| Landscapes are created and transformed by human beings as they engage in a dialogue with their biotic and abiotic environment. The Q'eqchi'—the fourth largest group of the Maya language family with speakers numbering over 700,000—are the primary transformers of the lowland forested landscapes of northern Alta Verapaz. However, families actively involved in this transformation are new arrivals to the area and hail from a botanical environment wholly different from the lowland tropical forests of their new home. This dissertation is based on 17 months of ethnographic and ethnobotanical research in two Q'eqchi' communities—one in the highlands, the other in the lowlands—and unravels the cultural process of behavioral and linguistic adaptation to an unfamiliar botanical environment.; Using the Mesoamerican aldea as the unit of analysis, the methods of this controlled comparison are both qualitative and quantitative. Participant observation and a long-term, personal commitment to the communities and the Q'eqchi' language provided an intimate understanding of ethnobotany as applied to the cultural domains of house construction, home gardens, agriculture, harvesting of forest resources, local and regional markets, and plant related lexical patterns. Community surveys, home garden inventories, and a plant trail experiment provided a large, quantitative data set that helped determine patterns in the cultural matrix. Basic descriptive statistics, multilinear regression, multi-dimensional scaling, cluster analysis, agreement matrices, and consensus analysis were all employed to help determine the patterns of cultural adaptation within the two communities.; The cultural data show that, although the lowlands are indeed largely unfamiliar to the migrants, distant and recent histories have played a role in preadapting the Q'eqchi' to the lowlands. Through these historical and contemporary channels, knowledge of plants and other characteristics of the lowland forests have reached the highlands, essentially helping to homogenize plant knowledge and behavior across any artificial altitudinal categories. Nevertheless, the lowlands are drastically new and the needs and stressors of the new ecological and cultural environment seem to elicit numerous instances of behavioral and lexical modification.; The “worldy” Q'eqchi'—an ethnographic enigma when compared to other Mayan groups—have been stigmatized in the conservation and anthropological literature as the “invaders” of a “pristine” ecological haven in northern Guatemala. Until this community and the Guatemalan government understand and address the pressing problems in the highlands, the lowlands will remain a social and ecological sponge, destined to become uninhabitable. |
