Anthropogenic Fire (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
Clear evidence of hominin-controlled fire in the Earlier Stone Age archaeological record is sparse. Many indicators used to identify anthropogenic control of fire are not present or do not preserve from Early Pleistocene sediments (e.g. hearthstones, charcoal, ash). The 1972-4 excavations at FxJj20Main and FxJj20East localities of the Okote Mbr. (1.5-1.64 Ma) of the Koobi Fora Fm. recovered sediment features that appear to be reddened by an anomalous oxidation process. These are among the...
Fire, Humans, and Landscape Evolution: Modeling Anthropogenic Fire and Neolithic Landscapes in the Western Mediterranean (2016)
Archaeological and paleoecological analyses demonstrate that human-caused fires have long-term influences on global terrestrial and atmospheric systems. For millennia, humans have intentionally burned landscapes to drive game, clear land, engage in warfare, and propagate beneficial plant and animal species. Around the world, Neolithic transitions to agriculture often coincided with increases in fire frequency and changes in vegetation community composition and distribution. Although this...
Identifying fire in Early Stone Age: A study of site FxJj20 AB, Koobi Fora, Kenya (2016)
Fire use by human ancestors may explain changes seen in Homo erectus and be responsible for the development of later human species. Anthropogenic fire claims in the Early Stone Age (ESA) are disputed because many of these sites are in secondary deposits and contain no association between human behavior and fire evidence. Careful excavation producing high-resolution spatial data, detailed micromorphological analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR), and high-resolution spatial...
Indian Fires in the Prehistory of New England (1988)
Ecologists and archaeologists have long recognized that fires had an important effect on the vegetation of North America prior to the Colonial period. Evidence from areas as widely separated as Alaska (Shackleton 1979), Minnesota (Craig 1972), and Maine (Anderson 1979) shows that fires burned since before the time when humans first emigrated to the continent at the end of the last ice age. It seems likely that the early inhabitants of North America were accustomed to living in environments that...
Playing with Fire at ‘Ais Giorkis: A Geospatial Analysis of Prehistoric Fire Residue (2015)
Kritou Marottou Ais Giorkis is an Early Neolithic (9.5 kya) site located, uniquely, in the western foothills of Cyprus’ Troodos Mountains. It is one of five near contemporary sites and has produced the largest chipped stone and faunal assemblages recovered thus far. There are also several preserved circular, cobbled platforms, whose function has yet to be determined. In fact, little is currently understood about the lifeways practiced at the site. This includes the intensity and duration of its...
Reconstructing Anthropogenic Fire Regimes Using Multi-Disciplinary Methods: Preliminary Results from the Neolithic (7,700–4,500 cal. BP) in Eastern Spain (2017)
Charcoal is produced by the incomplete combustion of plant tissues and is used as an indicator of prehistoric fire activity in archaeological and paleoecological contexts. For millennia, humans have played an active role in shaping fire regimes, making the quantification and analysis of paleo-charcoal important for understanding long-term, social-ecological systems. Globally, prehistoric transitions to agriculture often coincide with increases in fire frequency and changes in vegetation...
Statistical Evidence For a New Method of Identifying Anthropogenic Fire in the Archaeological Record (2017)
Clarifying evidence for anthropogenic fire in the archaeological record has been subject to contention and vagueness. This uncertainty centers not on evidence for fire, rather what constitutes it being human-controlled. New research pursuing this question suggests that a peculiar angular fragment, termed thermal curved-fractures (TCF), are the byproduct of knapped materials (flakes, cores, bifaces) exposed at length to high heat. We present here results of experiments expanding our...
Thermal Curve Fracture (TCF) as a diagnostic tool for the identification of anthropogenic fire (2015)
Recognizing fire evidence in the record can be challenging and contentious. Aside from baked earth features – hearths, daub, etc. – a widely reported associated artifact is fire-cracked rock (FCR). Unlike flaked stone assemblages, FCR lacks a standardized description, criteria, test or model; archaeologists often learn identification ‘in the field.’ Recent actualistic studies have demonstrated that a previously undescribed type of FCR has likely been unknowingly lumped with other ‘angular...