Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Traditional fire-use, landscape transition, and the legacies of social theory past

  • Review
  • Published:
Ambio Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Fire-use and the scale and character of its effects on landscapes remain hotly debated in the paleo- and historical-fire literature. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropology and geography have played important roles in providing theoretical propositions and testable hypotheses for advancing understandings of the ecological role of human–fire-use in landscape histories. This article reviews some of the most salient and persistent theoretical propositions and hypotheses concerning the role of humans in historical fire ecology. The review discusses this history in light of current research agendas, such as those offered by pyrogeography. The review suggests that a more theoretically cognizant historical fire ecology should strive to operationalize transdisciplinary theory capable of addressing the role of human variability in the evolutionary history of landscapes. To facilitate this process, researchers should focus attention on integrating more current human ecology theory into transdisciplinary research agendas.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Agee, J.K. 1998. The landscape ecology of western forest fire regimes. Northwest Science 72.

  • Archibald, S., D.P. Roy, B.W. Van Wilgen, and R.J. Scholes. 2008. What limits fire? An examination of drivers of burnt area in southern Africa. Global Change Biology 10: 1–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Archibald, S., A.C. Staver, and S.A. Levin. 2012. Evolution of human-driven fire regimes in Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109: 847–852.

  • Barlett, H.H. 1955. Fire in relation to primitive agriculture and grazing in the Tropics: An annotated bibliography, vol. 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Botanical Gardens.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bean, W.T., and E.W. Sanderson. 2008. Using a spatially explicit ecological model to test scenarios of fire use by Native Americans: An example from the Harlem Plains, New York, NY. Ecological Modelling 211: 301–308.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bird, R.B., D.W. Bird, B.F. Codding, C.H. Parker, and J.H. Jones. 2008. The “fire stick farming” hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal foraging strategies, biodiversity, and anthropogenic fire mosaics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105: 14796–14801.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Bird, R.B., B.F. Codding, P.G. Kauhanen, and D.W. Bird. 2012. Aboriginal hunting buffers climate-driven fire-size variability in Australia’s spinifex grasslands. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109: 10287–10292.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Black, B.A., C.M. Ruffner, and M.D. Abrams. 2006. Native American influences on the forest composition of the Allegheny Plateau, northwest Pennsylvania. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 36: 1266–1275.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boas, F. 1904. The history of anthropology. Science 20: 513–524.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Bowman, D.M.J.S., J. Balch, P. Artaxo, W.J. Bond, M.A. Cochrane, C.M. D’Antonio, R. DeFries, F.H. Johnston, et al. 2011. The human dimension of fire regimes on Earth. Journal of Biogeography 38: 2223–2236.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bowman, D.M.J.S., J.A. O’Brien, and J.G. Goldammer. 2013. Pyrogeography and the global quest for sustainable fire management. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 38: 57–80.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Christensen, N.L. 1989. Landscape history and ecological change. Journal of Forest History 33: 116–125.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, G. 1947. Forest clearance and prehistoric farming. The Economic History Review 17: 45–51.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clark, G. 1957. Archaeology and society; reconstructing the prehistoric past. New York: Barnes and Noble Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, G. 1989. The economic approach to prehistory. In Economic prehistory: Papers on archaeology, ed. G. Clark. New York: Cambridge University Press. Original edition, 1953.

  • Clark, G. 1989. Farmers and forests in Neolithic Europe. In Economic prehistory: Papers on archaeology, ed. G. Clark. New York: Cambridge University Press. Original edition, 1945.

  • Clark, J.S., and P.D. Royall. 1995. Transformation of a northern hardwood forest by aboriginal (Iroquois) fire: Charcoal evidence from Crawford Lake, Ontario, Canada. The Holocene 5: 1–9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Conklin, H.C. 1954. An ethnoecological approach to shifting agriculture. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 17: 133–142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Conklin, H.C. 1961. The study of shifting cultivation. Current Anthropology 2: 27–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coughlan, M.R. 2014. Farmers, flames and forests: Historical ecology of pastoral fire use and landscape change in the French Western Pyrenees 1830–2011. Forest Ecology and Management 312: 55–66.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coughlan, M.R., and A.M. Petty. 2012. Linking humans and fire: A proposal for a transdisciplinary fire ecology. International Journal of Wildland Fire 21: 477–487.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cronon, W. 1983. Changes in the land, Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Daniau, A.-L., F. d’Errico, and M.F. Sánchez Goñi. 2010. Testing the hypothesis of fire use for ecosystem management by Neanderthal and Upper Palaeolithic modern human populations. PLoS One 5: e9157.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Delcourt, P.A., and H.R. Delcourt. 1998. The influence of prehistoric human-set fires on oak-chestnut forests in the southern Appalachians. Castanea 63: 337–345.

    Google Scholar 

  • Denevan, W.M. 1992. The pristine myth: The landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82: 369–385.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dove, M.R. 1983. Theories of swidden agriculture, and the political economy of ignorance. Agroforestry Systems 1: 85–99.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Forman, R.T.T., and M. Godron. 1986. Landscape ecology. New York: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freilich, M. 1967. Ecology and culture: Environmental determinism and the ecological approach in anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly 40: 26–43.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gragson, T.L. 1998. Potential versus actual vegetation. In Advances in historical ecology, ed. W. Balee. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grissino-Mayer, H.D., C.H. Baisan, and T.W. Swetnam. 1994. Fire history in the Pinaleno Mountains of southeastern Arizona: Effects of human-related disturbances. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report 264: 399–407.

    Google Scholar 

  • Guyette, R.P., R.M. Muzika, and D.C. Dey. 2002. Dynamics of an anthropogenic fire regime. Ecosystems 5: 472–486.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris, M. 1968. The rise of anthropological theory; a history of theories of culture. New York: Crowell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Headland, T.N. 1997. Revisionism in ecological anthropology. Current Anthropology 38: 605–630.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hough, W. 1926. Fire as an agent in human culture. United States Natural Museum Bulletin 139.

  • Hough, W. 1932. Fire and human civilization. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 71: 403–406.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huffman, M.R. 2013. The many elements of traditional fire knowledge: Synthesis, classification, and aids to cross-cultural problem solving in fire-dependent systems around the world. Ecology and Society 18.

  • Johansson, M.U., M. Fetene, A. Malmer, and A. Granström. 2012. Tending for cattle: Traditional fire management in Ethiopian montane heathlands. Ecology and Society 17.

  • Johnson, B.E., R.R. Everett, K.G. Lightfoot, and C.J. Stiplen. 2010. Exploring the traditional use of fire in the coastal mountains of Central California. In JFSP Research Project Reports. Paper 74: Joint Fire Science Program.

  • Jones, R. 1969. Fire-stick farming. Australian Natural History 16: 224–228.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelly, R.L. 1995. The foraging spectrum: Diversity in hunter–gatherer lifeways. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krech, S. 1999. The ecological Indian: Myth and history. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kroeber, A.L. 1936. Culture element distributions III: Area and climax. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 37: 101–116.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laris, P. 2002. Burning the seasonal mosaic: Preventative burning strategies in the wooded savanna of southern Mali. Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30: 155.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Laris, P. 2011. Humanizing savanna biogeography: Linking human practices with ecological patterns in a frequently burned savanna of southern Mali. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101: 1067–1088.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, H.T. 1972. The role of fire in the domestication of plants and animals in Southwest Asia: A hypothesis. Man 7: 195–222.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, H.T. 1978. Traditional uses of fire by Indians in northern Alberta. Current Anthropology 19: 401–402.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, H.T. 1994. Management fires vs. corrective fires in northern Australia: An analogue for environmental change. Chemosphere 29: 949–963.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, H.T. 2002. An anthropological critique. In Forgotten fires: Native Americans and the transient wilderness, ed. H.T. Lewis, and M.K. Anderson. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, H.T., and M.K. Anderson. 2002. Introduction. In Forgotten fires: Native Americans and the transient wilderness, ed. H.T. Lewis, and M.K. Anderson. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, H.T., and L.J. Bean. 1973. Patterns of Indian burning in California: Ecology and ethnohistory. Ramona, CA: Ballena Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, H.T., and T.A. Ferguson. 1988. Yards, corridors and mosaics: How to burn a boreal forest. Human Ecology 16: 57–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lightfoot, K.G., R.Q. Cuthrell, C.J. Striplen, and M.G. Hylkema. 2013. Rethinking the study of landscape management practices among hunter–gatherers in North America. American Antiquity 78: 285–301.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marlon, J.R., P.J. Bartlein, C. Carcaillet, D.G. Gavin, S.P. Harrison, P.E. Higuera, F. Joos, M.J. Power, et al. 2008. Climate and human influences on global biomass burning over the past two millennia. Nature Geoscience 1: 697–702.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Marsh, G.P. 1965. Man and nature; or physical geography as modified by human action. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Original edition, 1864.

  • Mason, O.T. 1894. Technogeography or the relation of the earth to the industries of mankind. American Anthropologist 7: 137–161.

  • McCune, J.L., M.G. Pellatt, and M. Vellend. 2013. Multidisciplinary synthesis of long-term human–ecosystem interactions: A perspective from the Garry oak ecosystem of British Columbia. Biological Conservation 166: 293–300.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McWethy, D.B., P.E. Higuera, C. Whitlock, T.T. Veblen, D.M.J.S. Bowman, G.J. Cary, S.G. Haberle, R.E. Keane, et al. 2013. A conceptual framework for predicting temperate ecosystem sensitivity to human impacts on fire regimes. Global Ecology and Biogeography 22: 900–912.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morgan, L.H. 1964 Ancient society: Or, researches in the lines of human progress from savagery, through barbarism to civilization. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Original edition, 1877.

  • Natcher, D.C., M. Calef, O. Huntington, S. Trainor, H.P. Huntington, L. DeWilde, S. Rupp, and F.S. Chapin III. 2007. Factors contributing to the cultural and spatial variability of landscape burning by native peoples of interior Alaska. Ecology & Society 12: 1–12.

    Google Scholar 

  • O’Connor, C.D., G.M. Garfin, D.A. Falk, and T.W. Swetnam. 2011. Human pyrogeography: A new synergy of fire, climate and people is reshaping ecosystems across the globe. Geography Compass 5: 329–350.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pausas, J.G., and J.E. Keeley. 2009. A burning story: The role of fire in the history of life. BioScience 59: 593–601.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perry, G.L.W., J.M. Wilmshurst, M.S. McGlone, D.B. McWethy, and C. Whitlock. 2012. Explaining fire-driven landscape transformation during the Initial Burning Period of New Zealand’s prehistory. Global Change Biology 18: 1609–1621.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Phillips, J. 1935. Succession, development, the climax, and the complex organism: An analysis of concepts: Part II. Development and the climax. Journal of Ecology 23: 210–246.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pyne, S.J. 1982. Fire in America: A cultural history of wildland and rural fire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roos, C.I., D.M.J.S. Bowman, J.K. Balch, P. Artaxo, W.J. Bond, M. Cochrane, C.M. D’Antonio, R. DeFries, et al. 2014. Pyrogeography, historical ecology, and the human dimensions of fire regimes. Journal of Biogeography 41: 833–836.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Russell, E.W.B. 1983. Indian-set fires in the forests of the northeastern United States. Ecology 64: 78–88.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sauer, C.O. 1950. Grassland climax, fire, and man. Journal of Range Management 3: 16–21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sauer, C.O. 1956. The agency of man on the earth. In Man’s role in changing the face of the earth, ed. W.L.J. Thomas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schmerbeck, J., A. Kohli, and K. Seeland. 2015. Ecosystem services and forest fires in India—Context and policy implications from a case study in Andhra Pradesh. Forest Policy and Economics 50: 337–346.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Seijo, F., and R. Gray. 2012. Pre-industrial anthropogenic fire regimes in transition: The case of Spain and its implications for fire governance in Mediterranean type biomes. Human Ecology Review 19: 58–69.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simmons, I.G., and J.B. Innes. 1987. Mid-holocene adaptations and later Mesolithic forest disturbance in Northern England. Journal of Archaeological Science 14: 385–394.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, B.D. 2011. General patterns of niche construction and the management of ‘wild’ plant and animal resources by small-scale pre-industrial societies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366: 836–848.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Steward, J.H. 1938. Basin-plateau aboriginal sociopolitical groups. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, O.C. 2002. Forgotten fires: Native Americans and the transient wilderness. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, O.C. 1951. Burning and natural vegetation in the United States. Geographical Review 41: 317–320.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sullivan III, A.P., and K.M. Forste. 2014. Fire-reliant subsistence economies and anthropogenic coniferous ecosystems in the Pre-Columbian northern American Southwest. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany: 1–17.

  • Sutton, M.Q., and E.N. Anderson. 2013. Introduction to cultural ecology. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tansley, A.G. 1935. The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms. Ecology 16: 284–307.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trigger, B.G. 1989. A history of archaeological thought. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Turner, M.G. 1989. Landscape ecology: The effect of pattern on process. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 20: 171–197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vale, T.R. 2002. Fire, native peoples, and the natural landscape. Washington, DC: Island Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Valese, E., M. Conedera, A.C. Held, and A. Ascoli. 2014. Fire, humans and landscape in the European Alpine Region during the Holocene. Anthropocene 6: 63–74.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitlock, C., P.E. Higuera, D.B. McWethy, and C.E. Briles. 2010. Paleoecological perspectives on fire ecology: Revisiting the fire-regime concept. Open Ecology Journal 3: 6–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Winterhalder, B.P. 1994. Concepts in historical ecology. In Historical ecology: Culture, knowledge, and changing landscapes, ed. C.L. Crumley. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wissler, C. 1926. The relation of nature to man in aboriginal America. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wissler, C. 1927. The culture-area concept in social anthropology. American Journal of Sociology 32: 881–891.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This paper was developed, in part, under STAR Fellowship Assistance Agreement No. FP917243 awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It has not been formally reviewed by EPA. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author. Partial support was also provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation through an award to the Coweeta LTER Program (DEB-0823293). The author thanks Ted Gragson, Victoria Ramenzoni, Genevieve Holdridge, and two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael R. Coughlan.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Coughlan, M.R. Traditional fire-use, landscape transition, and the legacies of social theory past. Ambio 44, 705–717 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-015-0643-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-015-0643-y

Keywords

Navigation