The ecological importance of Indigenous burning and fuel management has been much debated, particularly in dry forests of western North America where lightning fire frequencies are high. Using an extraordinary collection of nearly 5000 fire-scarred trees across dry forests and three in Arizona and New Mexico, my colleagues and I were able to assess the impacts of Indigenous fire management by Diné (Navajo), Hemish (Jemez), and Ndée (Apache) people on fire-climate relationships. We show that Indigenous fire management weakened the impact of climate on fire activity at local (stands of a few acres) and landscape scales (100s sq mi).
Fragmentation of fuels by anthropogenic pyrodiversity (a mosaic of many small burn patches) may have weakened the influence of climate on fuel production and drying for fire spread even if the particular cultural and economic purposes of burning that created the pyrodiversity varied across the three different cultural groups. This shows that #goodfire can reduce the impact of climate on fire activity – it did so for centuries in the SW, particularly under Indigenous management.
This study would not have been possible without collaborations with Diné, Hemish, and Ndée communities and scholars. My co-authors and I acknowledge that tribal elders describe deep connections to traditional territories since time immemorial for Diné, Hemish, and Ndée people. Although archaeology and history document varying intensities and locations of land use and settlement, we recognize that Diné, Hemish, and Ndée connections to their traditional territories extend deep in the past and are ongoing.
The original study:
Roos, Christopher I., Christopher H. Guiterman, Ellis Q. Margolis, Thomas W. Swetnam, Nicholas C. Laluk, Kerry F. Thompson, Chris Toya, Calvin A. Farris, Peter Z. Fulé, Jose M. Iniguez, J. Mark Kaib, Christopher D. O’Connor, and Lionel Whitehair
2022 Indigenous fire management and cross-scale fire-climate relationships in the Southwest United States from 1500 to 1900 CE. Science Advances 8:eabq3221. [PDF] [LINK]
Press coverage can be found here:
In Science magazine: https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-americans-broke-cycle-destructive-wildfires-here-s-how-they-did-it
In Popular Science magazine: https://www.popsci.com/environment/indigenous-burn-practices-southwest-wildfire/.
In Axios magazine: https://www.axios.com/2022/12/07/wildfires-indigenous-cultural-burning
In Courthouse News Service: https://www.courthousenews.com/native-americans-managed-wildfire-risk-with-controlled-burns-for-hundreds-of-years/
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Utah State University, where I gave two talks as part of the Ecology Center Seminar series. You can catch both talks below as well as a short radio interview that I did for the local NPR station.
Check out the NPR interview here.
The Southwest Fire Science Consortium webinar that I co-lead with Chris Toya and John Galvan from the Pueblo of Jemez Natural Resources Department is now available to stream on Youtube. Here I lay out the science and traditions behind centuries of sustainable Jemez (Hemish) fire management before Spanish colonialism. Chris and John put this in a cultural and contemporary context.
Tribal communities and their traditional wisdom play an important role in fire management of our forests and rangelands today and into the future.
In the wake of the devastating 2018 fire season in California, I penned a guest column for the Albuquerque Journal on the lessons from the past to coexist with wildfire today. Ancestors of Native American residents of Jemez Pueblo lived sustainably in fire-prone Southwestern Ponderosa Pine forests for centuries. I have been fortunate to work with tribal members from Jemez Pueblo in an interdisciplinary research project to document fire and human history in their ancestral landscape.
We tend to treat our contemporary fire problems as uniquely modern ones. This overlooks the thousands of years of experience that indigenous communities have with fire on their lands. We have a lot to learn from the past. We should look to interdisciplinary environmental archaeology and the traditional ecological knowledge still held in these native communities today to help us make better decisions as our forests and communities are transformed by fire risk on a warming planet.
This is a Throwback Thursday post to share the video of a public talk I gave as part of the Archaeology Southwest Archaeology Cafe series in Tucson in 2016. Here I talk about my work in Arizona documenting the benefits of indigenous burning on the long-term resilience of Southwestern forests.
Here is some more news coverage of my recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I was interviewed by KERA’s Justin Martin, the local host for All Things Considered. You can read a summary and listen to the interview here.
You can access the original paper here or on my Publications page.
Roos, Christopher I., María Nieves Zedeño, Kacy L. Hollenback, and Mary M. H. Erlick (2018) Indigenous Impacts on North American Great Plains Fire Regimes of the Last Millennium. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115:8143-8148.
I recently had the pleasure to do an interview on a CBC science radio show, ‘Quirks and Quarks’, about our recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the sophisticated ways that Native hunters used fire to manage prairies and manipulate bison herds. You can read more and listen to the interview here.
Our work was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You can find a link to the work here and on my Publications page.
Roos, Christopher I., María Nieves Zedeño, Kacy L. Hollenback, and Mary M. H. Erlick (2018) Indigenous Impacts on North American Great Plains Fire Regimes of the Last Millennium. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115:8143-8148.
We often ask the wrong question: how do we stop wildfires? The real question should be: what kinds of fire can we live with?
Environmental archaeology can be valuable here because we can learn from the successes and failures of past societies to live in fire-prone settings. This is what my colleagues and I have been doing in partnership with the Pueblo of Jemez in northern New Mexico. How did Jemez people live in fire-adapted ponderosa pine forests so successfully for centuries when we are in danger of losing this forest type to mega-fires today?
I recently had an opportunity to chat about these issues with my old schoolmate, Maya Lilly. She has made a video from that chat for her environmentally conscious lifestyle channel, Gungho Eco. Check it out.