Journal
JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 95, Issue -, Pages 1-15Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2018.04.009
Keywords
Anthropogenic fire; Fire regimes; Neolithic; Charcoal proxy modeling
Funding
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
- ASU Graduate and Postcolonial Studies Association via a Research and Support Program Grant
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Archaeological and paleoecological studies demonstrate that human-caused fires have long-term influences on terrestrial and atmospheric systems, including the transformation of wild landscapes into managed, agricultural landscapes. Sedimentary charcoal accumulations alone provide only limited information about the influence of human-caused fires on long-term fire regimes. Computational modeling offers a new approach to anthropogenic fire that links social and biophysical processes in a virtual laboratory where long-term scenarios can be simulated and compared with empirical charcoal data. This paper presents CharRec, a computational model of landscape fire, charcoal dispersion, and deposition that simulates charcoal records formed by multiple natural and anthropogenic fire regimes. CharRec is applied to a case study in the Canal de Navarres region in eastern Spain to reveal the role of human-driven fire regimes during the early and middle Holocene. A statistical comparison of simulated charcoal records and empirical charcoal data from the Canal de Navarres indicates that anthropogenic burning, following the Neolithic transition to agro-pastoral subsistence, was a primary driver of fire activity during the middle Holocene.
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