| Description |
Our success as a species and our deep, global ecological legacy is enmeshed with our use of fire. Despite the fundamental nature of fire as part of the human strategy set, the benefits and tradeoffs of fire use are rarely incorporated into interpretations of the archaeological record. In this dissertation, I incorporate the costs and benefits inherent in our use of fire into models that examine specific archaeological issues. Using novel, spatially-explicit applications of behavioral ecology this work captures variation in the advantageousness of fire as a human strategy in three case studies: The ethno-historic foraging ranges of Numic foragers in the Great Basin, how the cost of firewood effects prey choice, and the role of firewood in structuring settlement patterning in the lower Dolores River watershed in Utah. Explicitly considering foragers' subsistence-related applications of controlled fire is important to informing our understanding of past human behavior and our ecological relationships. This collection of papers offers a modeling approach for incorporating one of humanity's hallmark abilities-the control of fire-into the science of human behavior. |
