Fire and Vegetation Dynamics: Blazing the Trail in Pre-contact Southern New England

Summary

The concept that Native Americans were using fire for wide spread vegetation control and subsistence procurement during the pre-contact period in Southern New England has long been excepted as common practice, leading to changes in the landscape and then settlement patterns. However, save for the accounts of early explorers and colonists, whose goal was to solicit the "new land" as a familiar landscape and not an unknown wilderness, there is little supporting scientific evidence. This paper presents a component of a larger NSF-funded research project aimed to better understand the dialectical relationship among human activity (fire, land clearance, horticulture), vegetational dynamics, and climate by combining archaeological, paleoecological, and paleoenvironmental data. Overall, results of the multidisciplinary data analyses conducted thus far from state of Massachusetts and, further, from three distinct ecological zones within the state: Martha’s Vineyard, the Taunton River Drainage Basin, and the Deerfield Valley, does not show clear influence of human agency on the environment during the pre-contact period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21410