Ethnographic interviews and historical literature reviews provide evidence that the nine ethno-linguistic groups inhabiting the foothill region of the western slope of the Sierra Nevada relied on a variety of plants and animals from chaparral communities to meet their material needs and deliberately burned the chaparral to maximize its ability to produce useful products. The reasons for burning in chaparral are grouped into six ecologically-based categories, each relying on a known response to fire of the chaparral flora, community, or landscape. The densities of people in the region were high, and villages needed large quantities of chaparral-derived materials with specific qualities to make many cultural objects. Because the majority of chaparral-occurring species used as cultural resources by Native groups required frequent fire in order to exist in sufficient quantity, or to be useful, fires caused by lightning strikes were likely insufficient to meet needs. The authors posit that tribes employed intentional burning to expand the availability, abundance, and diversity of plant materials necessary for foods, medicines, and critical technologies and that they collected plants and animals from across a mosaic of periodically burned chaparral stands at different stages of ecological succession. Overall the evidence suggests that the burning of chaparral, as a major strategy for economic intensification and extensification, altered the natural fire regimes of the foothills by expanding the burn season, shortening the fire-return interval in specific areas, and enhancing the abundance and density of species that suited specific cultural objectives.

Entrevistas etnográficas y estudios realizados en el tema proveen evidencias de que los nueve grupos etnolingüísticos que habitaban la región de las estribaciones de la ladera occidental de la Sierra Nevada dependían de una variedad de plantas y animales de las comunidades del chaparral para satisfacer sus necesidades materiales. A su vez, esos grupos quemaban el chaparral deliberadamente para maximizar la capacidad de producción de objetos útiles. Las razones por las cuales se llevaban a cabo las quemas en el chaparral han sido agrupadas en seis categorías de base ecológica; cada categoría se relaciona con una de las conocidas maneras en que la flora, la comunidad o el paisaje responden al fuego. La densidad de población de la región era alta y los pueblos necesitaban extraer del chaparral grandes cantidades de materiales con características específicas para poder producir muchos de los objetos culturales. Puesto que la mayor parte de las especies del chaparral usadas como recursos culturales por los grupos indígenas requería incendios frecuentes, ya sea para que hubiera suficiente cantidad de dichas especies o para que éstas pudieran ser útiles, la periodicidad de los incendios causados por tormentas eléctricas parece haber sido insuficiente.

Los autores proponen que las tribus empleaban la quema intencional para aumentar la disponibilidad, la cantidad y la diversidad de los materiales vegetales necesarios para producir alimentos, medicinas y tecnologías críticas. Asimismo, plantean que dichas tribus recolectaban plantas y animales de un mosaico de chaparrales, los cuales eran quemados periódicamente en distintas etapas de sucesión ecológica. En general, las evidencias sugieren que la quema del chaparral, como importante estrategia de intensificación y expansión económicas, alteró los regímenes naturales de fuego en las estribaciones de la sierra extendiendo la temporada de fuego, reduciendo los intervalos de fuego en determinadas áreas, e incrementando la cantidad y la densidad de las especies idóneas para alcanzar objetivos culturales específicos.

It has long been thought that the only means by which the American Southwest's extensive pinyon-juniper woodlands, with their inherently low primary productivity, could have supported indigenous populations during prehispanic times was with the transformative consequences associated with the widespread cultivation of low-moisture-intolerant domesticated plants, principally maize (Zea mays L.). In this paper we present an alternative to this orthodox view which posits that anthropogenic fire was a vegetation-community management technology that was used to create disturbance patches and to propagate abundant, edible seed-rich ruderals in them. This perspective allows us, as well, to introduce and illustrate the interpretive possibilities of a conceptual scheme that focuses on three resource production types—cultivated wild plants, gathered wild plants, and domesticated plants—with multi-contextual macrobotanical data from a partially burned and rapidly abandoned multi-room settlement (occupied between AD 1070–1080) located south of the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. By integrating these data with previous archaeobotanical, pollen, and sedimentary micro-charcoal studies, we propose that the systematic cultivation of wild plants in pyrogenic resource patches was a sustainable practice that enhanced food-supply security by insulating populations from the effects of short-term environmental variability and long-term climate change that challenge maize farmers. Importantly, these investigations indicate that low-intensity burning did not involve widespread deforestation, as some models of Holocene climate change suggest, and that prehistoric depopulation and modern fire suppression have altered fundamentally the composition and economic potential of contemporary pinyon-juniper ecosystems.

Domesticated seed crops first appear in the archaeological record of the Cumberland Plateau region of eastern Kentucky (USA) at 3500 BP. Both the archaeobotanical and paleoecological records indicate a substantial increase in forest opening, seed storage, residential stability, and use of food production technology after 3000 BP. The Holocene pollen and microcharcoal record obtained from one upland pond additionally shows a concomitant increase in frequency of local fires and the abundance of fire-tolerant tree taxa, including oaks, chestnut, and pines. In this location, the establishment of an anthropogenic fire regime for agricultural clearing also transformed forests to include larger numbers of economically important nut-producing trees. However, an archaeological wood assemblage from the Mounded Talus shelter shows that human foragers in the region had access to these mixed oak forests and their products as early as 8000 BP. Comparison of multiple wood charcoal data sets shows considerable continuity in the species composition of upland forests across the transition to food production. Rather than indicating a deep history of fire management, this pattern is explainable as the result of human groups' reliance on productive resource patches that concentrate on naturally xeric sites. The role of fire in the spread of economically important mixed oak forests of the Cumberland Plateau may have been overestimated.

This paper focuses on the 2013 Carpenter One Fire in the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area (SMNRA) to understand how linked social and ecological factors affect fire regimes in ecosystems that exist in close proximity to human settlement and places culturally significant to Indigenous peoples. Ignited in July, this fire ultimately spread to 11,283 ha and cost USD $18.5 million to contain and extinguish. Priority was placed on protecting various private landholdings within the National Forest and on its periphery, which included several seasonal, high-value vacation homes. Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) consider the Spring Mountains landscape in Nevada to be their creation place and the center of their ancestral territory. Their oral history states that the Creator charged them with balancing the land, which is sentient and considered a close relative, at different points in time. This relationship includes a fire management model that creates small-scale landscape disturbances such as patch burns and fuels reduction, and protects fire-resilient trees. Assembling together ethnographic and United States Census data and literature, we argue that a decrease in indigenous fire management and a concurrent increase in fire suppression through Forest Service policy, old growth timber harvest, grazing, the introduction of nonnative invasive species, and private landholdings facilitated the unprecedented size and intensity of this wildfire. These circumstances are generalizable to many contexts in the American West. We conclude with recommendations for a Nuwuvi/Forest Service collaborative stewardship framework to conduct consultation on mutually compatible outcomes, including fuels reduction and controlled burns.

According to new ecological theories, many savannas are inherently in disequilibrium and can flip from tree-dominated to grass-dominated landscapes depending upon the disturbance regime. In particular, a shift in a fire regime to a more frequent and intensive one can radically alter the tree-to-grass ratio in a given savanna. Drawing upon the ecological buffering model we argue that savanna persistence requires a relatively stable fire regime. We hypothesize that anthropogenic burning practices perform this function by producing a regular annual spatiotemporal pattern of fire that is linked to vegetation type. We test this hypothesis using a study of two areas, one in Mali and the other Burkina Faso. We use two sources of satellite data to produce an 11-year time series of the spatiotemporal pattern of fires and an example of the annual burned area pattern these fires produce. We combine the analysis of satellite imagery with interviews of rural inhabitants who set fires to understand the logic underlying the patterns of fire. Analysis of a time series of imagery reveals a strikingly regular annual spatiotemporal pattern of burning for both study areas, which cannot be explained by the regional climatic pattern alone. We conclude that the regularity of the annual fire regime in West Africa is a human-ecological phenomenon closely linked to vegetation type and controlled by people's burning practices. We argue that the anthropogenic burning regime serves to buffer the savanna and maintain its ecological stability.

Kakadu National Park in northern Australia was one of the first jointly managed parks in the world, and offers an important case study of how public institutions and indigenous communities interact in the management of landscapes. In the 1990s, an extensive fire management program was instituted in Kakadu. The aim of this program was to shift the timing of fires from the late dry season to the early dry season, a pattern that on its surface more closely reflects precontact Aboriginal fire patterns. Despite broad success in this fire regime shift, Kakadu has come under particularly intense criticism from local Aboriginal communities, as well as the conservation sector and the wider public, for failures in fire management. These perceived failures are, however, assumed to be a feature of Kakadu specifically, rather than early season burning generally. Consequently, the model of extensive fire management in the early dry season continues to be a key goal for Aboriginal-owned lands across northern Australia, with early-burning projects that derive funding tied to reduced net carbon emissions now emerging as the most promising potential for reinstating indigenous fire management in northern Australia. We argue, however, that these new emissions-reducing programs run the risk of following the same fraught path of dissatisfaction and disassociation as Kakadu, because it is inherent in the nature of institutionalized management programs to replace the complexity and contingency of indigenous fire management with standardized goals. In so doing, such programs treat indigenous people as workers executing plans developed by others rather than as genuine partners in the design and implementation of management programs.

Since the mid-1990s, natural resource management or “ranger” jobs have been established in many Indigenous communities of northern Australia. These jobs are based on the formalization and professionalization of “traditional” responsibilities for the land and the sea referred to as “caring for country.” They are predominantly funded by the Australian government through policies and programs that combine environmental conservation and Indigenous economic development objectives. Fire management is usually one of the Indigenous rangers' main activities. This paper endeavors to analyze the power relations and ambivalences inherent in these rangers' burning practices, described in the scientific literature as “community-based.” The joint or integrated use of “traditional ecological knowledge” and Western science is widely advocated for programs using anthropogenic fires for conservation purposes. We argue that in northern Australia, attempts to integrate these two systems of knowledge have resulted in a de facto transfer of the social and ritual responsibility of burning the country from specific Indigenous custodians (traditional owners and managers) to Indigenous rangers, non-Indigenous fire ecologists, and other non-Indigenous actors. While traditional owners and local people are supposed to define and control their rangers' fire management activities, local involvement is impeded by the role of external experts. Furthermore, attempts to combine Indigenous and non-Indigenous fire knowledge entangle different understandings of what a “traditional” fire regime was and should be, and often prioritize Western views supported by funding bodies. Consequently, the burning practices implemented by Indigenous rangers can be a source of controversy within local communities and among rangers themselves.

Xavante (A'uwe˜) hunting with fire in the cerrado landscape of Central Brazil has garnered considerable attention by the public for its purported threat to the environment and by the scientific community as an example of responsible Indigenous landscape management. The practice and transmission of associated traditional knowledge now face acute challenges due to territorial circumscription, increased sedentarization, and economic change. In this article, I draw on my observations during a ceremonial hunting trek to discuss the process by which boys and young men acquire knowledge and skills required to autonomously participate in group hunting with fire in ways their elders consider proper, effective, and sustainable. I focus on a particular didactic strategy whereby young mentors assume primary responsibility for encouraging restrained participation by their even younger protégés while elders create opportunities for youth to gradually participate in increasingly direct capacities. This cultural configuration encourages active learning and entrusts younger people to assume responsibility for their own acquisition and production of knowledge pertaining to the ecology of anthropogenic fire, the burning calendar, group hunting strategies, and ceremonial aspects of the hunt.