Post by UKarchaeology on Aug 18, 2015 11:40:34 GMT
Slash and burn is an evocative phrase used to describe an early-farming method still used in some areas.
People chop down trees to clear an opening in the forest, burn the wood and brush to produce nutrient-rich ash and then sow their seeds among the charred stumps.
However, using fire to reshape the environment isn’t limited to farmers. Hunter-gatherers around the world have set fires to deliberately alter their ecosystems.
In a recent issue of the journal Current Anthropology, Fulco Scherjon and colleagues from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands present a comprehensive analysis of fire use by historically documented hunter-gatherers.
They conclude that setting fires had a variety of benefits, including the creation and maintenance of habitats favorable to game animals.
In Ohio, a Kickapoo chief complained to William Henry Harrison in 1805 that white settlers were interfering with his tribe’s practice of setting fires: “If we set fire to the weeds or grass, it is to live on the game,” which the “Master of Life” provided. “If we are not permitted to set fire, we cannot live.”
Although there is abundant evidence for the use of fire as a tool of landscape management among recent hunter-gatherers, there is little direct evidence for it in the ancient past.
Does this mean that humans only recently began to use fire in this way? Almost certainly not.
Extensive fires leave few traces in the ground for archaeologists to find thousands of years later. Even when they do leave traces, it’s hard to tell the difference between a fire set by humans and one created by natural causes.
In 1992, I co-directed excavations at the Newark Earthworks that provided indirect evidence of the use of fire by the early inhabitants of the region.
The Newark Earthworks, built 2,000 years ago by the Hopewell culture, are a series of massive earthen enclosures that sprawled across more than 4 square miles.
We excavated a trench through the Great Circle earthwork and found that it had been built upon what appeared to be a typical prairie soil. That was surprising because DeeAnne Wymer, co-director of the excavation and an expert on plants, said the ancient environment should have been an oak-hickory forest.
We sent a sample of the soil to a pollen specialist who found evidence that confirmed that the land had been an island of prairie within an ocean of oak-hickory forest. Yet, under purely natural conditions, there shouldn't have been a prairie there at all.
It appears, therefore, that hunter-gatherers had maintained the area as a prairie by periodically setting fires — possibly for thousands of years before the Hopewell culture came along.
There is no direct evidence for fire, but there is indirect evidence of fire’s effects. One of the reasons why the Hopewell chose this location might have been that the land already had been cleared.
America was no wilderness when Europeans landed. The landscape had been shaped by the efforts of hundreds of generations of its indigenous peoples.
Bradley T. Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio History Connection.
(Source: www.dispatch.com/content/stories/science/2015/08/16/01-ancient-groups-likely-used-fire-as-landscape-tool.html )
People chop down trees to clear an opening in the forest, burn the wood and brush to produce nutrient-rich ash and then sow their seeds among the charred stumps.
However, using fire to reshape the environment isn’t limited to farmers. Hunter-gatherers around the world have set fires to deliberately alter their ecosystems.
In a recent issue of the journal Current Anthropology, Fulco Scherjon and colleagues from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands present a comprehensive analysis of fire use by historically documented hunter-gatherers.
They conclude that setting fires had a variety of benefits, including the creation and maintenance of habitats favorable to game animals.
In Ohio, a Kickapoo chief complained to William Henry Harrison in 1805 that white settlers were interfering with his tribe’s practice of setting fires: “If we set fire to the weeds or grass, it is to live on the game,” which the “Master of Life” provided. “If we are not permitted to set fire, we cannot live.”
Although there is abundant evidence for the use of fire as a tool of landscape management among recent hunter-gatherers, there is little direct evidence for it in the ancient past.
Does this mean that humans only recently began to use fire in this way? Almost certainly not.
Extensive fires leave few traces in the ground for archaeologists to find thousands of years later. Even when they do leave traces, it’s hard to tell the difference between a fire set by humans and one created by natural causes.
In 1992, I co-directed excavations at the Newark Earthworks that provided indirect evidence of the use of fire by the early inhabitants of the region.
The Newark Earthworks, built 2,000 years ago by the Hopewell culture, are a series of massive earthen enclosures that sprawled across more than 4 square miles.
We excavated a trench through the Great Circle earthwork and found that it had been built upon what appeared to be a typical prairie soil. That was surprising because DeeAnne Wymer, co-director of the excavation and an expert on plants, said the ancient environment should have been an oak-hickory forest.
We sent a sample of the soil to a pollen specialist who found evidence that confirmed that the land had been an island of prairie within an ocean of oak-hickory forest. Yet, under purely natural conditions, there shouldn't have been a prairie there at all.
It appears, therefore, that hunter-gatherers had maintained the area as a prairie by periodically setting fires — possibly for thousands of years before the Hopewell culture came along.
There is no direct evidence for fire, but there is indirect evidence of fire’s effects. One of the reasons why the Hopewell chose this location might have been that the land already had been cleared.
America was no wilderness when Europeans landed. The landscape had been shaped by the efforts of hundreds of generations of its indigenous peoples.
Bradley T. Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio History Connection.
(Source: www.dispatch.com/content/stories/science/2015/08/16/01-ancient-groups-likely-used-fire-as-landscape-tool.html )