Re-thinking the Effects of Human-Controlled Ignitions on Ancient Economies and Modern Forest Health

It has long been presumed that water-dependent corn (Zea mays) agriculture was the only subsistence economy capable of supporting significant population concentrations in the prehispanic American Southwest. My alternative to this orthodox view posits that anthropogenic fire was as a vegetation-community management technology that could be used to propagate wild plants in bulk quantities. Supported by new archaeological and geoarchaeological data, the emerging picture is that the systematic encouragement of wild plants in pyrogenic resource patches was a sustainable practice that enhanced food-supply security by insulating populations from short-term environmental variability (e.g., rainfall patterns) and long-term climate change. Importantly, these kinds of studies indicate that low-intensity burning did not involve widespread deforestation, as some models of Holocene climate change suggest, and that fire suppression has made modern forest ecosystems more vulnerable to the fire regimes they once tolerated -- the implications of which we are just beginning to appreciate scientifically and culturally.