Heritage Management and Wildland Fire: A Story of Success on the Comanche Fire

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In June of 2023 the Comanche Wildfire began by a lightning strike on the El Rito District of the Carson National Forest in Northern New Mexico. Due to the rains and cool temperatures this fire was burning low to moderate allowing the Forest to use the fire beneficially; however, this posed a problem for cultural resources. Cultural resource management during fires is often triage, picking which sites you have time to protect; however, as this fire was burning slowly archaeologists had more time to protect sites. Thanks to preventative fire mitigations, a prehistoric habitation site and a historic spring box site came out unscathed by fire. Additionally, through the hard work after the fire by wildland fire fighters the site is even more protected from natural events and other impacts in the future. This is a success story for cultural resource management in a wildfire.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40248.0