Indigenous Americans broke the cycle of destructive wildfires. Here’s how they did it

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https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-americans-broke-cycle-destructive-wildfires-here-s-how-they-did-it

By Andrew Curry, Science. 

Excerpt: In the southwestern United States, wildfires typically follow a grim, but predictable cycle. When unusually wet years are followed by hot, dry ones, fuel builds up—then burns. But a new look at thousands of fire-scarred tree trunks from the region, combined with archaeology and oral histories, indicates that between 1500 C.E. and 1900 C.E., Indigenous fire management practices managed to break that cycle, buffering the landscape from climate-related conflagrations. The study, published today in Science Advances, does “a really nice job of addressing questions paleoecologists have struggled with,” says Dave McWethy, a paleoecologist at Montana State University, who was not involved with the research. “They’re able to demonstrate that on a smaller scale, people are having a very strong influence that’s able to dampen the effects of climate.” ....“A tree might record fires up to 20 or 25 times over a 200- or 300-year period.” The authors combined the fire data ...with other information that can be gleaned from tree rings, such as how wet or dry the years leading up to the blaze were. ...they then matched the fire and climate information with data on Indigenous land use over time. ...The team found that during periods of light land use, when Native American groups were pushed off their traditional land by conflict with European settlers or warfare with neighboring groups, wildfire hewed to its predictable cycle: Plant fuel built up during wet years and became more likely to burn during subsequent dry ones. But in time periods and geographic areas where Native people were actively managing the landscape in traditional ways—gathering wood for fuel or construction and setting small-scale fires to clear land for agriculture or grazing—they reduced or eliminated excess fuel from the landscape before it burned out of control. That short-circuited the connection between climate patterns and wildfire....

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