Precontact Indigenous Fire Stewardship: From the Valley to the Forest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Indigenous peoples lived in the Willamette Valley and adjacent highly productive upland forests for millennia and successfully coexisted with the region’s fire regimes. Like today, wildfires posed a threat to past societies and their livelihoods. Precontact Indigenous peoples of the Willamette Valley region would have been keenly aware of how fire relates to climate cycles, local landscapes, and weather conditions through personal observations and multigenerational traditional ecological knowledge. It is generally accepted that precontact Indigenous peoples used fire (fire stewardship) to intensively manage resources in the lower elevation prairies and savannas of the valley. We present preliminary results of an interdisciplinary study combining fire history, ethnohistory, and archaeology in the western Cascades to support the hypothesis that Indigenous stewardship also included the application of fire to some upland forest landscapes. We further explore how fire stewardship could have buffered Indigenous communities from severe wildfire events while attenuating longer-term effects of climate variability on forest composition, structure, and focal subsistence resources. Contrary to deterministic narratives, we suggest that Indigenous stewardship not only increased the abundance of key resources, but decreased risks of their loss to wildfire. Developing our understanding of Indigenous stewardship may offer solutions for modern fire management.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35645.0