Scant Historical Record

For many years, the importanceof fire use by American Indiansin altering North American ecosystems was underappreciated or ignored. Now, there seems to be an opposite trend, as exemplified in the pages of Fire Management Today (Summer 2004, volume 65[3]). * It is common now to read or hear statements to the effect that American Indians fired land-scapes everywhere and all the time, so there is no such thing as a “nat-ural ” ecosystem. A myth of human manipulation everywhere in pre-Columbus America is replacing the equally erroneous myth of a totally pristine wilderness. We believe that it is time to deflate the rapidly spreading myth that American Indians altered all land-scapes by means of fire. In short, we believe that the case for land-scape-level fire use by American Indians has been dramatically over-stated and overextrapolated