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Abstract Climatic conditions exert an important influence on wildfire activity in the western United States; however, Indigenous farming activity may have also shaped the local fire regimes for millennia. The Fish Lake Plateau is located on the Great Basin–Colorado Plateau boundary, the only region in western North America where maize farming was adopted then suddenly abandoned. Here we integrate sedimentary archives, tree rings, and archeological data to reconstruct the past 1200 years of fire, climate, and human activity. We identify a period of high fire activity during the apex of prehistoric farming between 900 and 1400 CE, and suggest that farming likely obscured the role of climate on the fire regime through the use of frequent low-severity burning. Climatic conditions again became the dominant driver of wildfire when prehistoric populations abandoned farming around 1400 CE. We conclude that Indigenous populations shaped high-elevation mixed-conifer fire regimes on the Fish Lake Plateau through land-use practices.
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Ontological Resilience: The Heirloom Crop Enset Thwarting Hunger and Colonists
Abstract Histories generally portray southern Ethiopians as pagans who lacked kings because they rely on the historical accounts of their northern Abyssinian conquerors, who adopted Christianity in the first century AD. Justified by a call to spread Christianity and suffering the threat of famine and disease to his empire, Abyssinian emperor Menelik II (1889–1913) conquered and colonized southern Omotic-speaking polities, who cultivated a drought-resistant crop, enset (Ensete ventricosum). According to most Ethiopian histories, Boreda were one of the southern Omotic societies, who quickly succumbed to conquest, adopted new agricultural technologies, and paid tribute and corvée labor. Boreda identity and history are entwined with farming enset, a relationship that provided food security, structured their historic settlement landscape, and charted their relationship with technology, each other, and outsiders. The authors argue that everyday practices, such as the farming of enset, are spaces within which Indigenous peoples frame and materialize ontological resilience against colonialism, religious conversion, and persecution. Boreda oral traditions, life histories, and daily practices support their efforts to resist settlers and richly inform the archaeology of their historic places, Bayira Deriya.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1916933
- PAR ID:
- 10634352
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9780197557686
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Book Chapter:
- https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197557686.013.3
