Forgotten Fires

A common stereotype about American Indians is that for centuries they lived in stataic harmony with nature in a pristine wilderness that remained unchanged until European colonization. Omer C. Stewart was one of the first anthropologists to recognize that Native Americans made significant impact across a wide range of environments. Most important, they regularly used fire to manage plant communities and associated animal species through varied and localized habitat burning. In Forgotten Fires, editors Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson present Stewart’s original research and insights, presented in the 1950s yet still provocative today.

Significant portions of Stewart’s text have not been available until now, and Lewis and Anderson set Stewart’s findings in the context of current knowledge about Native hunter-gathers and their uses of fire. This volume shows that for thousands of years, the North American landscape has been regularly shaped and renewed by the land and fire management practices of North American Indians.

• Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
• Prescribed Burning in California Wildlands Vegetation Management
• Forgotten Grasslands of the South: Natural History and Conservation
• Fire in California's Ecosystems
• Southeastern Grasslands: Biodiversity, Ecology, and Management
• Native American Ethnobotany
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
• Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians (Ballena Press Anthropological Papers, No. 40)
• Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources