Numic fires: modeling the effects of anthropogenic fire on foraging decisions in the Great Basin

PosterAcross Western North America, hunter-gatherers modified their surrounding environment with the application of fire (1; 11; 15). However, to date we lack a general theoretical framework to investigate the reasons why people would burn or its effects on traditional foraging economies. To begin to fill in these gaps, here we examine the immediate benefits fire may provide in the context of driving rabbits in shrubland ecosystems across the ethnographic Great Basin occupied by Numic speaking foragers. Poster for the Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Human Fire Legacies on Ecological Landscapes

The primacy of past human activity in triggering change in earth’s ecosystems remains a contested idea. Treating human-environmental dynamics as a dichotomous phenomenon – turning “on” or “off” at some tipping point in the past – misses the broader, longer-term, and varied role humans play in creating lasting ecological legacies. To investigate these more subtle human-environmental dynamics, we propose an interdisciplinary framework, for evaluating past and predicting future landscape change focused on human-fire legacies. Linking theory and methods from behavioral and landscape ecology, we present a coupled framework capable of explaining how and why humans make subsistence decisions and interact with environmental variation through time. We review evidence using this framework that demonstrates how human behavior can influence vegetation cover and continuity, change local disturbance regimes, and create socio-ecological systems that can dampen or even override, the environmental effects of local and regional climate. Our examples emphasize how a long-term interdisciplinary perspective provides new insights for assessing the role of humans in generating persistent landscape legacies that go unrecognized using a simple natural-versus-human driver model of environmental change