Anthropological and Archaeological Perspectives on Native Fire Management of the Willamette Valley
by Dr. Thomas J. Connolly, PhD, Research Division Director, Museum of Anthropology, University of Oregon.
This paper was originally presented at the 81st Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division, (Symposium: Fire History in the Pacific Northwest: Human and Climatic Influences), June 11-14, 2000, Ashland, Oregon. 12p.
Full text [here] 64KB
Selected excerpts:
In contrast to popular myth, the hardy Mountain Men of the American West did not venture into an uncharted and untamed wilderness. They frequently followed well worn trails, connecting generations-old villages and camps of a considerable population of Natives that they encountered in every valley they entered. Likewise, when Euroamerican trappers and settlers entered the Willamette Valley in the early 1800s, it was not a pristine wilderness they entered; but an anthropogenic landscape, maintained–and to a real extent created–by the valley’s Natives with the use of fire…
Many anthropologists, among them Omer Stewart (1956), Henry Lewis (1973, 1976), Richard Gould (1971), and others, have documented deliberate burning of vegetation by hundreds of Native groups worldwide, for the purpose of managing plant and animals resources. The practice of burning in connection with subsistence activities has been recently explored by Lawrence Keeley (1995), who examined 96 ethnographic groups worldwide–characterized by anthropologists as hunter-gatherers–to assess the strength of correlations between plant exploitation practices, and ecological, demographic, and social variables. He found particularly strong correlations between fire-setting and the use of nuts and seeds as staple foods. Further, he found that the most intensive uses of plants–involving the sowing of seed–usually occurs only if the foraging group is also using fire for vegetation management. Based on his findings, he suggests (cf. Lewis 1972) that burning may be more strongly associated with the development of agriculture than variables such as population pressure, increasing social complexity, or other conditions seen as classic drivers of agricultural development. He does not suggest that burning causes agriculture, but that it is one of a set of tools–including sowing, planting, cultivating, weeding and other practices–used by hunter-gatherer groups worldwide who actively manipulate plants in their environment for the purpose of enhancing their productivity and reliability…
In an important piece written nearly 25 years ago, Paul Mellers (1976) also drew on worldwide literature to postulate that systematic burning could potentially increase the overall productivity of ungulate populations by a factor of ten, and speculated that similar improvements may have been achieved in the yields of certain vegetable food resources. He notes that while burning may reduce biomass in a given area, it promotes a substantial increase in the overall annual production of new plant growth. The effect for humans is that it increases the available biomass easily converted to useable food (forbs, grasses, annuals, as opposed to trees and shrubs)…
Between the years of 1770 and 1840, it is estimated that more than 90% of native Kalapuyans died from introduced diseases (Boyd 1985, 1990; Zenk 1976). Further, these declines post-date possible earlier continent-wide post-Columbian epidemics suggested by some archaeological data (Campbell 1990; Guilmet et al. 1991; cf. Dobyns 1983, Ramenofsky 1987). The result of these catastrophic declines was a breakdown in social structures, communities, and traditional modes of behavior. A careful consideration of the archaeological, ethnographic, and historic records strongly suggests that earlier populations in the Willamette Valley, and elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, were denser, and their social institutions more sophisticated, than has commonly been acknowledged (Bowden 1997; Boyd 1990; Campbell 1990; Zenk 1976, 1994)…
By making use of the ethnographic notes, and the valley’s archaeological record, some of the social attributes associated with burning are considered.
1) The use of nuts and seeds as staple foods , which Keeley (1995) has shown is strongly associated with fire management of these resources…
Zenk (1990:547) notes that camas may have been the single most important staple in the valley, followed closely by tarweed, hazelnuts, and berries. These foods are commonly mentioned as centrally important foods in the Gatschet linguistic texts. One of many examples: They dried meat, and in the wintertime they also ate hazelnuts, and acorns, and tarweed seeds, and dried berries. . . . Sometimes they (also) mashed their cooked camas (in the mortar) where they mashed the tarweed seeds (Jacobs et al. 1945:19-20)…
A second feature to consider is 2) The presence of corollary plant management practices such as sowing, planting, cultivating, and weeding that, according to Keeley (1995), commonly accompany the use of fire management…
This is an aspect of behavior on which the archaeological record is mute, but on which the ethnographic record offers compelling testimony…
There is now a growing body of evidence indicating that fire management of the landscape, and practices such as planting, weeding, fertilizing, and cultivating of food plants were well known, and fundamental to the Native economies of the region (Deur 1998, 1999; Deur and Turner 1999; Hannon 1991, Thoms 1989). Doug Deur (1998, 1999) and Nancy Turner (Deur and Turner 1999) have recently reviewed native gardening practices among Pacific Coast groups, and have documented Native terms for weeding, cultivating, marking of boundaries, and other practices. They point out that the fact many of these terms are encoded in various Native languages, in etymologically unrelated terms, “suggests that they are practices of long standing,” i.e., dating well before initial Euroamerican contact (Deur and Turner 1999:9)…
Nan Hannon (1991), Helen McCarthy (1993), and Kat Anderson (1991, 1993) have all examined fire management of oaks for acorn production in southwest Oregon and northern California. Hannon (1991:139) concluded that the western Oregon native was “as much a horticulturalist as a gatherer, with fire as the major horticultural tool.”…
A third element in a consideration of fire management is an examination of 3) Factors affecting the distribution or harvest efficiency of important resources…
This is most clearly documented with respect to game management. David Douglas (1959:214) learned from the Kalapuya in 1826, that burning was sometimes done:
for the purpose of urging the deer to frequent certain parts, to feed, which they leave unburned, and of course they are easily killed. Others say that it is done in order that they might the better find wild honey and grasshoppers, which both serves as articles of winter food.
Burning was also, apparently, a part of the process of harvesting tarweed seeds. Charles Wilkes (1845) observed, in 1841, that:
The Indians are in the habit of burning the country yearly, in September, for the purpose of drying and procuring the seeds of the sunflower, which they are thus enabled to gather with more ease, and which form a large portion of their food.
Jesse Applegate’s (1914:69) observations clarify this harvest technique:
It was the custom of these Indians, late in the autumn, after the wild wheat, Lamoro sappolil, was fairly ripe, to burn off the whole country. The grass would burn away and leave the sappolil standing, with the pods well dried and bursting. Then the squaws, both young and old, would go with their baskets and bats and gather in the grain.
The implication of such testimony is that burning positively influenced both the distribution of plant and animal resources, and their harvest efficiency, in the Willamette Valley…
A fourth possible function to which burning may be related is 4) An increasing concern with resource ownership.
Nancy Turner (1975:81) notes that among the Coast Salish “camas beds were divided into individually owned plots, passed from generation to generation. Each season, these were cleared of stones, weeds, and brush, often by controlled burning.” George Gibbs (1877), Marian Smith (1950), Wayne Suttles (1951), and June Collins (1974) have all reported on different groups of western Washington Salish whose intensively managed plots of camas and other root foods were individually owned and inherited, and frequently demarcated by boundary stakes, rock lines, shallow ditches, or low berms…
The fifth, and final point I will consider is 5) the formation of larger social units and more permanent residential patterns.
Based on his reading of the Gatschet texts, Zenk (1994) concluded that the Tualatin resided in 15-20 villages or hamlets prior to ca. 1830 (Zenk 1994). Although historic detail diminishes as one progresses southward through the Willamette Valley, it is believed that each major sub-basin was more-or-less similarly configured (Zenk 1976:17-18), with localized village clusters identified by names still preserved in the basins they occupied: “Tualatin,” “Yamhill,” “Santiam,” “Luckiamute,” “Yoncalla,” and others. The linguistic texts also provide evidence that these ethnic groups were dialect communities. Linguists report that the Kalapuyan language family includes three mutually unintelligible languages and an undetermined number (but at least 13; Zenk 1990:547) distinct dialects. This linguistic diversity provides a compelling argument for considerable time depth to a pattern of residential stability in the valley, a rather striking contrast to the historic perceptions of post-epidemic wandering foragers…
In summary, the social history and economy of the Native Willamette Valley, particularly over the last 3-4,000 years, exhibits congruence with other cultural groups worldwide who used fire to intensively manage critical plant and animal resources. The short list of features focused on here include: 1) the use of nuts and seeds as staple foods; 2) the presence of corollary plant management practices such as sowing, planting, cultivating, and weeding; 3) factors affecting the distribution or harvest efficiency of important resources; 4) an increasing concern with resource ownership; and 5) the formation of larger social units and more permanent residential patterns.
As acknowledged previously, this congruence does not by itself provide direct evidence regarding the antiquity of the use of fire for resource management. It does, however, allow us to see that if the Willamette Valley Natives were not significantly modifying the biotic landscape, particularly during the last 3-4 millennia, we are in the much more challenging position of having to explain why the Willamette Valley’s cultural history runs counter to the rest of the world.
Reaching beyond the boundaries of environmental phenomena, we might pose the question: “If people were regularly burning, what should we expect the charcoal record to look like?” Isn’t it likely that frequent smallscale controlled fires would result in a marked increase in charcoal input, and a likely decrease in the incidence of catastrophic fires? We are not likely to know, unless we acknowledge and address the question in our both our research designs, and our interpretations. I would feel better about consideration and dismissal of a human factor, than I do about an absence of such a consideration (e.g., Long et al. 1998).
Final Thoughts
I am struck by what appears to me as an intellectual bias; derived not from intent but from the inevitable inertia developed within a particular field of study. For example, fire and vegetation histories are freely considered in terms of possible correlations to lightning strike history, solar flare activity, and other physical phenomena, while the exceptionally well-documented human influences on fire history are often regarded as too speculative for serious consideration. Our perceptions are limited by our understanding; there is much to be gained by developing a rich critical understanding and appreciation of the tools, models, and theories of other disciplines.
