Human Use of Fire in Prehistory (12,500 BP to AD 1540s)

Scientists believe that Native Americans increased fire frequency and expanded the seasonality of natural fires in the ecosystems they inhabited. “Natural” fire regimes existed before Native Americans arrived 12,500 years ago and in uninhabited places. Natural fire regimes are patterns in the frequency and intensity of lightning-caused fires. Indians burned the landscape intentionally, and sometimes they caused accidental burns when their intentional fires escaped. The intensities of Prehistoric Native American fires varied, but most intentional burns were low-intensity surface fires. While most lightning fires occur in the spring and summer, Indians in some parts of the South also lit fires in the dormant season (roughly November through February). Some Indian groups, for example in the southern Ozark-Ouachita Highlands, burned in the growing season (roughly April through October).

The five major cultural periods in Prehistory (defined as the time prior to the 1540s when first contact between Native Americans and European explorers occurred) were Clovis, Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian. Native Americans occupied all four physiographic regions of the South in Prehistory and there are some general patterns in the ways they used fire (Table: Major Purposes of Fire Use in Prehistory by Cultural Period). But, there are some differences on the local scale. For instance, burn frequencies varied in the different regions of the South (Table: Pre-European Fire Frequencies in the South by Region), due both to environmental differences and differences in human behavior and demographics. The skills for burning the landscape were probably part of the traditional ecological knowledge of southern Indians.

Changes in environmental conditions, human population densities, and settlement patterns during Prehistory caused changes in fire regimes (Guyette and Dey 2000). Over time, changes in ecosystem management practices – including the use of fire by Prehistoric Native Americans – led to increases in the carrying capacities of southern landscapes and to greater human population densities. The extent of Native American impacts on the landscape is directly related to population levels (Stanturf and others 2002) and the intensity of resource modification. There is a link between human history, fire regimes, and vegetation changes in the South during Prehistory.