Burning the land: An ethnographic study of off-site fire use by current and historically documented foragers and implications for the interpretation of past fire practices in the landscape

Current Anthropology • Vol/Iss. 56(3) • University of Chicago Press • • Published In • Pages: 299-326 •
By Scherjon, Fulco, Bakels, Corrie, MacDonald, Katharine, Roebroeks, Wil

Abstract

The authors assemble an inventory of burning practices based on cross-cultural ethnographic data in order to elucidate or provide interpretive range for burning patterns seen in the archaeological record. Although no explicit hypotheses are tested, descriptive generalizations are proposed.

Samples

Sample Used Coded Data Comment
Ethnographic Reports
historical reports
Historical records
Various sources

Hypotheses (4)

HypothesisSupported
"Off-site fire use by hunter-gatherers and other people practicing traditional subsistence strategies is omnipresent, carried out by males, females, and children and by individuals and groups of all sizes"(311).NA
"Fire is used for equally diverse objectives and on a range of spatial scales in different types of vegetation"(311).NA
"Fire use is an integral prat of the hunter-gatherer niche, off-site as well as on-site"(314).NA
There is a discrepancy between the "historical visibility of hunter-gatherer burning practices as reconstructed through ethnohistorical accounts and the relative invisibility of such firing practices in nearly contemporaneous proxies, such as charcoal and pollen records"(314.NA
Documents and Hypotheses Filed By: emily.pitek