Archaeological evidence of anthropogenic burning for food production in forested uplands of the Grand Canyon province, northern Arizona
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite convincing archaeological arguments about the global effects of human pyrogeography and their evolutionary significance, many of the implicated data sources are unavailable in research contexts that lack significant accumulations of charcoal or stands of fire-scarred trees. In view of the strong likelihood that hominins routinely ignited small, low-intensity landscape fires for millennia, we explore the role of cultural burning for food-production in an area of the American Southwest where anthropogenic fire has not been considered. To illustrate the virtues of a multidisciplinary approach, informed by Formation Theory and time perspectivism, we focus on the returns from macrobotanical and palynological analyses of samples recovered from a variety of archaeological and geoarchaeological contexts in the Upper Basin, a landform located south of the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. Previous archaeobotanical studies of samples recovered from archaeological sites (ca. AD 500–1500) in the basin's pinyon-juniper woodlands are dominated by amaranth, chenopodium, and other economic ruderals. These findings support the “fire foodway” model that posits prehistoric Indigenous populations of the Upper Basin depended on these fire-following wild plants, rather than maize, by harvesting their abundant seeds and leaves from production locations that were created by low-intensity understory fires. In this paper, we present the results of new studies of archaeobotanical remains recovered from cut-back terraces and sedimentary contexts that (i) expand the evidence base for the fire-foodway model, (ii) provide a basis for proposing several types of prehistoric cultural burning practices, and (iii) introduce the outlines of the ruderal seed-bed hypothesis. Combined, these findings provide a new archaeological perspective on upland subsistence practices in the northern American Southwest. Our study also highlights biases of modern vegetation surveys that do not include archaeological data, and contributes to an appreciation of the extent to which biodiversity has declined because of widespread fire exclusion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".