Multi-Millennial Fire Histories from Sedimentary Archives: Human and Climate Impacts

Summary

Sedimentary archives offer the opportunity to build millennial length fire history reconstructions with which to evaluate hypotheses of anthropogenic and climatic impacts on fire prone forests. Particularly when calibrated with centennial length fire history records from tree-rings, sedimentary paleofire proxies can be used to build spatially explicit records of fire regime changes. As part of the Jemez Fire & Humans in Resilient Ecosystems Project, this paper presents the results of multiple, spatially distributed paleofire records that span more than 6000 years. This research contextualizes the historic fire-climate dynamics on these landscapes and provides evidence of human impacts on the vulnerability of fire-prone ponderosa pine forests to low-frequency climate changes.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Fire and Humans in Resilient Ecosystems in the American Southwest

Keywords

Spatial Coverage