Doctoral Dissertation Research: Did Native Americans Fundamentally Alter Western Forest Structure? A Reconstruction of Vegetation and Fire History from Northwestern California

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Broad disagreement exists regarding the scale and degree of historic Native American disturbance in the western forests of the United States. There is a continuum from those who argue for minimal impacts restricted to the immediate vicinity of permanent villages and camps, to those who argue that Native American influences, through the use of fire, were widespread and that modern management practices need to acknowledge this influence when formulating land use policies. This debate is a central issue in distinguishing the role humans may have had in influencing forest structure in the western United States. Differing interpretations from scientists in different disciplines have led to a lack of multidisciplinary studies directed at answering this important issue. Doctoral student Jeffery Crawford, under the supervision of Dr. Scott Mensing at the University of Nevada, Reno will use methods from both paleoecology and anthropology to examine the record of fire and vegetation change at two low-elevation lake sites in northwestern California that have a history of Native American land-use. These lakes were selected because they are near well-documented sites of long-term Native American habitation and should provide clear evidence if local populations were manipulating large areas of forest. This analysis will utilize multiple methods, including pollen and charcoal analysis, tree-ring analysis, ethnographic studies, and archaeological studies. Lake sediments collected from each site will be analyzed for pollen and charcoal in order to provide a high-resolution record of the fire and vegetation dynamics of each lake basin. A fire history of each basin will be constructed using fire scar analysis of tree-rings. The fire-scar results will be compared with charcoal results from lake sediments to calibrate charcoal abundance to a known fire record in order to reconstruct a long term fire history. Any anomalous vegetation or fire patterns will then be compared to the regional climatological, anthropological and archaeological records in order to determine how Native American migration patterns or technological changes may have influenced landscape fire and vegetation patterns.The results of this study will begin to fill the knowledge gap regarding the intensity and scale of Native American land-use in western forests. The results will be directly applicable to Northwestern California forests, but will be broadly applicable to forests throughout the west by explicitly measuring the impacts of Native Americans on western forests and the extent to which they may have impacted landscapes beyond the local scale. These results can play a transformative role in conceptualizing a wider range of conditions that influenced forests prior to Euro-American settlement and help to guide future forest management decisions.