Anthropogenic Fire and the Origins of Agricultural Landscapes during the Neolithic Period (7,700–4,500 cal. BP) in Eastern Spain

Summary

Humans have intentionally set fires for millennia to transform the arrangement and diversity of resources within their landscapes, often altering the relationship between fire and ecosystems at multiple scales. Although scholars regularly identify human-altered fire regimes through paleoecological studies, archaeological research has not yet fully incorporated the spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions of human-caused fire into discussions of the development of agricultural landscapes. This paper presents new, integrated research on anthropogenic fire and landscape change during the Neolithic period (7,700–4,500 cal. BP) in Eastern Spain. Using an analysis of charcoal morphology from sedimentary records, the spatial distribution of prehistoric land-use and fire across the landscape, and an ethnographic review of burning practices of small-scale agriculturalists, this project aims to better understand the socio-ecological processes that drove the pace and scale of agricultural landscape development during the Neolithic. This research builds on data and analyses from the Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics Project (MedLanD), a collaborative project between Arizona State University and the University of Valencia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18761