Page 57 - Archaeology - October 2017

Firefighters watch a 2015
wildfire in northern California.
Destructive blazes such as these
were less common in the region
in the ancient past.

LETTER FROM CALIFORNIA

THE ANCIENT ECOLOGY

OF FIRE

Lessons emerge from the ways in which North American hunter-
gatherers managed the landscape around them

by Antone Pierucci

he Quiroste Valley on California’s village in 1769, the valley was full of Quiroste, fire was a powerful tool. They
central coast lies sheltered from meadows, hazel groves, and stretches of used it to manage a number of food
Tthe wind that blows in from burned earth. The expedition chaplain, resources, not just grass seeds. And by
the Pacific not two miles distant. Juan Crespi, noted in his diary that regularly setting controlled fires, the
Coniferous pine and redwood trees the Quiroste hunter-gatherers were Quiroste also kept themselves safe
stand along the valley’s rim and sweep careful managers of the landscape. He from catastrophic wildfires, which feed
down into the lowland where they wrote that they regularly burned the on dense undergrowth. Recently, a
compete with thickets of poison meadowlands “for a better yield of the group of archaeologists, ecologists, and
oak, buckeye, and coyote brush. This grass seeds that they eat.” members of a local Native American
overgrown valley of some 200 acres On public lands today, vegetation tribe set out to understand the history
was once the home of the Quiroste, a often goes unmanaged and, as a of this practice in the Quiroste
people who would not recognize their result, becomes the tinder that fuels Valley, now part of Año Nuevo State
traditional lands today. When a Spanish wildfires. Nearly 7,000 blazes ravaged Park. “We had a lot of questions we
expedition first visited the Quiroste’s California in 2016 alone. But for the wanted answers to,” says University of

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