Anthropogenic Fires Regimes Before European Settlement

Historical fire regimes throughout North America were greatly influenced by aboriginal man. Homo sapiens sapiens migrated to North America across the Bering Strait about 20,000 to 35,000 years ago (Aschmann 1978, Komarek 1974).  Ancestors of these original peoples arrived in the southern Appalachians about 10,000 years ago (Keel 1976).  Natural fire regimes were dramatically altered by paleo-Indians.  In the southern Appalachians, as elsewhere, paleo-Indians increasedfire frequencies from the natural fire regimes of mostly lightning ignited fires (Van Lear and Waldrop 1988).

When paleo-Indians first arrived in the southern Appalachian region, the landscape was dominated by boreal forests (tundra or taiga). Gradual global warming shifted the dominant forest type in the southern Appalachians to upland hardwood forest (Delcourt and Delcourt 1991).  It is believed that paleo-Indians initiated widespread burning to encourage grazing habitat in these deciduous forests.  Hunting was their primary means of survival for most of the millennia that they occupied the southern Appalachians (Buckner and Turrill 1999).

It is estimated that paleo-Indians in the Southeast developed agricultural techniques around 800 to 1000 A.D. (Hudson 1982).  Fire was used by these early agriculturalists to clear fertile floodplains for cultivation (Delcourt and Delcourt 1997, Chapman 1985).  Fires set intentionally by paleo-Indians in agricultural plots likely escaped to surrounding uplands.  But paleo-Indians also intentionally used fire outside of cultivated lands for other benefits including improving grazing habitat for wildlife, exposing nuts, and encouraging fruit production (Williams 1989, Buckner and Turrill 1999).

The relatively high human population densities in prehistoric America, although still a subject of much debate, indicate that most regions were likely subject to frequent anthropogenic fires.  Dobyns (1983) estimated that 18 to 20 million native Americans inhabited North American in 1492 (Dobyns 1983). Evidence from paleo-ecological studies also indicate that during most of the last 4000 years, paleo-Indians played an important role in determining the composition of southern Appalachian vegetation through their selective use of fire (Delcourt and Delcourt 1997).  Perhaps the best, and most objective, evidence about the composition of forests before European settlement comes from pollen records from pond and bog sediments that have accumulated for thousands of years.  These studies indicate that anthropogenic fires increased populations of fire-tolerant oaks, chestnut, and pines in upland forests of the southern Appalachians (Delcourt and others 1986, Delcourt and others 1998, Delcourt and Delcourt 1997).  Landscapes likely contained open pine and oak forests with widely spaced trees and herbaceous understories when European settlers arrived.  For example, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was reported to be a vast prairie between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies in the mid-1700s (Leyburn 1962, Van Lear and Waldrop 1988, Buckner and Turrill 1999).