Nov. 12, 2025 — Professor Christopher I. Roos‘s recent research on the historical use of fire among the Apache people has received extensive coverage in The Arizona Republic, Arizona’s largest newspaper. The story, “Tree Rings Reveal How Apache People Used Fire to Shape and Protect Their Environment,” describes how Roos and his collaborators studied burning practices and stewardship among the Western Apache.
Oct. 30, 2025 – Next week, SMU Anthropology’s Christopher I. Roos will host a Southwest Fire Science Consortium (SWFSC) Webinar, “Tree Rings Reveal the Legacy of Indigenous Cultural Burning in the Southwest USA.”
In the webinar, Dr. Christopher Roos and colleagues will explore how Indigenous peoples across the Southwest shaped fire regimes through diverse cultural practices and land uses. Using extensive tree-ring fire records, they demonstrate that Indigenous influence on fire was widespread and consistent across foraging, pastoral, and farming societies—offering new perspectives for research and restoring traditional fire stewardship and co-management today.
The event will be held at 12pm (MT) on November 5, 2025. You can register to attend on Zoom here.
Aug. 20, 2025 — Professor Christopher I. Roos recently led the publication of a seminal fire history paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Roos and a team of scientists, including members of the White Mountain Apache and San Carlos Apache tribes, leveraged a large dataset of thousands of fire-scarred trees across Arizona and New Mexico to demonstrate that Ndee (Western Apache) people managed fire across their ~19,000 square mile homeland in central Arizona. Tree-ring analysis revealed that fires on Ndee homelands were more frequent, smaller, occurred disproportionately in late April and May, and ultimately buffered the impacts of climate when compared to the rest of the region. Roos and colleagues argued that the centuries of Ndee fire stewardship could be a model for fire management.