Kay, Charles E. Are Lightning Fires Unnatural? A Comparison of Aboriginal and Lightning Ignition Rates in the United States. 2007. in R.E. Masters and K.E.M. Galley (eds.) Proceedings of the 23rd Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference: Fire in Grassland and Shrubland Ecosystems, pp 16-28. Tall Timbers Research Station, Tallahassee, FL.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
ABSTRACT
It is now widely acknowledged that frequent, low-intensity fires once structured many plant communities. Despite an abundance of ethnographic evidence, however, as well as a growing body of ecological data, many professionals still tend to minimize the importance of aboriginal burning compared to that of lightning-caused fires. Based on fire occurrence data (1970–2002) provided by the National Interagency Fire Center, I calculated the number of lightning fires/million acres (400,000 ha) per year for every national forest in the United States. Those values range from a low of <1 lightning-caused fire/400,000 ha per year for eastern deciduous forests, to a high of 158 lightning-caused fires/400,000 ha per year in western pine forests. Those data can then be compared with potential aboriginal ignition rates based on estimates of native populations and the number of fires set by each individual per year. Using the lowest published estimate of native people in the United States and Canada prior to European influences (2 million) and assuming that each individual started only 1 fire per year—potential aboriginal ignition rates were 2.7–350 times greater than current lightning ignition rates. Using more realistic estimates of native populations, as well as the number of fires each person started per year, potential aboriginal ignition rates were 270–35,000 times greater than known lightning ignition rates. Thus, lightning-caused fires may have been largely irrelevant for at least the last 10,000 years. Instead, the dominant ecological force likely has been aboriginal burning.
keywords: aboriginal burning, Indian burning, lightning-caused fires, lightning-fire ignition rates, potential aboriginal ignition rates.
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February 26, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Fire History
If Omer Stewart was the Father of Anthropogenic Fire Theory, then Henry Trickey Lewis Jr. (1928-2004) was the First-born Son, the standard-bearer, the torch-bearer for 30 years.
Anthropologist Henry T. Lewis was born October 2, 1928 in Riverside, CA. He served in the U.S. military (1947-1954) and as a U.S. National Park ranger. “Hank” as he was fondly referred to, received his BA from Fresno State College (1957) and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1967). Based on his research there, Lewis authored Patterns of Indian Burning in California in 1973. That landmark work expands on Omer Stewart’s general contentions by examining the details of anthropogenic fire in California as practiced by the indigenous residents in pre-contact times.
First hired by San Diego State College (1964-1968) and then by the University of Hawaii (1968-1971), Lewis went on to become Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta in Edmondton (1971-1975 and 1986-1990). There he conducted research in the burning practices of the native peoples of northern Alberta. In addition to written works, Lewis produced a documentary film, The Fires of Spring, in 1978.
Lewis, along with M. Kat Anderson, also compiled, edited, and wrote introductions to Forgotten Fires by Omer Stewart [here]. He was instrumental in getting the work published, fifty years after it had been written by Stewart.
February 25, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Fire History
Boyd, Robert, editor. Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest. 1999. Oregon State University Press.
Selected excerpts:
Robert Boyd — Introduction
In May and June of 1792, George Vancouver’s British-sponsored, exploring expedition entered the uncharted waters of Puget Sound.1 Expecting a forested wilderness inhabited by unsophisticated natives, they were surprised at what they found. At Penn Cove, on Whidbey Island:
“The surrounding country, for several miles in most points of view, presented a delightful prospect consisting chiefly of spacious meadows elegantly adorned with clumps of trees; among which the oak bore a very considerable proportion, in size from four to six feet in circumference. In these beautiful pastures … the deer were seen playing about in great numbers. Nature had here provided the wellstocked park, and wanted only the assistance of art to constitute that desirable assemblage of surface, which is so much sought in other countries, and only to be acquired by an immoderate experience in manual labour.”
Among the “pine forests” of Admiralty Inlet, Joseph Whidbey noted “clear spots or lawns … clothed with a rich carpet of verdure.” The “verdure” of these “lawns” included “grass of an excellent quality,” tall ferns “in the sandy soils” and several other plants: “Gooseberrys, Currands, Raspberrys, & Strawberrys were to be found in many places. Onions were to be got almost everywhere.” Whidbey was nostalgic: the lawns had “a beauty of prospect equal to the most admired Parks of England.”
Nearly two centuries later, in 1979, well after the “lawns” observed by Vancouver’s party had been converted to agriculture, the “pine forests” partially cut and managed for timber production, many indigenous species supplanted by Eurasian varieties, and the villages and seasonal camps of the Native Americans replaced by the cities and farms of Euro-American newcomers, anthropologist Jay Miller went into the Methow Valley [north-central Washington] with a van load of [Methow Indian] elders, some of whom had not been there for fifty years. When we had gone through about half the valley, a woman started to cry. I thought it was because she was homesick, but, after a time, she sobbed, ‘When my people lived here, we took good care of all this land. We burned it over every fall to make it like a park. Now it is a jungle. Every Methow I talked to after that confirmed the regular program of burning.
Separated by 187 years of systemic, region-wide ecological change in the Pacific Northwest, these two sets of observations address several themes central to this volume. The Pacific Northwest at first contact with Euro-Americans was not exclusively a forested wilderness. West of the Cascades, as documented in the Vancouver journals, there were large and small prairies scattered throughout a region that was climatically more suited to forest growth. And east of the mountains, as the Methow passage suggests, the forests of the past were quite different, with a minimum of underbrush and clutter. Other differences in local environments were present both east and west.
Vancouver believed that “Nature” alone was responsible for the “luxuriant lawns” and “well-stocked parks”; there is nothing in any of the expedition’s journals suggesting that the Native inhabitants of the “inland sea” had any hand in their existence. Until relatively recently, most anthropologists believed this as well. The traditional stereotype of non-agricultural foraging peoples was that they simply took from the land and did not have the tools or knowledge to modify it to suit their needs. We now know better. Indigenous Northwesterners did indeed have a tool-fire-and they knew how to use it in ways that not only answered immediate purposes but also modified their environment. We now know that the “lawns” that Vancouver observed on Whidbey Island, the prairies that early trappers and explorers described in the Willamette Valley, and the open spaces that led the Hudson’s Bay Company to select the site of Victoria for their headquarters in 1845 had been actively manipulated and managed, if not actually “created,” by their Native inhabitants. Anthropogenic (human-caused) fire was by far the most important tool of environmental manipulation throughout the Native Pacific Northwest.
January 7, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Cultural Landscapes, Fire History
Williams, Gerald W. References on the American Indian Use of Fire in Ecosystems. 2003.
Compiled and introduction by Gerald W. Williams, Ph.D. Historical Analyst USDA Forest Service Washington, D.C. June 12, 2003, containing over 1,000 citations to books and papers about anthropogenic fire.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
… Many people believe that North America, before the coming of the Spanish explorers, missionaries, and settlers, was a totally pristine, natural, wilderness world with ancient forests covering the landscapes. This ideal world was populated by millions of Indian people who, somewhat amazingly, “were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance (Shetler 1982: 226).” This peaceful, mythic, magical ideal has symbolized the thinking behind much of the modern environmental movement. However, as Daniel Botkin pointed out, these impressions of a “benign people treading lightly on the land” are wrong…
“Native Americans had three powerful technologies: fire, the ability to work wood into useful objects, and the bow and arrow. To claim that people with these technologies did not or could not create major changes in natural ecosystems can be taken as Western civilization’s ignorance, chauvinism, and old prejudice against primitivism–the noble but dumb savage. There is ample evidence that Native Americans greatly changed the character of the landscape with fire, and that they had major effects on the abundances of some wildlife species through their hunting,” (Botkin 1995: 169)…
…Steve Pyne put much of the Indian use of fire into perspective as he reported that:
“the modification of the American continent by fire at the hands of Asian immigrants [nowcalled American Indians, Native Americans, or First Nations/People] was the result of repeated, controlled, surface burns on a cycle of one to three years, broken by occasional holocausts from escape fires and periodic conflagrations during times of drought. Even under ideal circumstances, accidents occurred: signal fires escaped and campfires spread, with the result that valuable range was untimely scorched, buffalo driven away, and villages threatened. Burned corpses on the prairie were far from rare. So extensive were the cumulative effects of these modifications that it may be said that the general consequence of the Indian occupation of the New World was to replace forested land with grassland or savannah, or, where the forest persisted, to open it up and free it from underbrush. Most of the impenetrable woods encountered by explorers were in bogs or swamps from which fire was excluded; naturally drained landscape was nearly everywhere burned. Conversely, almost wherever the European went, forests followed. The Great American Forest may be more a product of settlement than a victim of it,” (Pyne 1982: 79-80)…
December 29, 2007 | Comments Off | Topic: Fire History
Lewis, Henry T. A Time for Burning. Occasional Publication No. 17. 1982, Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta, Boreal Institute for Northern Studies
Review with selected excerpts by Mike Dubrasich
Anthropologist Henry T. Lewis (1928-2004) earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley and authored Patterns of Indian Burning in California in 1973. Lewis went on to become Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta in Edmondton (1971-1975 and 1986-1990). There he conducted research in the burning practices of the native peoples of northern Alberta. In addition to written works, Lewis produced a documentary film, The Fires of Spring, in 1978.
Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson edited and wrote Introductions to Forgotten Fires — Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness by Omer C. Stewart, University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Papers by Henry T. Lewis include:
1973 Patterns of Indian Burning in California: Ecology and Ethnohistory. Lowell John Bean (ed.). Ballena Anthropological Papers Vol. 1. Ramona, CA: Ballena Press. Reprinted in Thomas C. Blackburn and Kat Anderson (eds.) Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press.
1977 Maskuta: The Ecology of Indian Fires in Northern Alberta. Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 7, #1: 15-52.
1978 Traditional Uses of Fire in Northern Alberta. Pp. 61-62 in Dennis E. Dube (compiler) Fire Ecology in Resource Management: Workshop Proceedings, December 6-7, 1977. Information Report NOR-X-210. Edmonton, Alberta: Environment Canada, Canadian Forestry Service, Northern Forest Research Centre.
1980 Hunter-Gatherers and Problems for Fire History. Pp. 115-119 in Marvin A. Stokes and John H. Dieterich (technical coordinators) Proceedings of the Fire History Workshop: October 20-24, 1980, Tucson, Arizona. General Technical Report RM-81. Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station.
1980b Indian Fires in Spring: Hunters and Gatherers of the Canadian Forest Shaped Their Habitat with Fire. Natural History, Vol. 89, #1 (Jan): 76-78, 82-83.
1982 Fire Technology and Resource Management in Aboriginal North American and Australia. Pp. 45-67 in Nancy M. Williams and Eugene S. Hunn (eds.) Resource Managers: North American and Australian Hunter-Gatherers; Proceedings of AAAS Selected Symposium 67. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Inc.
1982 A Time for Burning. Occasional Publication No. 17. Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta, Boreal Institute for Northern Studies.
1985 Why Indians Burned: Specific Versus General Reasons. Pp. 75-80 in James E. Lotan, et al. (technical coordinators) Proceedings–Symposium and Workshop on Wilderness Fire: Missoula, Montana, November, 15-18, 1983. General Technical Report INT-182. Ogden, UT: USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station.
1990 Reconstructing Patterns of Indian Burning in Southwestern Oregon. Pp. 80-84 in Nan Hannon and Richard K. Olmo (eds.) Living with the Land: The Indians of Southwest Oregon - Proceedings of the1989 Symposium on the Prehistory of Southwest Oregon. Medford, OR: Southern Oregon Historical Society. [See our review here]
1988 Lewis, Henry T. and Theresa A. Ferguson. Yards, Corridors, and Mosaics: How to Burn a Boreal Forest. Human Ecology, Vol. 16, #1 (Mar): 57-77. Notes Indian fire use in NW California and western WA in pages 58-63 .
In A Time for Burning Lewis recounts the burning practices of three Athabaskan groups, the Beaver, Slavey, and Sekani Nations of the boreal forests of Alberta. In addition, his informants included Crees, who moved into the area around 1725 from western Ontario and the James Bay region, and Chipewayans who entered from northeast Alberta during the latter part of the 18th century.
Selected excerpts:
In North America, the most important resources of Indian hunter-gatherers are those found in recently burned areas: bison, moose, deer, elk, hares, grouse, grass seeds, legumes, berries, bulbs. However, natural [lightning] fires are much too irregular in occurrence and distribution to ensure the abundance of these resources. Also, because these fires are normally a phenomenon of late spring and early autumn, they destroy standing crops of plant materials. In some cases, they can seriously delay or fundamentally alter the pattern of plant recovery, which can adversely affect the local adaptations of hunter-gatherers…
December 28, 2007 | Comments Off | Topic: Fire History
Carloni, Ken. The Ecological Legacy of Indian Burning Practices in Southwestern Oregon. 2005. Doctoral dissertation, Oregon State Univ.
Review with excerpts by Mike Dubrasich
An Oregon forest scientist has discovered (or rediscovered, to be precise) an ancient system of trails and campsites on the Umpqua National Forest. Dr. Ken Carloni of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, reported his findings in his 2005 doctoral dissertation entitled The Ecological Legacy of Indian Burning Practices in Southwestern Oregon.
Using a sophisticated computer system and software (Idrisi GIS from Clark Labs, 2002), Dr. Carloni modeled the most ergonomic (not too steep) and least cost (shortest) travel routes between ten known archaeological sites. The model was field-validated, leading to on-the-ground discovery of the ancient trails and additional sites, including an ancient summer village. The trail and homesite system in the Little River watershed is at least 2000 years old, and was used by Native Americans of the Yoncalla, Upper Umpqua, Cow Creek, and Molalla Tribes.
Strong historical development indications seen in modern vegetation species conditions and structures, together with archaeological artifacts, yield evidence of the validity of Dr. Carloni’s computer-predicted trail and campsite system. Among the evidence is the presence of ancient meadows and remnant open, uneven-aged, park-like forests along the travel routes. Both types of vegetation are thought to have been maintained by anthropogenic fire (Indian burning).
December 26, 2007 | Comments Off | Topic: Cultural Landscapes, Fire History
Pyne, Stephen J. Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada. 2007. Univ. British Columbia Press.
Review by Mike Dubrasich
Steve Pyne has done it again. Awful Splendour is a tour de fire and history, another of his magnificent explorations of land and peoples told through the prism of fire. Prior Pyne fire histories include:
Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982)
Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991)
World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth (1995)
Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s Encounter with the World (1997)
The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (1986)
The latter-most book, The Ice, is not about fire directly, but instead examines the only continent where there is no (exogenous) fire. And that illustrates the fact that Pyne’s fire histories are not histories of fire per se, but rather histories of land and people with fire as the central “informing conceit.”
Awful Splendour is also about more than fire in Canada; it is about the great boreal forests, temperate forests, and prairies of northern North America, the people and institutions who encountered those habitats and their fires, and who over the course of time made Canada what it is today.
Of course, the great fires of Canada are all mentioned: Miramichi (1825), Porcupine (1911), Kelowna (2003) and all the major others. But they are placed in the context of the people who set, fought, and responded in fashion to the forces of history, natural and cultural, that gave rise to Canadian fires.
December 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Fire History
by Dr. Thomas J. Connolly, PhD, Research Division Director, Museum of Anthropology, University of Oregon.
This paper was originally presented at the 81st Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division, (Symposium: Fire History in the Pacific Northwest: Human and Climatic Influences), June 11-14, 2000, Ashland, Oregon. 12p.
Full text [here] 64KB
Selected excerpts:
In contrast to popular myth, the hardy Mountain Men of the American West did not venture into an uncharted and untamed wilderness. They frequently followed well worn trails, connecting generations-old villages and camps of a considerable population of Natives that they encountered in every valley they entered. Likewise, when Euroamerican trappers and settlers entered the Willamette Valley in the early 1800s, it was not a pristine wilderness they entered; but an anthropogenic landscape, maintained–and to a real extent created–by the valley’s Natives with the use of fire…
Many anthropologists, among them Omer Stewart (1956), Henry Lewis (1973, 1976), Richard Gould (1971), and others, have documented deliberate burning of vegetation by hundreds of Native groups worldwide, for the purpose of managing plant and animals resources. The practice of burning in connection with subsistence activities has been recently explored by Lawrence Keeley (1995), who examined 96 ethnographic groups worldwide–characterized by anthropologists as hunter-gatherers–to assess the strength of correlations between plant exploitation practices, and ecological, demographic, and social variables. He found particularly strong correlations between fire-setting and the use of nuts and seeds as staple foods. Further, he found that the most intensive uses of plants–involving the sowing of seed–usually occurs only if the foraging group is also using fire for vegetation management. Based on his findings, he suggests (cf. Lewis 1972) that burning may be more strongly associated with the development of agriculture than variables such as population pressure, increasing social complexity, or other conditions seen as classic drivers of agricultural development. He does not suggest that burning causes agriculture, but that it is one of a set of tools–including sowing, planting, cultivating, weeding and other practices–used by hunter-gatherer groups worldwide who actively manipulate plants in their environment for the purpose of enhancing their productivity and reliability…
November 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Fire History
