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Native American use of fire
In addition to simple cooking, Pre-Columbian Native Americans used fire in many and significant ways, ranging from protecting an area from fire to landscape-altering clearing of prairie.
==Human-shaped landscape==
Many people believe that North America, before the coming of the Spanish explorers, missionaries, and settlers, was a totally pristine, natural, wilderness world with ancient forests covering the landscapes. This ideal world was populated by millions of Indian people who, somewhat amazingly, “were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.” This peaceful, mythic, magical ideal — sometimes referred to as tabula rasa — has symbolized the thinking behind much of the modern environmental movement. However these impressions of a "benign people treading lightly on the land" is wrong in its view of an entirely natural landscape: natives played a large role in determining the diversity of their ecosystems.〔
The most significant type of environmental change brought about by Precolumbian human activity was the modification of vegetation. … Vegetation was primarily altered by the clearing of forest and by intentional burning. Natural fires certainly occurred but varied in frequency and strength in different habitats. Anthropogenic fires, for which there is ample documentation, tended to be more frequent but weaker, with a different seasonality than natural fires, and thus had a different type of influence on vegetation. The result of clearing and burning was, in many regions, the conversion of forest to grassland, savanna, scrub, open woodland, and forest with grassy openings.(William M. Denevan)
Fire scientists and ecologists often find old fire scars in trees going back hundreds of years. Geographers studying lake sediments often find evidence of charcoal layers going back thousands of years, attributing the data to prehistoric fires caused by climatic warming and drying conditions. Since the trees and sediments cannot document how the fires started, lightning becomes the easiest natural explanation. Early researchers thought that no large burning was carried out by natives, but research during the latter half of the 20th century has shown that many or most of the presettlement fires were intentionally caused . Keeping large areas of forest and mountains free of undergrowth and small trees was just one of many reasons for using fire in ecosystems. Intentional burning greatly modified landscapes patches across the continent in many subtle ways that have often been interpreted as natural by the early explorers, trappers, and settlers . Many research scientists who study presettlement forest and savanna fire evidence tend to attribute most prehistoric fires to lightning rather than by humans. This problem arises because there was no systematic record keeping of these fire events. Thus the interaction of people and ecosystems may be downplayed or ignored, which can lead to the conclusion that people are necessarily a threat to the integrity of ecosystems perceived as natural, whereas they might be one the primary forces in their development .
Romantic and primitivist writers such as William Henry Hudson, Longfellow, Francis Parkman, and Thoreau were major contributors to the myth of pristine pre-columbian landscapes, which became part of American heritage.〔 At the time of their writings, however, enormous tracts of land had already been allowed to succeed to climax thanks to the reduction in anthropogenic fires caused by the collapse of aboriginal populations brought about by epidemics of diseases introduced by Europeans in the sixteenth century. Influenced by Western noble savage views of hunter-gatherer societies, many people still believe that Native Americans lived in complete harmony with the environment and neither disturbed nor destroyed but took only what was absolutely needed for survival. One of the powerful technologies which Native Americans had was fire, and they clearly changed the landscape with it. Sometimes to clear the woods for hunting or travel, sometimes to create a berry patch, the changes could be found in patches across the continents.〔
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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