The overlap not only allowed Indigenous survival, but also sustained political and cultural continuity much longer than colonial Spaniards claimed. Maya resilience occurred right alongside Spanish and British actors because of preexisting environmental relationships. Different groups gradually carved out specific territories and built different relationships with the lowland tropical forest resources. Pockets of hyperlocal settlement were kept separate by large arboreal buffer zones, but counterintuitively, they were also often in contact, stitched together by the shared utilization of forests.

This history of entanglement crosses imperial lines, cultural differences, and species divides. It also blends multiple timescales. The post-1697-invasion Maya forest is thus reimagined not as a conquered colonial space, but as a young forest. The organizing motif of this seminar borrows from the agricultural cycle in the area, when, after a major disturbance, the tangle of young undergrowth (known in Yucatec Maya as jubche’) mixes with surviving mature forest (known as ka’anal k’áax) to rewild an agroforestry plot. The result is a young forest consisting of both new and old growth and human and nonhuman participation.

About the Speaker

Scott Doebler is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, specializing in colonial Latin America and environmental history. He earned his Ph.D from Pennsylvania State University in 2022. Prior to his current appointment, he served as a 2025–2026 ACLS Fellow, a Huntington Library Long-Term Research Fellow, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pomona College. He is currently completing his first monograph, tentatively titled The Lure of the Lowlands: An Early Modern Environmental History of Yucatán and Guatemala’s Maya Forest, 1517–1767.