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 Author(s): Fulco Scherjon, Corrie Bakels, Katharine MacDonald, and Wil Roebroeks Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 56, No. 3 (June 2015), pp. 299-326 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

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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
Author(s): Fulco Scherjon, Corrie Bakels, Katharine MacDonald, and Wil Roebroeks
Source:
Current Anthropology,
Vol. 56, No. 3 (June 2015), pp. 299-326
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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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
by Fulco Scherjon, Corrie Bakels, Katharine MacDonald,
and Wil Roebroeks
CA1Online-Only Material: Supplements A and B
Archaeological indications for off-site burning by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherers present
intransigent interpretive problems; by contrast, burning practices by recent hunter-gatherers are well documented.
Here, we present a systematic global inventory of extant burning practices—including the reasons for burning and
the environmental setting of firing activities—and also discuss their visibility in the archaeological record. This
inventory is based on ethnographic and historical texts. In historical times, off-site fire was used for a wide range of
purposes, irrespective of age and gender, with significant advantages for its producers. While the reasons given for
burning can vary between individuals, in the longer term, many hunter-gatherer firing practices created more
mosaic types of environments than would have occurred naturally. The historical visibility of hunter-gatherer
burning activities contrasts with the relative invisibility of such practices in the contemporary archaeological record,
highlighting the difficulty of analyzing past use of fire. On the basis of its ethnographic importance, we suggest that
diverse off-site fire use is as old as the regular use of fire. New multiproxy data from well-sampled sequences,
analyzed at a local scale, is needed to test this hypothesis.
All hunter-gatherers construct their ecological niche in a
variety of ways (Rowley-Conwy and Layton 2011), described
in admirable detail in Kelly’s (1995) The Foraging Spectrum.
One of the important ways in which hunter-gatherers ac-
tively alter their environment is by repeatedly burning the
landscape to improve the predictability and yield of prey ani-
mals as well as of plant food resources. The ethnographic
record contains many examples of burning-related types of
landscape management, especially from wider Australia and
North America. For example, when the first Europeans ar-
rived in Tasmania, some commented on the park-like land-
scapes that they encountered in this uttermost end of the
earth. John Glover fossilized some of these open landscapes
in his early nineteenth-century paintings, commenting that
“It is possible almost every where, to drive a carriage as read-
ily as in a Gentleman’s Park in England”(Glover 1835:9). As
described by Gammage (2008), some did exactly that, with a
certain David Collins declaring in 1812, “Theforestland...
is very open. To give an idea of the open country, the first
intercourse we had by land from Hobart’s Town to Laun-
ceston, a loaded cart was drawn without the necessity of
felling a tree”(quoted in Gammage 2008:243). The dense for-
est that now covers Glover’s open hills indeed provides a
striking illustration of landscape changes following the ceas-
ing of burning activities. At the same time, these paintings
and descriptions were also strongly influenced by the aesthetic
preference and experience as well as the settlement agendas of
the European colonists, as discussed in a critical review (Neale
2012) of Gammage’s (2011) recent book, The Biggest Estate on
Earth. Some of the early nineteenth-century explorers of Aus-
tralia and Tasmania recorded that the aboriginal inhabitants
of these regions fired the country to attract game, but it was
only in the 1960s that this was first described as forming part
of a systematic use of fire to continuously modify the sur-
roundings, for example, by Rhys Jones, who aptly coined the
term “fire-stick farming”for the practices of creating more
complex vegetation mosaics by systematic and repeated burn-
ing (Jones 1969). Whether the primary goal of this burning
was short- or long-term returns and the local and/or conti-
nental extent of influence of their burning on the vegetation is
Fulco Scherjon is a Staff Member, Corrie Bakels is a Professor of
Archaeoecology, Katharine MacDonald is a Postdoctoral Researcher,
and Wil Roebroeks is Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology in the
Faculty of Archaeology of theUniversity of Leiden (P.O. Box 9514, 2300
RA Leiden, The Netherlands [k.macdonald@xarch.leidenuniv.nl]).
This paper was submitted 21 V 13, accepted 9 VII 14, and electroni-
cally published 12 V 15.
q2015 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2015/5603-0001$10.00. DOI:10.1086/681561
Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015 299
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still debated (e.g., Bliege Bird et al. 2008, 2013; Holdaway,
Douglass, and Fanning 2013; Mooney et al. 2011; Morton et al.
2011). However, there is little doubt that their fires help to
manage the presence of resources by increasing the local avail-
ability and predictability of game as well as plant species,
making mosaics of fresh grass to concentrate feed and trees
or old grass to shelter game and hunters, at least in some areas.
As these case studies illustrate, wider Australia has un-
doubtedly yielded the best data on hunter-gatherer burning
practices. There is, however, also a rich record from North
America, where human firing practices had a significant im-
pact on the landscapes, as summarized by this quotation from
Stewart’sForgotten Fires:
There is evidence that fires set by Indians were of the ut-
most importance in determining the pattern of the vege-
tation from the time mankind first peopled the Western
Hemisphere. The methods of using fire and the actual ex-
amples of their effect will come, of course, from historic
records. The evidence suggests that few Europeans have
ever seen in America vegetation areas that were not at
some time burned over. Exceptions are found only in places
where vegetable matter was too scant to carry fire from one
plant to another. If there was anything to burn, Indians
set fire to it. The effect of fires would vary from place to
place. How burning would modify the vegetation balance
would depend upon many other natural conditions. To-
pography, moisture, wind, and the plants set afire would
all interact to determine the relative influence of the fires.
How often the vegetation might be burned varied. (Stewart
2002:68)
While the burning of land in wider Australia and North
America is particularly well studied, there exists a wide range
of historical and ethnographic sources from other parts of
the world showing that woodland, bush, and grassland burn-
ing was an important niche construction practice carried out
by many foragers, with a wide variety of benefits (Daniau,
D’Errico, and Sánchez Goñi 2010; Rolland 2004; Smith
2011). However, these reviews are selective, give limited de-
tails, and cover regions of varying extent. In fact, “fire”is a
keyword one rarely encounters in hunter-gatherer studies,
and it is even absent in the extensive index of the thorough
work The Foraging Spectrum (Kelly 1995). One exception is
the global review of hunter-gatherer burning practices by
Barbara Mills (1986), which compares objectives of burning
with a number of environmental parameters and season of
burning; this study has been almost completely neglected in
the recent archaeological literature and in anthropological
studies in general. A number of studies focusing on off-site
burning practices in particular contexts have been published
since, and there is scope for an up-to-date review that also
takes into account additional factors, including which people
participate in off-site burning and spatial scale.
Our study aims to provide a global synthesis of the extent,
diversity, and patterns in off-site fire use by historically doc-
umented and current hunter-gatherers. However, the remit
of this study lies in the deeper past. There are some tan-
talizing archaeological indications for off-site burning ac-
tivities by final Pleistocene and early Holocene (Mesolithic)
hunter-gatherers (Innes, Blackford, and Simmons 2011; Kaal
et al. 2013), with the lakeside Mesolithic site of Star Carr
(Yorkshire) being a key candidate for environmental man-
agement with fire in the deep past (Mellars and Dark 1998).
There is even evidence suggestive of off-site firing activi-
ties by Neandertals (Roebroeks and Bakels 2015; but see Pop
and Bakels 2015); these consist of traces of burning coincid-
ing with significant changes in vegetation as well as with the
first arrival of Neandertals around a small lake in the be-
ginning of the Last Interglacial (about 125,000 years ago) at
Neumark-Nord 2, near Halle, Germany (Bakels 2014; Sier
et al. 2011). Charcoal kept being produced in the environ-
ment all through the 2,000–3,000 years of Neandertal pres-
ence there and ceased when their artifacts disappeared, with
subsequent closure of the forests (Bakels 2014; Roebroeks and
Bakels 2015; Sier et al. 2011). The fieldwork at the Neumark-
Nord 2 site itself was steered by broader questions of how
Neandertals managed to survive in interglacial forested set-
tings, challenging environments also for modern human hunter-
gatherers (Roebroeks, Conard, and van Kolfschoten 1992).
However, even for later periods, disentangling the role of nat-
ural and anthropogenic fire and establishing whether such
associations indicate an anthropogenic cause is challenging.
The interpretive problems raised by findings such as those
from Neumark-Nord 2 as well as by comparable ones in the
laterphasesofprehistory(see“Off-Site Fire Use in the Past:
Spatiotemporal Scales of Visibility”) called in our view for a
systematic inventory of extant burning practices, including
the reasons for burning, the environmental setting of firing
activities, as well as a discussion of their possible visibility in
the archaeological record. While archaeologists discussing
possible archaeological evidence for off-site fire use rarely
refer to the ethnographic record, this rich data source has
some potential to aid in archaeological interpretation. For
example, a review of this evidence can help to assess whether
a possible role for anthropogenic burning should be con-
sidered in all types of vegetation and climates. It can also
help us to understand the full range of possible uses of off-
site fire and perhaps highlight some costs to such activities.
We tried to survey all possible off-site fire uses, not just
burning for hunting or for improvement and increased pre-
dictability of resources. We will also discuss the (sometimes
secondary) side effects of various forms of fire usage on
habitat formation. Repetitive firing practices aimed at short-
term benefits may have had secondary long-term conse-
quences for the structure of landscapes, possibly on a scale
visible in the geological record (Jones 1969; Laris 2002; Mills
1986; Stewart 2002). Even if these burning events were nei-
ther large nor frequent enough to alter habitats, they could
have played an important and hitherto underrated role in
subsistence and social strategies. We use the terms “off-site”
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and “on-site”fire for consistency with the archaeological lit-
erature. This distinction is not entirely clear-cut in terms of
types of fire and activity; for example, cooking fires may be
built near the spot where resources are obtained. However,
the distinction has the benefit of delimiting a manageable
study scope, and focusing attention on a wide range of uses
of fire that are less frequently discussed.
Despite their recorded abundance in the last four centu-
ries, such “off-site”uses have received far less attention in
studies of early fire use than “on-site”fire usage. That is un-
derstandable, considering the ongoing debate over the his-
tory of fire use even at the “on-site”level, where chronologies
for habitual fire use vary widely (Roebroeks and Villa 2011a;
Sandgathe et al. 2011b; Wrangham 2009). The study of the
history of fire use is a difficult topic because of the problems
with distinguishing traces of human-made fires from natu-
ral ones and the virtual invisibility of fire places and camp-
sites of mobile hunter-gatherers in general (Gowlett and
Wrangham 2013). Moving beyond the site level dramatically
increases the difficulty of interpreting possible fire proxies in
terms of hominin activities versus nonanthropogenic causes.
However, this did not deter us from our larger scale, cross-
cultural off-site fire use study, as a review would at the very
least yield information relevant to the extant hunter-gatherer
niche. The presentation and discussion of the collected data
form the core of this paper, which is accompanied by CA1
online supplements A and B, including our extensive data-
base (CA1supplement A). As for the identification of sim-
ilar types of off-site fire usage in the deeper past, we will
briefly discuss several paleoenvironmental and archaeologi-
cal case studies illustrating the nature of the available evi-
dence and suggest necessary steps to improve understanding
of this issue.
Methods and Data
Cross-cultural research is a well-established approach in an-
thropology (Ember and Ember 2001) to identify widespread
patterns and provide a rich characterization of particular
areas of behavior (e.g., Lancy 1996) and a basis for predicting
the occurrence of similar behavior in the past (e.g., Smith
2011). We carried out a literature search for examples of off-
site use of fire, focusing on the diversity, function, and en-
vironmental context. While focusing on hunter-gatherers,
we also included examples of use of fire for nonagricultural
purposes by populations practicing other subsistence sys-
tems. However, given our emphasis on mobile foragers, the
use of fire to prepare land for cultivation (e.g., slash-and-
burn activities) is excluded.
The geographical scope of this paper is global. Some geo-
graphical biases in the record could be expected, as a result
of the restricted distribution of recent hunter-gatherers as
well as the history of research on off-site fire use (the focus
on Australia and North America, discussed above). We ex-
plicitly aimed to include examples from underrepresented
regions and environmental contexts in order to counteract
geographical biases.
Sources of information about off-site fire use are diverse—
including accounts by travelers, hunters, missionaries, and
ethnographers—and extend from the seventeenth to twenty-
first century. Examples range from some of the earliest de-
scriptions of peoples encountered in the New World written
by French missionaries to recent ethnographic studies. Using
a wide range of sources has the advantage of providing a
broader geographical coverage and larger sample (and hence
showing more of the diversity of ways in which fire is used
off-site). However, the approaches taken to data gathering
and aims of these different sources vary. We ranked sources
from 1 to 3 (with 1 being the best) on the basis of whether
the text was primary or secondary, the reliability of the ac-
count, and the directness of the observation (for details, see
CA1supplement A). This made it possible to assess the
effect on our results of including less reliable sources.
Nevertheless, there is potential for error in cataloguing
these sources. For example, an interesting observation by
Laris (2002) based on a study of anthropogenic burning in
Mali illustrates the difficulties associated with recording the
objectives of burning. This author found that informants
setting fires claim that they do this primarily to prevent later
fires or protect particular areas from fire, while those wit-
nessing the same fires believe that a large number of fires are
the result of carelessness, malice, or hunting activities. Fur-
thermore, these witnesses are convinced that many fires were
started by outsiders, while the interviews show that almost
half of the population in the area do use fire on a larger scale
than just campfires (Laris 2002:182). In this case, a long
government-issued ban on burning meant that burning was
carried out covertly, and the perceptions of burning by peo-
ple who were not actively involved changed (Laris 2002:182).
In other cases, younger generations lack knowledge of fire
use and management or share negative attitudes toward fire
with the wider population (Mistry et al. 2005; Rodríguez
2007). Difficulty in obtaining exact reasons for burning is
clearly illustrated by an interview with a juvenile Pemón from
Venezuela on the frequent use of fire (Rodríguez 2007:337):
“‘I am sick and tired of fire. Sometimes I feel embarrassed
when people ask me why there are so many fires and I have
no answer to give them, so I shut my ears. I always tell them,
Ahhh! that is done for pure pleasure [sic]. I tell them that
when the elders are gone there will be no more fires I think
it will be better that way’(name withheld, young Pemón.
Interview, August 19, 1999). Responsibility for large, cata-
strophic fires is often attributed to outsiders, non-indigenous
people”(Rodríguez 2007:340). Similarly, among the Krahô
indigenous group in Brazil, the younger generation no lon-
ger recognizes nor understands the reasons and rationality
of their elders. “There are many younger members of the
Wakmejê group that claim they do not burn the cerrado nor
advocate burning because it is bad for the environment. The
Krahô of the younger generation are keen to learn and have
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 301
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contact with contemporary Brazilians, and it is only natural
that ideas of locals, mainly farmers, will influence the behav-
ior of some of their number. However, this may be a source
of future conflict—older members of the group already com-
plain that youngsters are gradually losing their traditional
knowledge, including that pertaining to fire management”
(Mistry et al. 2005:379). This loss of information about fire
management in young generations may mean that limited
data about fire landscape management is available at least
from recent sources and also that there is a potential for error
in using these sources.
An important source for this study was the electronic
Human Relations Area Files World Cultures ethnographic
database (eHRAF). Cross-cultural research requires access to
a large body of information (Ember and Ember 2001). While
a number of ethnographic databases exist, eHRAF differs in
that it contains no precoded data but searchable full texts
indexed by subject matter and grouped by culture on more
than 350 ethnographic groups. This is useful in providing
details about the aims and context of fire use. Our sources
also included a number of secondary texts addressing fire
landscape management in particular regions. The literature
was searched using the following terms: fire, pyrotechnology,
burn(ing/t), landscape management, charcoal. Because of
time limits, we were not able to access the original text in all
cases. On the basis of our review, it is clear that there is a
much larger volume of material available on this topic than
we included. However, since we collected more than 230 in-
dividual references to off-site fire use, and given the diversity
of the data that we obtained and the wide geographical cov-
erage, we assume that extending the database would not al-
ter the patterns significantly.
The data was stored in spreadsheet format, including col-
umns with the relevant text from the sources. The spread-
sheet (CA1supplement A) and a list of references (CA1
supplement B) are included. At this stage, we gained an
overview of the varied functions of off-site uses of fire, and it
became apparent that these uses fell into a number of broad
categories in terms of overarching objectives: subsistence,
social, and improvement, with a few unusual cases that do
not fit into these categories. The data was broken down into
many subcategories in order to facilitate graphical and sta-
tistical analysis (definitions of the overarching categories
and subcategories are included in CA1supplement B, to-
gether with a comprehensive description of the database
structure and fields). Where fire was used with more than
one objective, we counted these as separate cases.
Results
Research Bias and Data Quality
Our collected database (np231) is dominated by accounts
from North America (np87), South America (np44),
and Australia (np36). There are few records from Africa
(np24), Oceania (np13), Asia (np12), Central Amer-
ica (np11), and Europe (np4). In addition, most of our
data come from low or middle latitudes (see fig. 1). This
distribution could make it difficult to address questions
about the importance and objectives of off-site fire use or its
role in different environmental contexts. However, the doc-
umentation of fire use with a broad range of objectives from
all latitudes suggests that this is not the case (fig. 2; see also
table 1). The peaks in the number of observations at low and
middle latitudes correspond to the global distribution of
landmass, with large areas at low latitudes particularly in the
Southern Hemisphere and at middle latitudes in the North-
ern Hemisphere, suggesting that geography may be an im-
portant factor underlying the distribution of cases.
To each observation, we have assigned a confidence level
indicating how much confidence we have in the source, on
the basis of the criteria listed above. Each entry is assigned a
value of 1–3, with 1 indicating a high confidence level. The
majority of cases are considered reliable (level 1, np168;
level 2, np36; level 3, np27). This is particularly im-
portant for the interpretation of objectives. From figure 3a,
it becomes clear that for each objective, at least one entry
with confidence level 1 is present in the database (see also
table 1). Only for stimulation of flora are less than 50% of
the observations given a level 1. This suggests that our da-
tabase provides a good basis for discussing objectives of off-
site fire use.
Contexts and Objectives
The aims with which fire is used in an off-site context are
strikingly diverse (fig. 3b; table 1). Fire is used most fre-
quently for the direct procurement of food (np94); in ad-
dition, it is often used as a tool in social interactions, for
example, as a signal or weapon of war (np63). There are a
number of unusual objectives (np7) that do not fit easily
into these broad categories, for example, to keep away pred-
ators (database [DB] entry 101; see CA1supplements A, B),
to fell a tree (DB 182), or fire used by accident (DB 81).
While such activities often yield immediate benefits, fire
is also frequently used to alter the environment in various
ways that will be useful in the future (np67), for example,
Figure 1. Distribution of number of observations over the ab-
solute value of latitude (10 pfrom 07to 107north or south
inclusive, 20 pfrom 107to 207north or south inclusive, etc.).
302 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015
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stimulating the growth of edible plants, clearing pathways, or
removing rubbish. The importance of fire for procuring food
is even more evident when we take longer-term goals into
account.
Driving game is by far the most frequent way in which fire
is used to directly obtain food (fig. 3b). Game animals are
driven between fire lines toward an enclosure (DB 22, 120),
encircled by fire (DB 42, 111, 112), driven into rocky out-
crops or water (DB 82, 106), or flushed toward hunters
(DB 30). Smaller-scale fires are used to smoke game from
burrows, hollow trees, and caves (DB 31, 73, 74). Both small
game (such as rodents, rabbits, and snakes) and larger game
(such as antelope, deer, bison, and kangaroos) are targeted
using fire drives. A more specialized method is the use of
torches to attract fish, fowl, and even deer; for example, the
Mi’kmaq people from eastern Canada fished for salmon and
trout using canoes, torches, and harpoons, a method yielding
hundreds of fish in one night (DB 126). Burning is also car-
ried out to locate the tracks and burrows of small game (e.g.,
DB 230), to kill the latter, and to make it easier to gather
plant foods such as seeds (e.g., DB 5). For example, Kalapuya
hunter-gatherers from Oregon beat roasted tarweed seeds
into baskets after burning (DB 5).
Signaling is the most important social use of fire (fig. 3b),
with widely varying content, from the assembly of a raid-
ing party (e.g., DB 191), the approach of a migrating herd
(DB 119), or communicating the position of members of a
hunting team (DB 215). For the Yahgan of Tierra del Fuego,
“One such smoke signal signified sickness or an accident;
two, a grave emergency; three, a death; four, the discovery of
Figure 2. Objective versus latitude range (number of examples). For latitude range, 10 pfrom 07to 107inclusive, 20 pfrom 107to
207inclusive, and so on.
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 303
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Table 1. Objective versus group size, age group, gender, fire size, vegetation structure, fire product, category, confidence, and latitude range
Objective
Total Accident
Chase
away Clearing Communicate Cultural Drive Find
Fire
prevention Fun Illuminate Kill
Stimulate
flora
Stimulate
for fauna Warfare
n231 3 8 23 29 16 67 14 5 9 1 16 11 21 8
Group size:
Large 44 0 0 0 8 3 23 1 0 1 0 4 0 1 3
Small 51 1 4 7 3 6 15 3 1 2 1 2 3 2 1
One person 26 0 2 2 4 3 5 2 1 2 0 2 1 2 0
Unspecified 110 2 2 14 14 4 24 8 3 4 0 8 7 16 4
Age group:
Adult 61 1 4 4 9 8 16 4 1 2 1 3 2 5 1
Children 4 0 1 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Both 14 0 0 0 1 2 7 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1
Unspecified 152 2 3 19 19 4 43 9 4 6 0 12 9 16 6
Sex:
Male 50 1 4 2 8 10 14 1 1 1 0 3 1 3 1
Female 9 0 0 0 0 0 2 4 0 1 1 0 1 0 0
Both 23 0 1 3 2 3 9 0 0 0 0 2 0 2 1
Unspecified 149 2 3 18 19 3 42 9 4 7 0 11 9 16 6
Fire size:
Large 147 3 2 21 5 3 45 7 5 5 1 12 11 21 6
Small 84 0 6 2 24 13 22 7 0 4 0 4 0 0 2
Vegetation structure:
Boreal forest 8 0 0 1 3 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
Desert or semidesert 18 1 0 1 2 2 6 3 0 0 1 1 0 1 0
Swamp or marsh 4 0 0 1 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Temperate deciduous
forest 20 0 0 3 1 1 10 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1
Temperate grassland 38 1 3 2 6 0 9 3 1 1 0 0 4 7 1
Temperate mixed
forest 11 0 1 0 1 1 2 1 0 2 0 1 0 0 2
Tropical forest 34 0 1 4 3 4 7 3 1 2 0 3 2 1 3
Tropical savannah 53 1 2 5 2 4 16 0 3 4 0 8 2 6 0
Tundra 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
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Woodland or
scrubland 43 0 1 6 9 3 12 3 0 0 0 2 2 4 1
Fire product:
Charcoal 3 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Flames 166 3 5 23 3 6 49 10 5 9 0 13 11 21 8
Heat 70 0 0 0 3120 0 0 10 0 0
Light 12 0 0 0 2 0 8 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
Smoke 43 0 3 0 23 5 9 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0
Category:
Improvement 67 0 0 23 0 0 0 1 5 0 0 6 11 21 0
Social 63 1 1 0 29 15 0 0 0 9 0 0 0 0 8
Subsistence 94 0 6 0 0 1 67 10 0 0 0 10 0 0 0
Other 7 2 1 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
Confidence:
1 168 3 8 12 26 15 53 9 3 5 1 13 4 12 4
236007201021202253
32700411431201541
Latitude range:
260 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
250 11 0 1 3 3 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0
240 2 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
230 20 1 0 2 1 3 6 3 0 0 1 1 0 1 1
220 26 1 0 1 5 2 10 1 1 0 0 0 1 3 1
210 27 0 3 4 0 0 5 0 1 2 0 6 2 4 0
10 35 0 1 5 3 5 8 2 1 4 0 3 0 1 2
20 10 0 0 0 1 1 4 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1
30 6 0 0 0 0 1 2 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0
40 44 1 1 2 6 4 21 1 0 0 0 2 3 2 1
50 42 0 2 5 5 0 9 5 0 2 0 2 3 7 2
60 4 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
70 2 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
305
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astrandedwhale”(Cooper 1946:105). Fire is used as part of a
ritual in initiation ceremonies (DB 80) and ritual activities
before hunting (DB 40, 210). Burning can play a role in as-
serting rights, whether the hunting rights of a specificfamily
group (DB 94) or the rights of an indigenous community in
the face of restrictions (DB 161). Fires also offer other at-
tractions, including aesthetic pleasure and entertainment
(e.g., DB 36; see also DB 159); the Kayapó of the Brazilian
Amazon “say the fires produce beautiful effects in the night
skies”(Posey 1985:143). The products of fire are also used to
communicate with spiritual forces, including the burning
of certain herbs to draw attention from god to the Mbuti
Pygmy hunters from the Ituri Forest in Africa (DB 38; see also
DB 210; this is classified as communication in the database).
While social uses mostly involve smaller fires, there are a few
cases involving burning on a larger scale for purposes of de-
fense (DB 63, 65), claiming ownership (DB 94), and com-
munication (DB 185, 187).
Burning is also carried out with more or less distant future
benefits in mind, most importantly, for clearing vegetation
Figure 3. Objectives in absolute numbers of cases versus confidence (a), category (b), and fire product (c) in percentages.
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and resetting the vegetation succession to favor edible plants
for people and game (fig. 3b;classified as improvement in
the database). Figure 4 illustrates an example of this type of
burning, although not from a traditional subsistence context:
the burning of heathland in order to increase biodiversity in
Dutch nature reserves. In addition to subsistence purposes,
vegetation is burned (sometimes on a relatively large scale)
in order to create a path, to clear a waterhole or campsite, to
open up an area of water for fishing or boats, and to get rid
of poisonous animals (e.g., DB 51, 76, 124, 149). New plant
growth lures ungulates from forests or even nature reserves
(DB 96, 207) as well as improving visibility (DB 96). For ex-
ample, according to Gould (1971), Nyatunyatjara hunters
in Western Australia often burned areas of spinifex to which
they would return immediately after it rained in order to
hunt the game that was attracted to the fresh grass shoots
(DB 84). The growth of a wide range of edible plants—from
berry patches and fruit trees to seed bearers and grasses—
was also stimulated by fire (e.g., DB 9, 18, 23, 24, 60). The
benefits may be felt very soon after (e.g., that very night
when camping in a snake-free area; DB 76) or in the longer
term (after the first rains, as in the case above, DB 84). In
some cases, both long- and short-term returns were ob-
tained; for example, Hart and Pilling’s (1961) description
of Tiwi people hunting kangaroos highlights the abundant
meat obtained, improved visibility, and generation of attrac-
tive forage.
The products of fire that are pertinent also vary (fig. 3c);
for example, in addition to the wide use of heat and flames,
smoke may be important in communication (DB 178), obtain-
ing honey (DB 39), driving prey from a hiding place (DB 176),
and light in wayfinding or attracting prey (DB 77, 126).
Vegetation Structure and Topography
People use fire off-site in a broad range of vegetation types
for diverse purposes (including subsistence, improvement,
and social goals). For some types of vegetation, there is lim-
ited data, for example, for tundra or swamps (see fig. 5). In
general, the same activities are important in each vegetation
type, although communication is more important in boreal
forest and woodland than is generally the case. This includes
areas in which the dominant vegetation is difficult to set
alight. In deciduous forest, burning was carried out on a rel-
atively large scale with a range of objectives, including drives,
managing oak trees, and making tracking easier (DB 20, 118,
110, 112). Leaves, humus, and undergrowth in woodlands as
well as open areas were burned (DB 20, 118); in one case, the
grass was ignited to drive game (DB 112); in another, this
involved “the woods all around being set on fire”(DB 110).
There are no cases of deciduous vegetation being burned to
open up vegetation and improve food for game, although the
clearing of already utilized areas is mentioned (DB 13). Simi-
larly, fire is used off-site in tropical forest in activities ranging
Figure 4. Use of fire in managing national park landscape and fauna in the Netherlands, De Sallandse Heuvelrug. Photo by Jap
Smits. A color version of this figure is available online.
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 307
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from clearing an area for walking and hunting, killing poi-
sonous beasts, and stimulating the growth of fruit trees (DB
149–151) to flushing game (DB 157), although in one case the
latter activity occurs after areas have been cleared already (DB
211). Off-site burning is rare in tundra, with the few cases in-
volving smoke signals (e.g., DB 203). Both smaller- and larger-
scale burning occurs in most biomes (except tundra), although
larger-scale burning is rare in boreal habitats (see fig. 6).
Fire is used in a range of topographic contexts. For ex-
ample, in a number of cases, fire is used near a river or lake
to clear vegetation (e.g., to make way for boats in swamp
forest; DB 51, 55); to attract fish, fowl, or game; and occa-
sionally to drive game into rivers (DB 132, 133). Taphonom-
ical circumstances increase the chances that evidence is pre-
served near these landscape features (see “Discussion”).
Scale of Burning
Burning clearly occurs on a range of scales, and fires both
small and large can be used in a variety of activities, although
Figure 5. Objective versus vegetation structure (number of examples).
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explicit quantitative or relative descriptions of the areas that
are burned are scarce (fig. 7a). Fires are identified as small or
large on the basis of the description (e.g., described as small
or as involving burning a single tree or bush). More specific
examples suggest that a fire drive may cover areas of several,
10, or 100 km
2
(DB 70, 112, 230). For example, fire drives
carried out by the Delaware of Pennsylvania took place over
a circle with a diameter of a half to 2 miles (Lindestrom
1925, cited in Newcomb 1956). Burning on a large scale in a
hunting context is not restricted to large game but is also
applied to smaller targets, such as rodents or lizards (DB 90,
91, 180, 230). “Hunters fire a tract of mangul or kunarka,
usually between 1 and 10 ha in extent, follow in behind the
advancing fire line to search the cleared area for signs of
tracks to pursue to fresh burrows, and then use a specialized
digging stick to probe for and excavate an occupied den”
(Bliege Bird et al. 2008:14797). This and the cases above
demonstrate that burning tends to be scaled to forager day
range, as Bird and colleagues point out; a maximum of a 20–
30-km round trip, according to Kelly (1995:133). Other ac-
tivities occur on a much smaller scale, from burning patches
of grass sometimes as small as half a square meter across
(DB 204) to burning down a single tree (DB 229).
Burning is often carried out in a particular season, when
the vegetation is dry enough (DB 66), early before the risk of
dangerous conflagrations (DB 143), in anticipation of wet
seasons, in the main hunting season (DB 10, 42), or when a
food source is mature (DB 5). This may occur annually or at
longer intervals (e.g., DB 146). One description suggests fre-
quent burning as part of small-game hunting activities by
Gundjeihmi in Western Arnhem Land, Australia; “This pat-
tern of burning, with relatively small, typically low intensity
fires being set onto vegetation as soon as it was cured suffi-
ciently, was employed progressively and systematically over
the full extent of the dry season”(Russell-Smith 1997:175).
For Maasai herders in East Africa, “Burning grassland appears
to be a deeply ingrained cultural trait. Young herdboys will
seek out and ignite small patches of unburned grass, some-
times only one or two feet across. We have watched Masai
moran striding across a dry plain lighting matches as they
went, leaving a long line of small blazes gradually joining
togetherbehindthem....Wehadmarkedplotsthatwere
burned as much as four times in one year”(Talbot 1964:159).
Some accounts imply that burning occurs on a large
enough spatial scale and with a high enough temporal fre-
quency to influence the landscape substantially. For example,
according to Lee (1979:147), “Fire is also used indirectly in
hunting in the late winter and spring to set bush fires. Vast
areas measuring hundreds of hectares may be burnt off this
way each year. Visitors to the Kalahari have noted the blood-
red sunsets of August and September when dozens of local
bush fires create a pall of haze on the horizon. These fires
burn off old vegetation and encourage new growth, which
attracts game animals to the burnt-out areas.”While pic-
turesque, it is not clear from this description whether all of
the burning was anthropogenic (this case is therefore not
included in the database). A number of sources describe the
creation of a seasonal mosaic (DB 64, 67, 151). Using sat-
ellite imagery, Bliege Bird et al. (2008) found that burning by
Martu hunters, described above, created a smaller-scale hab-
itat mosaic than was present in natural vegetation, in the area
surrounding residential camps. In addition, lizard density in-
creased in areas close to successional edges (Bliege Bird et al.
2013). These unusually high-quality data confirm that burn-
ing activities, including burning for direct returns, can alter
the landscape significantly. However, this pattern is specificto
a contemporary context involving a single central settlement,
vehicle transport and guns, which are likely to influence burn-
ing activities; for example, as these authors point out (Bliege
Bird et al. 2008:14800), with more frequent camp moves, an-
Figure 6. Fire size versus vegetation structure (number of ex-
amples).
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 309
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thropogenic mosaics may be nearly indistinguishable from
natural ones.
Composition and Size of Groups
Both men and women are involved in a range of activities
using fire off-site, with social, subsistence, and longer-term
goals, although in many cases gender is unspecified (np149;
see fig. 7b). The primary role of Martu women in burning
while hunting small to medium-sized game has been high-
lighted by Bird et al. (2005, 2008). Women in other groups in
Australia also burn as part of small game hunting to flush or
trap game or reveal burrows (DB 66, 85). In addition to car-
rying out some of the same burning activities as men, women
but not men use fire to obtain firewood and to illuminate a
path; however, the number of recorded cases is very small (DB
75, 77). Groups of children also use fire while hunting (DB 87),
and fire plays a role in boys’initiation ceremonies (DB 37, 79,
80; fig. 7c).
Both individuals and small groups carry out a wide range
of activities using fire; however, people take part in burning
activities more often as part of a small group than on their
Figure 7. Objective versus fire size (a), gender (b), age group (c), and group size (d) in percentages.
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own (fig. 7d). Individuals may use fire to collect honey (DB
39, 53, 144), for protection (DB 101), to smoke out game
(DB 103), and in signaling (DB 178). While fire drives of
deer by individuals—experienced hunters—are mentioned
in one case, they are said to be rare (DB 148). Some activities
involve larger and more diverse groups. For example, the
members of a small Tiwi camp, which may comprise a man
and wife and their children and possibly kin, are involved in
firing areas of hunting ground (DB 94). On a yet larger scale,
senior Tiwi men may invite a number of households to par-
ticipate in a grass-burning posse to hunt kangaroo and im-
prove forage for game animals, and such occasions may in-
volve 10–15 men as well as women and children (DB 96).
Tasks were divided, with young men hunting, older men su-
pervising, and women and children beating. Overall, large
groups are most often convened for driving game, signaling,
or clearing land, and there are few if any burning activities
for which a large group of more than 10 people is essential.
While even larger aggregations are mentioned, these involve
agricultural or horticultural populations (e.g., DB 42, 43).
Discussion
Implications of the Cross-Cultural Review
Off-site fire use by hunter-gatherers and other people prac-
ticing traditional subsistence strategies is omnipresent, car-
ried out by males, females, and children and by individuals
and groups of all sizes. People use fire as a tool off-site for a
range of activities, largely irrespective of gender and age. Such
a tool may be particularly beneficial in contexts where tech-
nological and subsistence aids—such as guns or dogs (or tele-
phones)—are lacking, leading us to expect that it was more
important in the past. At the same time, as discussed above,
the current impact of these activities on vegetation at a
landscape scale is influenced by the contemporary context.
These activities occur in a wide range of environments, in-
cluding those in which the vegetation is relatively hard to
ignite, such as deciduous and tropical forests. This is consis-
tent with Mills’(1986) study, which showed no significant
relationship between use of off-site burning and effective
temperature as a measure of seasonality, and identified cases
of off-site burning in all vegetation categories, with tundra
forming an exception; however, in contrast to this study, we
did find examples from tropical forest habitats. Fire is used
for equally diverse objectives and on a range of spatial scales
in different types of vegetation. Off-site burning occurs for a
very wide range of purposes, including simply enjoying fire.
Similarly, Mills (1986) found no significant climate associa-
tion for most objectives of burning; in addition, our study
shows that fire drives are used by nonequatorial groups and
that use of fire to remove primary biomass occurs at roughly
the same frequency at higher and lower latitudes. The stated
intentions for one and the same fire can vary from individual
to individual, even between members of the same hunter-
gatherer group.
The lack of evidence for burning from tundra contrasts
with the ubiquity of burning in other types of vegetation and
does not seem to be due to a lack of data. Studies in Alaska
show that fire in tundra vegetation consumes lichens that are
an important source of forage for caribou (North American
reindeer), that the lichen takes several decades to recover,
and that caribou avoid areas that have been burned fewer
than 35 years ago (Jandt et al. 2008; Joly et al. 2009). Many of
the foraging or pastoral populations occupying tundra were
strongly dependent for their subsistence on hunting or herd-
ing reindeer and would have had a strong incentive to avoid
driving them away (others focused on fishing and hunting
sea mammals, for which fire is less useful). The potentially
problematic effect of fire was recognized by indigenous pop-
ulations. In a ruling from a Swedish district court, Saami
herders complained that “the settlers were not careful with
the forests, and were the cause of many forest fires, which
burns away the reindeer moss [i.e., lichens] . . . the heaths
which have been burnt do not re-grow for 50 or 60 years”
(ruling from Lycksele District Court [northern Sweden] from
January 16, 1755, cited in Granström and Niklasson 2008).
Our review highlights a range of short and long-term ben-
efits for burning. The distinction between short- and long-
term benefits is important because activities involving long-
term benefits involve a risk that other people will reap the
benefits without putting in the work, as well as a greater risk
that returns will not be forthcoming (Smith and Wishnie
2000). These disadvantages may be relevant to understand-
ing anthropogenic off-site burning (Bliege Bird et al. 2008).
According to the latter authors, where short-term benefits
can be obtained from this activity, long-term benefits are
likely to emerge. In addition, burning may be a relatively low-
cost activity in some contexts. In other cases, there may be
systems of ownership or access that allow the person who
set the fire to obtain more of the future benefits. Unfortu-
nately, it is difficult to tease apart the role of short- and long-
term returns in the ethnographic literature with confidence,
and information about ownership agreements with regard
to burned areas is scarce. However, our database hints that
several of these factors play a role in different contexts, in-
cluding cases where both short- and long-term benefits are
identified, cases where the landscape is burned for fun (sug-
gesting low costs), and a few cases in which the people who set
the fires established rights to burned areas.
Burning for short- or long-term benefits by hunter-
gatherers—carried out on a smaller scale yet more often than
natural fires—can create mosaic vegetation that provides di-
verse resources at a useful scale for human foragers (Jones
1969; Laris 2002; Mills 1986; Stewart 2002). Niche construc-
tion consists of activities through which organisms define,
choose, or modify their own niches in ways that alter sources
of natural selection in a population’s environment (La-
land, Odling-Smee, and Feldman 2000). According to Smith
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 311
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(2011:836), “one of the primary goals of ecosystem engi-
neering by human societies has been to increase their share
of the annual productivity of ecosystems they occupy by in-
creasing both the abundance and reliability of the plant and
animal resources they rely on for food and raw materials.”
As this author emphasizes, burning the landscape forms one
of the key means of achieving this form of niche construc-
tion. Even in the absence of such anthropogenic mosaics, off-
site burning offered a range of benefits for subsistence and
social life.
Off-site burning is an important tool in the niche con-
struction activities of extant hunter-gatherers and is so com-
mon and widespread that we assume that this may have a
considerable antiquity. But how long? The debate about
the antiquity of on-site fire use is seriously frustrated by the
near invisibility of fire use and production. Hence, we can
expect that the origin of off-site fireuseisevenmoredifficult
to trace. What data do we have on the antiquity of this form
of niche construction?
Off-Site Fire Use in the Past: Spatiotemporal
Scales of Visibility
The question is whether off-site fire use and its effects can be
detected in the records from the past, that is, in the soot,
charcoal, or remnants of former vegetation embedded in
deposits reflecting this past. More specifically, can these ef-
fects be traced in regions and time periods in which hunting
and gathering formed the primary mode of subsistence?
Fletcher and Thomas (2010) review charcoal from the
west coast of Tasmania and find an increase in burning over
the past 6,000 years, which decreased during the coloniza-
tion period. Studies of organic soils in Tasmania refine this
picture, showing a difference between the history of the coast
and the interior after the arrival of Europeans. The colonists
burned the interior for agricultural purposes, while in the
coastal areas, vegetation returned to forest because of the
cessation of burning by the indigenous population (di Folco
and Kirkpatrick 2013). This example confirms historical and
ethnographic accounts of the impact of European coloniza-
tion on vegetation in Tasmania.
However, the signal left by hunter-gatherers is not always
visible and, if not drowned in the signal left by contempo-
raneous agriculturalists, may be masked by the traces of
natural fire. The fact that this natural signal is not a given
constant does not make things easier. A study of the western
United States found no correlation between the arrival of
European colonists and a decline in biomass burning (Mar-
lon et al. 2012). In fact, a decline in biomass burning began
before European contact at about 1500 AD and is largely
explained by climate, that is, the Little Ice Age (Marlon et al.
2012). The incidence of natural fire is dependent on climate
and the specific vegetation associated with climate. The less a
vegetation type is prone to burning, the lower its generation
of charcoal due to natural fire and the easier to detect human
burning activities. A clear example of differences in the oc-
currence of natural fire is provided by the work of Sannikov
and Goldammer (1996:153): “In the meridional geographical
profile across the distribution range of pine in the Trans-
Urals and Northern Kazakhstan, as aridity and lightning in-
tensity of the climate increases, the density of lightning fires
increases rapidly along a gradient from forest tundra to mid-
dle taiga; then a certain stabilization is observed, and the
density increases sharply in the steppe zone.”It is therefore
easier to detect human influences in the forest tundra than in
the steppe zone.
Of course, the spatial scale and frequency of off-site fire
use is a factor as well. Presumably, very small fires and spa-
tially restricted activities (such as constructed signal fires
or individual burned trees) have small or no visibility. Ac-
tivities on a larger scale, especially if they are repeated again
and again, are expected to leave more detectable traces in
the record of the past. In addition, a dense population of
hunter-gatherers is expected to leave a heavier footprint than
a sparse population. Further, if the population is unevenly
distributed over the landscape—for instance, when hunter-
gatherers tend to remain for a prolonged period at a par-
ticular location—their presence will have an impact that
exceeds the impact of natural fires, while the remainder of
the landscape will not yet show any deviation from the nat-
ural situation. The assessment of the interval between burns
is an important tool to detect human interference. Hassell
and Dodson’s (2003) charcoal-based study of the fire history
of southwest Western Australia provides an example. They
measured charcoal deposition over time during the Pleisto-
cene and Holocene and found a decrease in the length of
the fire intervals during the Holocene that cannot be as-
cribed to natural changes in fire-prone vegetation linked
with climatic change. Their explanation is that the increase
in the frequency of fires is due to an increasing population
density of Aboriginal Australians. During the Pleistocene
and early Holocene the charcoal signal did not exceed the
signal as expected if left by natural fire. A possible impact by
anthropogenic fires remained undetected. Later on, an in-
crease in the number of people using off-site fire raised the
frequency of fire above the natural level.
In view of the problems outlined above it is not entirely
surprising that Daniau et al.’s (2010) analysis of charcoal
concentration in deep sea cores did not detect any sign that
the first arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe
made any difference in this fire proxy compared to earlier
periods. In this study all changes in charcoal load, both be-
fore and after modern humans arrived, are explained by
changes in climate, and this trend was not affected by burn-
ing by hunter-gatherers. If these hunter-gatherers used off-
site fire, the traces left by their burning are obviously too
weak to be detected in such off-shore cores, presumably
because the source area for this study is too large.
If we want to find traces of human influence on the fire
regime we have to focus on terrestrial settings and to scale
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down. A good example is the study by Kaal et al. (2013) re-
garding colluvial deposits in a very restricted area in north-
western Spain. By focusing on colluvial deposits and char-
coal particles larger than 2 mm, these authors were able to
study the fire history of this relatively small area. These well-
dated deposits show low but constant concentrations of char-
coal during the first part of the Holocene Thermal Maximum
with its corresponding deciduous forest. During this period
the area was occupied by Early and Middle Mesolithic hunter-
gatherers. In the Late Mesolithic, however, charcoal concen-
trations rose above the former level. Moreover, the pollen
records from the same colluvia now show clearings with
pasture-like vegetation. Putting the observations together,
the best explanation to be offered here is that Late Meso-
lithic hunter-gatherers manipulated their environment with
fire. The difference between the signal left by these hunter-
gatherers and their Early/Middle Mesolithic predecessors is
explained by the authors as a difference in population density,
not as demonstrating that the earlier population did not use
fire off-site. This Spanish case study bears a strong resem-
blance to the one from south-west Western Australia men-
tioned above, especially in the inferred role of population
density in the changes in the visibility of anthropogenic fires.
A relatively low population density may also explain, for
instance, why Rick et al. (2012) were unable to find clear
evidence for increased fire frequency coincident with the
Paleo-Indian settlement on Santa Rosa Island, California,
and why Salzmann et al. (2000) could not find any effect of
hunter-gatherers on the vegetation of the West-African sa-
vannah. While their possible impact did not rise above the
impact of natural fire, this changed with the arrival of the
first agriculturalists, whose impact is clearly detectable (in-
dicating that the natural fire signal does not inevitably ob-
scure human impact, even in this fire-prone habitat).
If we scale down and indeed manage to find evidence of
human-lit off-site fire, one key question still remains: does it
represent a few cases of hearth fires getting out of control or
more frequent burning for short- or long-term benefits? The
burning of reed beds around former Lake Flixton, England,
during the Mesolithic (including the Star Carr site) provides
a relevant example (Innes, Blackford, and Simmons 2011).
Reed beds are not readily ignited by lightning, by far the
most important source of natural fire. Therefore, and in view
of the abundant presence of traces of human activity, the
burning was most likely caused by humans, but it is known
that one single spark sets reed aflame with fires that travel
with speeds of 20 km/h (Wang et al. 2006). The question is
whether sparks of Mesolithic campfires along the lake ig-
nited the reeds by accident or whether the reeds at Star Carr
were burned to improve access to the lake.
The problem of identifying anthropogenic burning and
possible benefits also turns up in the discussion of what is,
ironically, one of the best cases for possible off-site fire use:
the near surroundings of the Neumark-Nord 2 pool, Ger-
many, connected with Neandertal activities (referred to in
the introduction; Sier et al. 2011). The pollen record shows
an opening up of the local deciduous forest, and the charcoal
record suggests that fire played a major role in this. The
vegetational change, the appearance of charcoal, and the
arrival of Neandertals at the location—as reflected by abun-
dant archaeological remains—occur simultaneously. Like-
wise, higher up in the Neumark-Nord 2 sedimentary se-
quence, Neandertal artifacts disappear at the same time as
the charcoal signal does, and a closed canopy forest develops.
Interpreting this pattern presents a problem of equifinality:
the same pattern could have been produced whether Nean-
dertals or natural processes were responsible for the initial
opening up of the vegetation, and in either case this would
have created an area that was attractive for continued exploi-
tation by Neandertals. We do not see these co-occurrences
as unambiguous evidence that Neandertals were intention-
ally opening the landscape and kept on firing it in order to
keep it open (see Roebroeks and Bakels 2015), but the case
shows the difficulties in explaining such past traces of fire in
terms of prehistoric landscape management in this and later
periods.
General Conclusions
At present, our conclusion is that the off-site fire use in the
deep past is nearly invisible. Seemingly, there was little or no
off-site fire use by hunter-gatherers before the Holocene, but
given the problems with visibility of historically documented
and present off-site fire use, this impression may be false.
Demographic changes during the Holocene may have in-
creased the strength of the off-site fire use signal, making it
stronger than the background of natural fire. We clearly
need more information combining various proxies, such as
charcoal records and molecular markers (especially levogluco-
san; see Elias et al. 2001), from well-sampled and well-dated
sequences with archaeological records from the same area.
In particular, charcoal counting should be a standard pro-
cedure in paleoenvironmental studies. The study of local-
scale events will detect human interference more readily than
other approaches, and a range of such studies spread over
a larger area will establish the history of the anthropogenic
landscape.
Given the ephemeral character of traces of fire, which
creates a biased and incomplete record that is strongly
steered by taphonomy, studies of early fire use entail a degree
of speculation both from those who base their hypotheses
on what is observable in the archaeological record (Roe-
broeks and Villa 2011a) and from those who focus on what
might have been probable (Gowlett and Wrangham 2013).
Taking the low visibility of fire use into account, both long
and shorter chronologies for fire use have thus far mainly
(and implicitly) focused on on-site types of fire use, since
visibility is a (somewhat) smaller issue here; it is here that the
obvious benefits are thought to have been, as stated in simple
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 313
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terms, “Early humans would have used fire for cooking,
warmth, and light”(Twomey 2013:122).
Studies of both historic and prehistoric hunter-gatherers
have tended to neglect the importance of off-site fire usage in
the development of the human niche. The data presented in
this paper demonstrate that fire use is an integral part of the
hunter-gatherer niche, off-site as well as on-site. In historical
times, off-site fire was used for a wide range of purposes, with
significant advantages for its producers and with considerable
but varying local and regional impact in all types of environ-
ment, except the northern tundras. This exception is the re-
sult of the conjunction of specific subsistence specializations
and the effect of fire on a specific element of vegetation.
The substantial amount of ethnographic data assembled in
this study shows that it is problematic to assess the primary
short- and long-term benefits of the firing practices of hunter-
gatherers, with the given reasons for burning varying from
individual to individual, even within one and the same
hunter-gatherer group. Regardless of the expressed goals,
however, it is clear that burning is carried out for a wide range
of short- and long-term objectives, and in the longer term,
many hunter-gatherer firing practices created more mosaic
types of environments than would have occurred without an
anthropogenic fire regime. The distinct advantages for a range
of subsistence practices is undoubtedly one of the factors
behind the fact that all ethnographically known hunter-
gatherer societies used fire in the landscape, outside their
campsites, thus changing the structure of their habitats in
often considerable ways. This in itself supports a very long
association with fire, one that probably extends back to the
global range expansion of Homo sapiens and possibly earlier.
Such a deep association with fire is also supported by sug-
gestions that some nonhuman primates can conceptualize
and predict the behavior of fire (Pruetz and LaDuke 2010),
with a recent study of vervet monkeys demonstrating that
these animals take advantage of newly burned landscapes,
thus substantially increasing their home ranges (Herzog et al.
2014).
A clear and important discrepancy exists between the
historical visibility of hunter-gatherer burning practices as
reconstructed through ethnohistorical accounts and the rel-
ative invisibility of such firing practices in nearly contem-
poraneous proxies, such as charcoal and pollen records. This
is the case both on a smaller, local scale and on larger scales,
where anthropogenic fire may have become overshadowed
by natural fire or, later, by the (highly visible) burning activ-
ities of agriculturalists. This discrepancy in visibility shows
the difficulty in detecting and analyzing the past use of fire.
The ubiquitous usage of fire off-site suggests the antiquity
of this prominent and global activity, an issue that formed
the remit of this study in the first place. Answering questions
regarding the evolutionary history of our fire-constructed
niche requires the systematic retrieval and detailed study of a
wide range of possibly fire-related proxies from the archaeo-
logical record, more than thus far available or commonly re-
trieved during archaeological fieldwork and laboratory work.
Given the high benefits and low-tech requirements of off-
site fire usage, we suggest that all fire-producing hominins
would have been characterized by a range of off-site fire usage
comparable to the general pattern described in this paper.
Testing this hypothesis calls for new data, given the prob-
lems of identifying fire in the archaeological and geological
record and identifying the anthropogenic usage in the nat-
ural fire signal. Fire use, both on- and off-site, played an
important role in the development of the human niche, the
prehistorical development of which we archaeologists have
failed to identify thus far.
Acknowledgments
This research benefited from an Akademie Assistant grant
from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
(KNAW) and from a SPINOZA-grant (28-548 to W. Roe-
broeks) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific
Research (NWO). We thank the reviewers for their valuable
comments.
Comments
Rebecca Bliege Bird and Douglas W. Bird
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford,
California 94305, U.S.A. (rbird@stanford.edu). 18 XI 14
Asking the Right Questions
As this paper points out, it is important to realize that
hunter-gatherers use(d) fire in many different ways, most of
which are off-site and only indirectly related to activities that
occur in camp (i.e., cooking). These practices have deep his-
tories: human fire likely shaped the ecology of many of the
world’s ecosystems and may be critical for understanding
the economic and ecological conditions that led to the ag-
ricultural revolution. Until recently, Omer Stewart’s(2002,
1963), Rys Jones’(1969), Richard Gould’s (1971), and Henry
Lewis’s (1972, 1973) call to play close attention to foragers
and fire has gone unheeded by most of the social and natural
sciences (Anderson 2014). Scherjon and colleagues now add
an important note to a chorus of new voices critiquing the
portrayal of hunter-gatherers simply as resource extractors
from a static environment. Ethnographers and archaeolo-
gists are now picking up the gauntlet in a significant way,
showing how foragers construct their environments and
providing exciting new insights into human-environmental
relationships, especially in fire-prone environments with long
and significant human occupations. California is a prime ex-
ample (e.g., Anderson 2005; Anderson and Lake 2013; Han-
kins 2013; Lightfoot et al. 2013a,2013b). Now what needs
to be done is the hard work of going out and measuring—
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through ethnographic and ecological work—the role of fire
in social and ecological systems.
It cannot be done by asking a question such as why people
use fire. Scherjon and colleagues treat all fires the same, re-
gardless of their adaptive value, their social value, their ap-
plication, or ecological consequences; yes, signal fires are im-
portant, but are they ecologically and socially as significant
as fires that cover many hectares of space and provide ac-
cess to food on a daily basis? Asking what use is fire broadly
construed is a bit like asking what use are rocks. The answers
are very difficult to understand in a comparative sense be-
cause the usefulness of a rock depends on the contexts that
situate the challenge at hand: in the desert, we use rocks as
tent weights; on a volcanic island in the Pacific, we would use
rocks for cooking; and anywhere lacking a knife, we would
use rocks to make a tool and, lacking a rifle, to bring down a
small animal. Asking why people use fire recalls the exercise
in Tinbergian levels of explanation that I teach to all my in-
troductory classes: we can provide a multitude of noncom-
peting proximate, ontogenetic, functional, and evolutionary
explanations with a question as broad as this, and if we can,
so can the people we work with. Ask a Martu hunter why she
has just lit a fire, and you might get the proximate reason
why that fire was lit (the grass was thick there), the func-
tional (I can’t hunt well if I don’t burn), the ontogenetic (I
burn because it is in the Dreaming), the evolutionary (I burn
because there are many environmental benefits of doing so),
or all four if she is feeling particularly philosophical that day.
It also cannot be done without a more careful reading of
the literature, especially in attention to the more recent work
on hunter-gatherer fire use. Case in point: the authors mis-
represent the nature of our hypotheses about how fire mo-
saics might change with changes to subsistence and mobility
patterns in the Western Desert, suggesting that we dismiss
anthropogenic fire mosaics that differ from lightning-driven
fire as a product of contemporary use of vehicles and cen-
tralized settlement. What we actually did was to suggest that
these mosaics are a product of the restricted mobility of mid-
Holocene broad-spectrum economies, implying that at the
colonization of Australia, the extensive arid zone mobility
implied by the archaeological record may have produced
such a weak anthropogenic signal that might be difficult
to distinguish from lighting fire regime. We do not suggest
that it is merely a product of contemporary settlement pat-
terns, which actually exhibit greater mobility than the mid-
Holocene in many respects.
Omer Stewart and Henry Lewis drew our attention to the
significance and ubiquity of the use of off-site fire by hunter-
gatherers more than 40 years ago. Better questions to ask
about fire take us beyond this to illuminate the variability in
the processes that lead to its application in ways that have
significant social and environmental impacts. Better ques-
tions would be about the variability in the extent to which
hunter-gatherers use broadcast fire (fire that covers sub-
stantial areas of the landscape), what immediate gains sus-
tain different uses of fire, how long-term benefits are realized
(i.e., is there ownership over burnt areas or priority of access
to managed regions?), and what ecological consequences
stem from these practices in different environments to affect
hunter-gatherer foraging and social arrangements on these
changed landscapes?
David M. J. S. Bowman
School of Biological Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart,
Tasmania, Australia 7000 (david.bowman@utas.edu.au). 16 X 14
Archaeology, Hominin Fire Use,
and the Role of Pyrogeography
The use of fire for cooking, illumination, heating, and man-
ufacture is and has been integral to all human cultures. Such
domestic—or on-site, to use the terminology of Scherjon
et al.—is not controversial. Yet the idea that landscape fires
set by humans, so-called off-site fire, has had a transforma-
tive effect on the natural environment is a deeply contro-
versial topic. Indeed, incorporating anthropogenic landscape
fire in any academic discipline dealing with human ecologies,
evolution, and the past and present dynamics of the Earth
system is fraught with difficulties (Roos et al. 2014). Why?
The explanation lies in the very integrative nature of land-
scape fire.
Landscape fires instantaneously link the atmosphere, hy-
drosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. For example, fire pro-
duces seedbeds for plants by creating nutrient-rich ash and
killing soil pathogens with a heat pulse (biosphere-geosphere
coupling). Fires can make soils vulnerable to erosion after
heavy rain, resulting in fouling water bodies or temporally
enriching rivers with nutrients (geosphere-hydrosphere cou-
pling). Fires produce smoke that contains gasses and par-
ticulates that can asphyxiate animals, reduce visibility, and
affect weather and regional climates (biosphere-atmosphere
coupling). Fires are a powerful natural selective force that
has driven the evolution of fire-tolerating morphologies and
regeneration strategies and has shaped plant and animal
communities. For instance, savannas support large herds of
animals that graze on grass maintained by frequent burning.
Humans have an imperfect relationship with landscape fire;
although we can set landscape ablaze and suppress natural
wildfires, some fires are beyond our control.
The reason why there are debates as to whether humans
and our ancestors used fire to transform landscapes stems
from three key factors (Scott et al. 2014). First, a holistic
understanding of landscape fire demands a grasp of knowl-
edge from numerous disciplines and specialities within them.
Because of the fragmentation of fire research effort, scholars
with an interest in landscape fire are often working in par-
allel, unaware of equivalent research or new ideas being de-
veloped in other fields. Second, most educated people have
little first-hand experience of landscape fire because they in-
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 315
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habit urbanized settings in cultures that have deeply held
cultural prejudices against any beneficial effects of burning.
Wildfire, for instance, is typically portrayed in the media as
a disaster. Third, the unambiguous demonstration of past
anthropogenic effects on fire activity is enormously difficult,
given available historical proxies, such as sedimentary char-
coal, fire scars on tree rings, stable isotopes in fossils, and
changes in pollen spectra. The paper by Scherjon et al. ex-
emplifies many of these issues.
Scherjon et al. report a controversial interpretation of ar-
chaeological and paleoecological evidence (charcoal and pol-
len in sediments) from around a small lake at Neumark-
Nord 2, near Halle, Germany: at the beginning of the Last
Interglacial (about 125,000 years ago), Neandertals used fire
to manipulate landscapes in the current European temperate
forest biome. Clearly, proving this hypothesis demands dis-
criminating natural from anthropogenic causation of the fire
signal in paleoecological proxies, yet they acknowledge that
that is not possible because of the problem of equifinality.
They write, “The same pattern could have been produced
whether Neandertals or natural processes were responsible
for the initial opening up of the vegetation, and in either case
this would have created an area that was attractive for con-
tinued exploitation by Neandertals.”In an attempt to break
this impasse, the authors compiled a searchable global eth-
nographic database of human landscape burning practices.
This is a very useful resource that has captured some cita-
tions not widely known in the human ecology and broader
physical science communities (e.g., Mills 1986). Their anal-
ysis of the database shows that from nearly all environments
on Earth, with the exception of the tundra, anthropogenic
landscape fires are known to achieve a spectrum of short-
term and longer-range economic outcomes. Such economic
benefits imply a cultural awareness of the manifold ways
landscapes fire impacts the total environment outlined above.
Scherjon et al.’s analysis therefore invites serious consid-
eration of the diversification and antiquity of pyrotechnology
among hominins. Archaeological research is obviously piv-
otal to advancing this project, and Scherjon et al. assert that
archaeologists need to collect more data to test the hypoth-
esis that “all fire-producing hominins”used fire “in the de-
velopment of the human niche,”influencing their “prehis-
torical development”in ways that “archaeologists have failed
to identify thus far.”Yet for this project to succeed, there
must be much closer engagement among scholars studying
the human-landscape fire nexus. The current fragmentation
of research effort is highlighted by the very similar global
database of traditional ecological knowledge of fire compiled
by Huffman (2013) published in the natural resource man-
agement literature. The emerging field of pyrogeography
may facilitate more effective transdisciplinary collaboration
among fire scholars. Pyrogeography provides a holistic way
of understanding variation of landscape fire activity in space
and time and provides a framework to partitioning homi-
nin burning from background climate driven fire activity.
Such knowledge is critical to evaluate the concept that hu-
mans are—or already have—impacted the entire earth sys-
tem through our profligate combustion of living and fossil
biomass, increasingly known as the Anthropocene (Bowman
2014).
Richard Cosgrove
Department of Archaeology, Environment, and Community Plan-
ning, La Trobe University, Melbourne 3086, Victoria, Australia
(r.cosgrove@latrobe.edu.au). 26 XI 14
Fire has been part of the global ecosystems for the past
420 million years (Bowman et al. 2009), although controlled
human use seems to have occurred only in the past 400,000
years ago. Discriminating between natural and anthropogenic
fires in the archaeological and paleoecological records has been
a hot topic, particularly in Australian fire studies over the past
20 years (Hallam 1975, 2014; Black and Scott 2007; Black et al.
2007; Enright and Thomas 2008; Haberle et al. 2010; Mooney
et al. 2012; Rose 1995; Steinberger 2014). Scherjon et al. show
that the problem is not confined to Australia and have use-
fully provided a number of ethnographic studies on the func-
tion of fire from the Northern and Southern Hemisphere to
widen the debate. Linking it with the archaeology has been
more problematic, however.
The quest to find a solution is important since it would
enable the origin of ancient ignition sources to be identified
when the presence of soil charcoal is common across land-
scapes. If this can be achieved, it will significantly inform on
the question of past environment-human interaction. The
identification of the earliest systematic use of fire that altered
the vegetation pattern worldwide is of crucial importance,
recording the first attempts at landscape management and
the later development of social and agricultural landscapes.
Scherjon et al. attempt to characterize the possible archae-
ological attributes by reference to the ethnographic record,
and their goals are admirable.
However, it is a complex and multifaceted problem, one
that requires the links between paleoenvironmental change,
ethnographic patterns, and the attributes of past human fire
use to be explicitly stated. Although the authors have gone
some way in achieving this through listing the numerous
uses and effects of fire in ethnographic settings globally, they
also recognize that identifying the source of the charcoal as
either anthropogenic or natural is a scalar problem (Stein-
berger 2014). The larger-scale paleoecological charcoal data
often compromises an understanding of the origin of off-site
ignition sources.
Gammage (2011), for example, strongly suggests that at
smaller temporal scales, anthropogenic fires are significant
drivers of landscape modification. Another view is that the
influence of Aboriginal people on Australia’s vegetation was
minimal, while climate change was dominant (Mooney et al.
2012). However, at a continental or global scale, it may be
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difficult to detect relationships between burning and hunter-
gatherer populations because as Haberle (2005) suggests,
there is interdependence between climate change and human
activity in producing charcoal. It is possible that the two
scales have been conflated, where continental models based
on charcoal in pollen cores or soils overwhelm other smaller,
regional patterns (Murphy and Bowman 2012), a point the
authors of the paper recognize.
However, the relationships between climate, fire, and peo-
ple needed to be developed further by Scherjon et al., since
the influence of past climatic changes, consequent effects
on vegetation structure, the creation of fire-prone environ-
ments, and various fire regimes are instrumental in setting
the conditions for fire ignition (Lynch et al. 2007; Whitlock
et al. 2010a,2010b). Understanding the impact of millennial-
or decadal-scale climate variability on the magnitude, fre-
quency, and spatial scale of landscape fire is important be-
cause it has confounded the arguments of whether fires
originated from natural or cultural ignition sources.
Given that climatic conditions set the ecological param-
eters within which anthropogenic and natural fires ignite, the
production and survival of soil charcoal will be determined
by vegetation structure and fire intensity in the short term
and various long-term processes, such as burial context. Here,
the taphonomy of charcoal needs to be understood when
assessing its off-site patterns (Ascough et al. 2010; Scott
2010). For example, grasslands that were frequently fired in
the past generate less macro charcoal than infrequently fired
forest. Thus, fire frequency and its detection in these cases
by palynological studies also need to consider accompany-
ing anthracological or phytolith data across a locality. It chal-
lenges assertions that repeated burning in unspecified vege-
tation would leave “more detectable traces”of fires, since
flammability is dependent on the historical contingency of
prior burning patterns.
Detailed studies of relationships between paleoenviro-
mental charcoal records and the archaeological evidence in
specific regional environmental contexts are assisting in this
(Cosgrove 2005; Haberle and David 2004; Steinberger 2014),
but overall identification of the ignition sources of fire is
never straightforward. Not only do we need to recognize dif-
ferences between natural and anthropogenic fire signals
through charcoal studies, but also an understanding of fire
ecology is crucial, one that takes into account the various
drivers of fire and charcoal production in off-site situations.
Simon Holdaway and Harry Allen
Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland,
Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142, New Zealand (sj.holdaway
@auckland.ac.nz). 3 XI 14
Scherjon and colleagues are to be congratulated in drawing
together information on the use of fire from four continents
and across a number of time periods. Their comparisons
work best as a review of the current understanding of these
questions. However, they wish to take this information fur-
ther, concluding that all fire-producing hominins used a
range of off-site fire comparable to the general patterns they
describe. It is at this point that the comparative categories
and the dichotomies they distinguish—on-site and off-site
firing, intentional and accidental burning, short-term and
long-term effects, natural and anthropomorphic burning, and
insider and outsider understandings—hinder rather than en-
courage further advances.
The authors make a number of observations concerning
the archaeological record of firing, which, given the ephem-
eral character of the evidence, will be well-nigh invisible
within pollen and charcoal records. They raise the issue of
equifinality. This, however, is a problem only if we wish to
determine the causes for which fires were lit—whether peo-
ple fully understood their impacts—to differentiate between
fires that were lit on-site or off-site, to distinguish between
natural and human-induced firing, or to counter arguments
that firing correlates strongly with climatic controls.
In Australia and elsewhere, the contribution of humans
and natural processes to the origins of fires occurs in inter-
related ways. An analysis of fire regimes across Australasia
and parts of the Pacificfinds that the relationship between
biomass burning and the number of radiocarbon dates from
archaeological contexts is complex. However, there is no un-
equivocal relationship between the intensity of Aboriginal
occupation and fire regimes over the past 21 Ka or with
population increase during the late Holocene (Mooney et al.
2011). While climate-modulated changes in vegetation might
be the dominant control of fire, we should expect that hu-
mans also responded to these changes, such that human and
natural burning is inextricably intertwined.
If fire use was ubiquitous across the landscape in the sense
that hunter-gatherer people might make a fire for many dif-
ferent reasons, then is there much to be gained from dif-
ferentiating between on-site and off-site fire use in the first
place? In places where the archaeological record is highly
visible on the surface, we find fire features distributed across
whole drainage systems rather than concentrated in areas
that might be conventionally identified as sites, even though
the population density was likely to be low (e.g., Holdaway
et al. 2012). These records reflect the extent of fire presence
in the landscape. If fire escaped from the fire features, then
this presence might leave a record not so different to people
who wished to fire the landscape for management purposes.
The scale at which fire was introduced into the landscape
therefore needs to be considered carefully. A small-scale fire
might have large-scale consequences irrespective of popula-
tion density, as the Star Carr reed example shows.
The problem with a site/nonsite dichotomy is that the
places where ancient records are found—that is, the sites—
are in effect taphonomic irregularities: they are places in the
landscape that retain ancient sediments. These places may
indeed retain records of fire use, but they were almost cer-
tainly not the only places where fire was used. Rather than
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finding fault with the record or with our current inability to
use the available measures (charcoal and pollen) to decide
thesis issues, questions should be redirected toward under-
standing the archaeological record within the context of the
dynamics of climate, landscape evolution, human popula-
tions, and the opportunities and limitations posed by human
technologies, including fire, and the human understanding
of their use.
In areas outside archaeological sites, fire was likely used in
a variety of ways. Some of these might have included using
fire as a tool with which to manage the landscape, but other
uses might involve what might loosely be described as do-
mestic uses of fire. Gould (1971), for instance, describes a va-
riety of ways in which Aboriginal people used fire, including
fires for warmth at night as well as for cooking and, at other
times, fire as a tool for modification of the environment.
These uses can be distinguished by asking people why they
used fire in particular situations, but if it is the outcome of
fire use that is of interest, then the reasons that people used
fire may be of less concern than the effect of the presence of
fire within the landscape. As Gould comments, Aboriginal
people who lit fires often showed little concern with extin-
guishing them. In areas with sufficient fuel, fire might con-
tinue to burn, and the record of such burning might be
difficult to distinguish from the record of fires that were lit
with the intention of environmental modification.
Robert L. Kelly
Department of Anthropology, University of Wyoming, 1000 East
University Avenue, Department 3431, Laramie, Wyoming 82071,
U.S.A. (rlkelly@uwyo.edu). 19 X 14
I appreciate the effort that Scherjon, Bakels, MacDonald, and
Roebroeks have committed to gathering cross-cultural data
on hunter-gatherer burning. I can foresee a new table in the
third edition of The Foraging Spectrum—and will add “burn-
ing”to the index! The paper reminded me of one of the few
times I saw Mikea in Madagascar set fire to their savanna: it
will be easier to walk back through here, they explained to
me (in another case, it was to search for animal tracks lead-
ingtohedgehogburrows).
The remit of this study is an effort to determine when and
in what way Paleolithic hunter-gatherers began to use off-
site fire. The authors begin with the assumption that know-
ing something about how ethnographically known hunter-
gatherers use fire would be useful, and I whole-heartedly
agree. However, I disagree with the statement that “the ubiq-
uitous usage of fire off-site suggests the antiquity of this
prominent and global activity.”Does the ubiquity of cell
phones suggests their antiquity? Of course not. If fire in-
creases an environment’s productivity, then it is possible that
this action became more prominent as colonial powers cir-
cumscribed foragers and led them to intensify use of their
environment. Or perhaps it arose much later in time as a
response to internal population growth and a need to in-
crease return rates or productivity. In any case, it is not safe
to assume the antiquity of a behavior only because of its
ubiquity. The antiquity must be established through the em-
pirical data of archaeology.
So, how would we know when hunter-gatherers began
using off-site fire? The difficulty of course is sorting out
evidence produced by natural fire from that produced by
human-caused fire. They both produce the same evidence:
charcoal. However, figure 1 provides a model of how com-
mon that evidence should be across different latitudinal sam-
ples if all that charcoal were the result of human activity.
Likewise, climate data modeling lightning (since lightning
is the major source of natural fire) can model expectations
for the abundance of charcoal across latitudinal zones if all
evidence were the result of natural fire. With appropriate
deep sea or delta samples, we could then determine whether
one model or a combination of them best accounts for lat-
itudinal variation in evidence of burning.
Another approach that would provide a maximal date for
off-site fire use is to search for the earliest evidence of on-site
fire, hearths; because if foragers are burning their environ-
ments, then they have control of fire for cooking, light, pro-
tection, and warmth. Of course, finding evidence of early
hearths is difficult and controversial; through time, the or-
ganic and sediment record of hearths simply disappears. Re-
searchers look for early hearths, but an element of this search
is ignored: a model of taphonomic loss (as some analysts have
used to examine
14
C date frequencies) should allow us to
predict from the later, known record of hearths when the
absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Finally, the data point to two other predictions that could
be tested. If burning increased the availability of produc-
tion to human foragers (as the authors note correctly, in my
opinion), then burning should be associated with an increase
in human population size, as possibly evidenced through ra-
diocarbon date density; likewise, if burning is primarily used
in game drives, then evidence of burning might also be asso-
ciated with an increase in such behavior, as evidenced through
faunal assemblages.
In any case, this compilation of ethnographic data on off-
site fire use is a necessary and welcome step.
Barbara J. Mills
School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210030,
Tucson, Arizona 85721, U.S.A. (bmills@email.arizona.edu).
14 XII 14
I have divided my comments into two parts: the first relates
to the ethnographic data compilation of off-site burning,
while the second addresses the archaeological implications.
The ethnographic data compilation is useful because it looks
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at several variables that have not been systematically tabu-
lated in the past including the scale and social context of off-
site fires. The authors recognize several issues, such as the
presence of eyewitnesses and reliability of reporting. The
authors also recognize that there are many more references
in the literature than were included in their database.
Although beyond the scope of their analyses, it would
have been interesting to have included more agricultural so-
cieties in the database to assess how burning intersects with
the continuum of foragers to farmers rather than relying on
the discrete eHRAF categories of “hunter-gatherers,”“horti-
culturalists,”and “agriculturalists.”In addition, one agricul-
tural society that was included, Zuni, has more use of fire
than was recorded in the database; for example, there is a
religious personage called the Little Fire God or Shulawitsi,
who carries a burning stick and leads the Council of the
Gods during winter ceremonies. He uses this stick to light
fires along the pilgrimage route between east-central Ari-
zona and the Pueblo of Zuni in New Mexico (although ab-
original lands were in what is today Arizona, most of the
reservation is in New Mexico). Stevenson (1904:21) noted
that he “sets fire to everything in his way from Ko’thluwala’wa
to Zuni.”Such burning might have been an important way
that trails were maintained and perhaps also to increase
productivity of plants consumed by ungulates (especially an-
telope), which were also hunted in the area. In addition, be-
cause the authors did not include societies that practiced
slash-and-burn agriculture, they may have missed other im-
portant references to nonagricultural burning practices in
these groups. Rather than seeing swidden agriculture as re-
placing other landscape burning practices, it may have been
added to a repertoire of landscape burning.
One more problematic aspect of the analyses is that while
there are 231 mentions of burning of different kinds, some
of these are within the same group and even from the same
source. However, the data summarized in table 1 treats each
of these as independent cases, creating elevated counts for
environmental settings, uses, and so on for those groups that
had multiple uses of fire. A relational database would have
provided control over this or presentation in an alternative
format.
With respect to the archaeological implications, interpret-
ing when and where our early ancestors used fire has been
challenging for archaeologists both on-site as well as off-site.
As Scherjon and colleagues note, when addressing off-site
use of fire, it can be difficult to distinguish between anthro-
pogenic and nonanthropogenic causes. While they cite Mar-
lon et al. (2012) as attributing most fires documented in the
western United States to nonanthropogenic, climatic con-
ditions, other climate scientists have recognized the impor-
tance of anthropogenic fires. For example, Bowman et al.
(2011) explicitly discuss how intertwined are human uses of
fire, climate, and environmental regimes over different tem-
poral scales. Christopher Roos (2008; see also Roos et al. 2010)
presents one way to parse out the differential effects of nat-
ural and anthropogenic burning by combining paleoclimatic
data with multiproxy archaeological data, including pollen
and charcoal. Such a combined approach, when available, is
a highly effective research direction that could be applied in
multiple geographic areas. Scherjon et al. point out that the
demographic changes associated with the Holocene record
increase the strength of the off-site signal, making it more
difficult to detect the smaller-scale use of fire on ancient
landscapes. Nonetheless, they have underscored the neces-
sity for thinking about how to incorporate off-site burning
within a global perspective and over deep time.
Christopher H. Parker, Nicole M. Herzog, Earl R. Keefe,
James F. O’Connell, and Kristen Hawkes
Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, 270 South 1400
East, Room 102, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, U.S.A. (nicole.herzog
@anthro.utah.edu). 4 XI 14
We appreciate Scherjon et al.’sthoroughethnographicre-
view of off-site fire use and the opportunity it provides for
considering why pyrogenic behaviors are ubiquitous for
humans, regardless of the environmental setting.
If, as the authors conclude, fire “is used most frequently
for the direct procurement of food,”then much of the var-
iability observed in human burning might be explained using
the prey (or optimal diet) model (Emlen 1966; MacArthur
and Pianka 1966) from behavioral ecology (Stephens 2008;
Stephens and Krebs 1986). This model simplifies foraging ac-
tivities into either searching or handling. If foragers aim to
maximize their net rate of nutrient gain, behavioral (includ-
ing technological) innovations that improve search or han-
dling efficiency will be favored by foragers because they ei-
ther increase encounter rates with profitable prey types or
raise resource profitabilities (Hawkes and O’Connell 1992).
Controlled anthropogenic fire use is such a foraging in-
novation. It increases foraging efficiency by reducing the
time required to search for and handle food resources in any
ecological context. Examples of fire use improving search
efficiency noted by Scherjon et al. include driving game (e.g.,
DB 22, 120, 82, 106, 30, 112, 66, 85), torch fishing/hunting
(e.g., DB 126), locating burrows and tracks (e.g., DB 230),
gathering seeds (DB 5), luring animals with new growth (DB
96, 207), improving visibility (DB 96, 84), attracting prey
(DB 77, 126), and flushing/revealing game (DB 66, 85, 157).
Where resources have already been detected, lighting fires
to more efficiently collect and process them similarly im-
proves handling. Examples of pyrogenic handling improve-
ments include smoking game from their burrows or dens
(DB 31, 73, 74, 103), using fire to kill small game (DB 230),
seed processing (DB 5), and obtaining honey (DB 39, 53,
144). In all of these scenarios, fire improves handling, raising
resource profitabilities.
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 319
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Perhaps the most effective pyrogenic handling improve-
ment used by humans is cooking (Wrangham 2009, 2010),
which reduces chewing effort (Dominy et al. 2008) and im-
proves digestive efficiency (Carmody and Wrangham 2009;
Oka et al. 2003). These alterations lower handling costs by
making the nutrients in foods more readily accessible (rais-
ing their profitabilities) and resulting in higher return rates.
The foraging benefits produced by fire have important
implications for understanding why our genus evolved with
habitual, consistent fire use. Other researchers have noted
the exploitation of burned landscapes by nonhuman pri-
mates, such as chimpanzees (Pruetz and LaDuke 2010) and
vervets (Jaffe and Isbell 2009), and our own research shows
that South African vervets expand their territories to incor-
porate burned areas because of increased resource encoun-
ter rates (Herzog et al. 2014, forthcoming). Such behavior
among nonhuman primates can be considered passive pyro-
philia, and we contend that genus Homo evolved as an ac-
tively pyrophilic primate, adopting habitual, controlled fire
use to reap its foraging benefits. This changed the forag-
ing calculus for our genus by increasing the availability of
profitable prey types and allowed Homo to shape its envi-
ronment and expand out of Africa into Europe and Asia
(Parker et al., submitted). Accumulating and cooking food
(i.e., en masse processing) also made resources otherwise un-
obtainable by youngsters regular occasions for subsidizing
grandchildren (Hawkes and Coxworth 2013; Kim et al. 2012,
2014; O’Connell, Hawkes, and Blurton Jones 1999).
Given the apparent deep evolutionary history of fire ex-
ploitation in our order, detecting archaeological signatures of
this behavior is notably difficult (for review, see Gowlett and
Wrangham 2013; Wrangham 2007). Too often, the absence
of archaeological remnants of hominin fire use are assumed
to be indicators of the absence of fire-using behavior (e.g.,
Roebroeks and Villa 2011a, 2011b; Sandgathe et al. 2011a,
2011b). Scherjon et al. recognize this error with regard to off-
site fire use and suggest novel approaches to the problem.
Distinguishing between anthropogenic and natural burning
remains a confounding problem since sites ideally suited to
comparing pre- and post-Homo occupation are likely un-
common. We agree that the identification of archaeological
anthropogenic fire markers where possible is important, but
lack of such markers cannot be taken as evidence that fire
use was absent.
The broad exploitation of fire across taxa, the universal
use and creation of fire among humans, and the considerable
human physical adaptations to cooked foods all point to a
deep dependence on burning in our lineage. The surest ev-
idence of the early origin of active pyrophilia in Homo is
found in our physiology and foraging ecology. Recognizing
the benefits fire use provides and exploring lines of evidence
that can reveal their evolutionary consequences are crucial to
improving hypotheses about how our genus employed fire
in the past and interpreting the wide variation in archaeo-
logically visible consequences.
Dennis M. Sandgathe
Department of Archaeology and Human Evolutionary Studies
Program, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A
1S6, Canada (dms@sfu.ca). 7 XI 14
Considering that, as the authors point out, all historic hunter-
gatherer groups intentionally modified their environment to
improve foraging returns, we can expect that similar types of
niche construction behavior extend back in prehistory to
some extent. This seems very likely to be the case with the use
of burning to manage landscape productivity (e.g., Bird et al.
2005; Bliege Bird et al. 2008; Turner 1999). Getting access to
the nature of such behavior for any region and time period
would clearly improve our ability to understand the nature
and complexity of past adaptations and to better understand
how these changed over time.
As the authors point out, the major problem is success-
fully detecting any anthropogenic component in sedimen-
tological fire records. This is due to a number of different
factors, most of which the authors discuss in some detail.
First off, it can be expected that in most cases, the in-
congruence in scale between climate change, changes in nat-
ural fire frequencies, and human behavior will typically make
attempts to cite human use of fire as the cause very tenuous.
It can even be difficult reconciling different scales of data
when dealing with spatially discrete, on-site fire features that
are clearly of anthropogenic origin (e.g., Aldeias et al. 2012).
The incongruence of scales of data becomes particularly
problematic when human population densities are low. This
is seen to be a potential explanation for why there was no
apparent human influence on the fire record in some case
studies (e.g., Santa Rosa Island, California, as discussed in the
paper). Considering that population densities were very low
throughout the Paleolithic, the potential to detect (never
mind interpret) any evidence of human intentional off-site
burning would seem to very limited.
Second, if Lower and Middle Paleolithic hominins did
intentionally burn vegetation at the landscape scale, recog-
nizing this in the archaeological record is further compli-
cated by the general correspondence between climatic ame-
lioration, increased vegetational cover, and increased natural
fire frequencies. In the Pleistocene, during warm climatic
periods we can expect significant increases in lightning fre-
quency, which, along with increased vegetation, will result in
increased frequencies of natural fire. Since we can also expect
hominin behavior to change in response to such large-scale
climate change, it would not be surprising to see general
correlations between patterns in the variability in fire fre-
quency and patterns of hominin occupation. As pointed out
by the authors, this might well explain the apparent coin-
cidence between the duration of Neanderthal occupations
and increased fire frequencies at the site of Neumark-Nord 2,
Germany.
Perhaps some tentative interpretations can be developed
in some cases where the expected natural fire regime record
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(based on various approaches to paleoenvironmental re-
construction) does not well match the actual fire record from
sedimentological analysis but does seem to correlate with
patterns in hominin behavior, as evidenced by the archae-
ological record. If such data are available for Neumark-Nord,
then I would suggest that a stronger case might be made for
the argument that Neandertals were intentionally burning
off landscapes in the Middle Paleolithic.
Third, for Lower and Middle Paleolithic and Early and
Middle Stone Age contexts, the issue is further clouded by
the question of when people actually developed the technol-
ogy to create fire at will. This is still an open question (e.g.,
Goldberg et al. 2012; Roebroeks and Villa 2011a; Sandgathe
et al. 2011a,2011b). If earlier hominins relied entirely on
natural fire sources for all their fire use, then there will be an
even stronger correlation between the natural and anthro-
pogenic fire records; they may well be entirely inseparable.
It goes without saying that the issues in identifying an-
thropogenic off-site burning need to be dealt with before we
can get to the point where we begin asking why people were
practicing off-site burning prehistorically. However, reser-
vations aside, considering the importance of fire use (on-site
and off-site) among historic hunter-gatherers, this type of
research should be carried out, and this paper represents a
refreshingly honest and open approach to a difficult data
set. Clearly, there are major difficulties in both detecting fire
residues in very old contexts and then, even more so, dis-
tinguishing anthropogenic from natural fire sources, but the
authors freely acknowledge and discuss these issues.
I completely agree with the authors that data on fire fre-
quency in the past provide a point from which testable hy-
potheses can be developed about human use of off-site fire
extending back into Paleolithic contexts, but the fire records
themselves will be inherently difficult to interpret. That is to
say, the fire records themselves may not prove particularly
useful in directly interpreting past human behavior, but this
does not necessarily prevent the development of hypotheses
about the role of off-site burning in prehistoric contexts.
Testing these will require novel approaches to the analysis
of the fire record (e.g., regular and standardized recording of
charcoal frequencies; I again agree with the authors that this
should be standard practice in all Paleolithic excavations)
along with new types of analysis.
Reply
While writing this reply, enormous bushfires are raging
through the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, making head-
lines in newspapers around the world. They illustrate both
the capacity of fire to completely change the landscape and
also the limits to human control of the relationship between
fire, landscape, and human activity.
This research was inspired by an intriguing combination
of archaeological and environmental proxy data that could
suggest that fire was shaping the environment soon after the
arrival of Neandertals at a shallow lake basin location in
Germany, about 125,000 years ago (Bakels 2014; Gaudzinski-
Windheuser and Roebroeks 2014; Roebroeks and Bakels
2015, forthcoming; Sier et al. 2011). Faced with a problem of
equifinality in the record—both anthropogenic and natural
processes could have produced the pattern—we sought in-
formation about hunter-gatherer fire activities in similar en-
vironments as an aid to interpretation but found that rele-
vant reviews were scarce. This inspired us to compile an
inventory of off-site fire use by current and historically doc-
umented hunter-gatherers on the basis of a dedicated search
through the ethnographic literature. The aim of character-
izing fire usage in the landscape revealed a global and uni-
versal tool that was and is used in nearly all environmental
settings by modern humans of all ages and both sexes. The
archaeological record of off-site fire use is, however, sur-
prisingly sparse.
In this reply, we take the opportunity to further discuss
the remit of this paper, focusing on the antiquity of such
practices and the limitations identified in the present-day
application of archaeological techniques and methods. We
take this one step further by highlighting some of the sug-
gestions and comments provided by our esteemed col-
leagues, who have spent time and effort in responding to the
final version of our paper.
We would first like to extend our thanks toward the
commentators who almost universally expressed their agree-
ment on the relevance of our research and gave stimulating
and constructive criticism. With backgrounds in a multitude
of disciplines including anthropology, archaeology, and for-
est ecology, they highlighted interpretation issues, gave ad-
ditional examples of fire usage, and provided useful sugges-
tions for how to approach the identified issues.
We will first focus on the archaeological issues related to
the footprint of fire usage in the landscape, including the
archaeological observability, ubiquity, and potential antiq-
uity of fire use. We will then incorporate the different sug-
gestions made by the commentators before concluding this
reply with our suggestions for future research.
One issue brought up in the comments concerns the role
of the archaeological record in the debate over the origins
and the chronology of fire use. As did many of our col-
leagues, we interpreted the ubiquity of hunter-gatherer fire
use in the landscape as suggesting that this prominent and
global activity has at least some antiquity, without specifying
how deep such adaptations may be. We agree with Sand-
gathe when he states that as “all historic hunter-gatherer
groups intentionally modified their environment to improve
foraging returns, we can expect that similar types of niche
construction behavior extend back in prehistory to some
extent.”But we also agree with Kelly that the antiquity of
such behaviors “must be established through the empirical
Scherjon et al. Burning the Land 321
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data of archaeology.”However, using the archaeological pat-
terns to make inferences on the chronology and character of
early fire use is not unproblematic, given the variety of post-
depositional processes that influence the preservation of fire
traces in the archaeological record. Study of the diagenesis of
fire proxies constitutes an important focus of research in our
group (Braadbaart et al. 2012; Braadbaart, Poole, and van
Brussel 2009), and, contra Parker et al., we are keenly aware
of the incompleteness of the archaeological record. Absence
of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the friction ex-
isting between archaeology-based scenarios of early fire use
and models based on biological data (Gowlett and Wran-
gham 2013) is striking and potentially informative. In line
with Wrangham’s biology-based hypothesis, Parker et al.
state that the genus Homo evolved as an “actively pyrophilic
primate”and that fire making allowed members of our genus
to expand out of Africa. While that may be possible, we have
not observed it in the archaeological record, maybe because
we archaeologists have been looking in the wrong places or
with the wrong methods to trace the footprints of the earliest
fire use.
However, it is a fact that the visibility of fire use changes
dramatically in the middle part of the Middle Pleistocene,
that is, around 300,000–400,000 years ago in Europe (Roe-
broeks and Villa 2011a)aswellasintheNearEast(Shi-
melmitz et al. 2014). This does indicate that fire-related
behavior changed around that time and in a way that left
unambiguous traces in the archaeological record. That ar-
chaeological signal of fire use is much later than the emer-
gence of the genus Homo, but it needs to be stressed that
these Middle Pleistocene changes in the archaeological vis-
ibility of fire use occur in the same time range as the greatest
increase in relative brain size documented in the hominin
fossil record (Potts 2011; Ruff, Trinkaus, and Holliday 1997).
In that sense, Wrangham’s hypothesis could easily be rec-
onciled with the archaeological signal of fire use, be it with a
different and much shorter chronology than he has advo-
cated thus far. Whether and how this change in fire-related
behavior relates to and influenced larger-scale burning of the
landscape is an interesting and as yet unresolved question.
Apart from the chronological issue, the comments also
touch upon what kind of behavior we can access in the ar-
chaeological record, which is palimpsest in nature, containing
coarse-grained accumulated outcomes of hominin-generated
as well as natural fire processes. Bliege Bird and Bird are clearly
interested in high-resolution questions, such as “how long-
term benefits are realized (i.e., is there ownership over burnt
areas, or priority of access to managed regions), and what
ecological consequences stem from these practices in differ-
ent environments to affect hunter-gatherer foraging and so-
cial arrangements on these changed landscapes?”These are
relevant questions for the ethnographer but not readily ac-
cessible in the archaeological record. Our study focused on
the long-term archaeological patterns generated by a variety
of fire-related behavior. We were, in other words, interested
in asking the archaeologically right questions.
Holdaway and Allen as well as Cosgrove do appreciate
these longer-term outcomes and the problems associated
with studying a time (and actors)-averaged archaeological
record, up to the point that Holdaway and Allen explicitly
question the usefulness of the concepts we used to organize
our data collection, including on- versus off-site fire, inten-
tional and accidental burning, and short-term versus long-
term effects. We agree; these are, again, useful categories for
an ethnographic study (and hence interesting when trying
to distill information from ethnographic sources), but their
application to the archaeological record is very problematic
indeed, given its palimpsest nature.
In addition to these general issues, we would like to ad-
dress several very specific queries raised by the commen-
tators. Bliege Bird and Bird highlight an error in our dis-
cussion of their hypotheses about how fire mosaics might
change with changes to subsistence and mobility patterns in
the Western Desert, specifically “suggesting that we dismiss
anthropogenic fire mosaics that differ from lightning-driven
fire as a product of contemporary use of vehicles and cen-
tralized settlement.”This was certainly not what we under-
stood or intended to say. We cited their work throughout
the article because it provides exceptionally detailed evidence
for hunter-gatherer burning activities and the creation of
landscape mosaics. Our point in the paragraph at issue con-
cerned the length of time for which such a relationship is
likely to have existed and, particularly, whether this is likely
to have occurred in the Pleistocene. The authors present a
convincing argument that this relationship probably began
in the Holocene and not earlier. We realize that our refer-
ence to aspects of current mobility was confusing; our point
was simply that given the number of factors relating to mo-
bility that have changed, it would not be reasonable to as-
sume that the same pattern occurred in the Pleistocene.
In addition, Mills suggests that we should have used a
relational database and organized our data according to
groups. We agree that this would have offered some more
flexibility for other uses. However, while this would alter the
values in table 1, it would not affect our overall argument,
which focuses on the widespread distribution of burning
across diverse types of vegetation and the diversity of ac-
tivities and actors involved in burning. Also, the definition of
units is less important, given the qualitative nature of our
analysis.
One of the most attractive aspects of publishing in Current
Anthropology is the opportunity to start a discussion on an
important and challenging issue with a dream team of spe-
cialists; this exercise has generated a wide range of sugges-
tions for future approaches, some of which we would like
to highlight in our reply. First, further information about
the interaction between current human fire activity and lo-
cal landscapes is clearly desirable, with a focus on hunter-
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gatherers. This includes, in particular, “going out and mea-
suring—through ethnographic and ecological work—the
role of fire in social and ecological systems,”as stressed by
Bliege Bird and Bird. Research on large-scale burning by
hunter-gatherer populations such as the Martu is invaluable,
providing a clear demonstration that their activities shape
the landscape, with measurable foraging benefits, and high-
lighting a range of factors influencing this interaction (e.g.,
intention, season, habitat, gender, and residential patterns).
In addition, our database can be extended to include further
cases from the extensive existing literature. Additional sources
have been highlighted by the commentators, and we came
across still more while preparing this reply; these have the
potential, for example, to broaden the range of activities re-
corded in particular environmental conditions. Such research
can provide analogical insights into past human-fire-landscape
interactions and highlight what could be missing in the ar-
chaeological record.
Second, a better understanding is needed of the various
factors influencing fire ecology and the archaeological record
for fire, including vegetation history, short- as well as long-
term climate variability, and various interactions between
changing climates and human activity. Collaboration among
scholars studying landscape-fire interaction—as attempted
under the umbrella field of pyrogeography—would support
this. The comments highlighted additional relevant articles
from other disciplines as well as detailed regional studies;
there are clearly other disciplines making relevant contri-
butions to which we should pay more attention. At the same
time, archaeologists and scholars of human evolution are by
necessity accustomed to interdisciplinary work and could
be valuable discussion partners in a project requiring in-
tegration between different disciplines with different foci,
methods, and theories. Such engagement would probably
work best if it involved opportunities for face-to-face dis-
cussion. Consideration of diverse factors based on interdis-
ciplinary collaboration is valuable in other areas of research
too; for example, including an anthropogenic factor in fire
regimes for dynamic vegetation models will enhance the re-
sults from simulations and better characterize the human-
climate interaction (Arora and Boer 2005).
Understanding the taphonomy of charcoal is key to in-
terpreting the archaeological record for fire, as emphasized
by both Cosgrove and Kelly. The latter suggests using a
model of taphonomic loss, comparable to those used to ex-
amine radiocarbon date frequencies (e.g., Kelly et al. 2013),
to distinguish absence of evidence from evidence of absence
for hearths. On a smaller scale, understanding the role of
specific site conditions such as pH in preservation of char-
coal and other heated materials is important for assessing
whether the absence of fire evidence from particular sites
and samples can be explained by diagenesis or is likely to be
a real pattern; as discussed above, this is an area in which
members of our research group are making progress.
The multiple suggestions in Kelly’s commentary show the
value of formulating expectations about the record, on the
basis of principles and knowledge of current patterns, and
brainstorming multiple approaches for confronting these
expectations with the archaeological record. While not every
approach can be implemented or is expected to produce re-
sults, surely some will lead in productive directions. For ex-
ample, climate data modeling of lightning activity can make
predictions for the abundance of charcoal across latitudinal
zones (and their natural vegetation types). Kelly writes that
“with appropriate deep sea or delta samples, we could then
determine whether one model or a combination of them best
accounts for latitudinal variation in evidence of burning”(pre-
sumably taking taphonomic factors into account too). Al-
though large-scale comparisons may be limited by the scalar
issues discussed in our paper and emphasized by Cosgrove,
this approach may be scaled down and extended to other
kinds of depositional circumstances—for instance, lakes—
and fine-tuned to different vegetation zones in specificre-
gions.
One of the main problems for understanding these long-
term archaeological patterns is how to discern between
human-caused and natural fire, making Kelly’s suggestion
particularly interesting. It is obvious that far more data and
research are needed. What is lacking is a thorough knowl-
edge of the traces left by natural fire in all kinds of climate
and natural vegetation types, two factors that are not inde-
pendent. A second kind of approach to this problem is to
look for charcoal and other fire proxies in environments
without humans. If these are difficult to find in the Holo-
cene, they might be found in comparable earlier times. In
any case, counting charcoal and measuring other fire proxies
should become standard procedures, next to counting pol-
len, when cores are being analyzed. The methods should be
standardized too.
We are strengthened in our belief that the underlying
research has contributed in a positive way to fire research in
general by providing a database that can be used as an in-
terpretation aid for understanding archaeologically visible
consequences of past fire use and as a source of ethnographic
examples, as is nicely illustrated by the references to the
relevant database entries in the comments by Parker et al.
We also included a necessary discussion of possible and
required improvements in archaeological research methods
and technologies. The importance of fire use in the land-
scape is undisputed, and identifying its origin in the ar-
chaeological record a rewarding subject of further research.
—Fulco Scherjon, Corrie Bakels,
Katharine MacDonald, and Wil Roebroeks
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