KERA Originally Posted: August 1, 2018 Christopher Roos is an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University and lead author of a new study that looks into how that use of fire affected the ecosystem. LISTEN Interview Highlights On how the land was managed by Native Americans One of the primary uses of fire on the landscape was to refresh the prairie. Bison was one of their prime prey and the center point for their economy, in terms of food, clothing, shelter and tools. Bison prefer to graze recently burned patches of prairie — it's tastier, it's more nutritious. And so they manipulated the location of bison herds by selectively burning patches of prairie, and one of the things they did for most of the last millennium is burn patches of prairie to [...]

Earth and Environment Originally Posted: July 26, 2018 Native American communities actively managed North American prairies for centuries before Christopher Columbus and his ilk arrived in the New World, according to a new study. Fire was an important indigenous tool for shaping North American ecosystems, but the relative importance of indigenous burning versus climate on fire patterns remains controversial in scientific communities, researchers say. As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that, contrary to popular thinking, burning by indigenous hunters combined with climate variability to amplify the effects of climate on prairie fire patterns. Human dimension “The important contribution of this research to paleoenvironmental science is a demonstration of the impact that relatively small groups of mobile hunter-gatherers could have [...]