Influences of Native American land use on the Colonial Euro-American settlement of the South Carolina Piedmont.

We test the hypothesis that prehistoric Native American land use influenced the Euro-American settlement process in a South Carolina Piedmont landscape. Long term ecological studies demonstrate that land use legacies influence processes and trajectories in complex, coupled social and ecological systems. Native American land use likely altered the ecological and evolutionary feedback and trajectories of many North American landscapes.

Living on a flammable planet: interdisciplinary, cross-scalar and varied cultural lessons, prospects and challenges.

Living with fire is a challenge for human communities because they are influenced by socio-economic, political, ecological and climatic processes at various spatial and temporal scales. Over the course of 2 days, the authors discussed how communities could live with fire challenges at local, national and transnational scales. Exploiting our diverse, international and interdisciplinary expertise, we outline generalizable properties of fire-adaptive communities in varied settings where cultural knowledge of fire is rich and diverse.

Wildland Arson as Clandestine Resource Management: A Space-Time Permutation Analysis and Classification of Informal Fire Management Regimes in Georgia, USA.

Forest managers are increasingly recognizing the value of disturbance-based land management techniques such as prescribed burning. Unauthorized, "arson" fires are common in the southeastern United States where a legacy of agrarian cultural heritage persists amidst an increasingly forest-dominated landscape. This paper reexamines unauthorized fire-setting in the state of Georgia, USA from a historical ecology perspective that aims to contribute to historically informed, disturbance-based land management.

Traditional fire-use, landscape transition, and the legacies of social theory past.

Fire-use and the scale and character of its effects on landscapes remain hotly debated in the paleo- and historical-fire literature. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropology and geography have played important roles in providing theoretical propositions and testable hypotheses for advancing understandings of the ecological role of human-fire-use in landscape histories. This article reviews some of the most salient and persistent theoretical propositions and hypotheses concerning the role of humans in historical fire ecology.