Ecological and Cultural Contributions of Controlled Fire Use by Native Californians: A Survey of Literature

Prescribed burning of the countryside was widely practiced by Native Californians. The application of fire as a tool of land management resulted in greater environmental resources that served as food, forage for game, basketry and other plant material products, and medicines. Fire provided many benefits to the environment by stimulating plant growth, providing nutrients to the soil, eliminating plant competition and insect infestations, and controlling overgrowth. Because of their fire management activities, California Indian groups were able to support larger populations and greater population densities than hunter-gatherer subsistence methods would have otherwise been able to accomplish. There is extensive literature on the subject of fire use in Native Californian land management reaching back to the 1920s, though the foundations for analysis of this topic were laid only in the 1970s. The more recent sources propose that Native Californians used fire as a tool of land manage- ment to sustain the populations that existed prior to Euro-American contact. Much of this work draws from ethnohistorical data and places significant emphasis on encouraging game populations. Ecological studies are also relevant to this study. Archaeological data further supports the hypothesis that Native Californian groups used fire as a means of environmental management. These studies offer scientific evidence showing that forests experienced frequent, low-intensity fires during aboriginal times which were likely attribut- able to human ignition, either through records of fire-scars, charcoal and pollen deposits in the earth, material remains, or environmental effects which could not have been produced otherwise