 Welcome, I'm Christine Hastorf, the current director of the Archaeological Research Facility, and so we're here tonight to talk about fire and what its impact on the world and people's engagement with that. So welcome to this Archaeological Research Facility event called the FIRE panel. And thank you for coming. I know it's a busy, busy week. Just a little bit about the Archaeological Research Facility, many of you know about it, but we just wanted to say that it's the home of Archaeological Research at UC Berkeley, and it brings together more than 40 faculty affiliates from across one dozen academic departments. Sorry, should I keep that going? Sorry. Each year we provide enabling funding for more than two dozen archaeological field and laboratory projects that are carried out by our affiliates and graduate students that occur around the world, including California. And we're delighted to share the research free to the public through a series of presentations, this one included, but also every Wednesday at noon in the Archaeological Research Facility building, which is that little teeny brick building next to the law school called 2251 College Building, which is impossible to remember. We also have a website and current research is presented there. And also all of our publications, our monograph series and reports are now free and open access online, so you can go and get many archaeological reports, especially linked to California there as well. We are building up our public programs and we invite you to participate if you have any ideas and you want to get involved. You can join our mailing list, make a donation to Berkeley, volunteer at a lab or just make suggestions. We hope that you will enjoy the panelists tonight and we want to thank them all for coming from far and near and sharing their work, some long lived work, some dangerous work with us together. And to now I'd like to turn over the panel tonight to the moderator, John Holson, who is here from a local company, I guess company, Pacific Legacy. I was trying to think of what it was, an institution as well. Anyway, and he is going to moderate the fire panel for us tonight. So thank you very much, John, and welcome. Welcome to the forum. Whoops, wrong program. First of all, we want to thank you all for coming out tonight for this discussion on fire. I'm John Holson, I'm an institutionalized at Pacific Legacy Incorporated, and I'm going to be your moderator for tonight, which means I have to keep these four speakers under control as best I can. As a cultural resources consultant, my experience is more about the work with agencies such as FEMA, the U.S. Forest Service, and FDF during reconstruction after a while. Part of that is the setting of damage to cultural resources due to fire and fire suppression activities. A little of our current projects are in California, but I think about the tonight's talk is the first in a series of lectures given and supported by the Archaeological Research Facility, also known as part of it. At the University of California, the series is a public outreach effort where the goal is to renew the community and the place of research being conducted by our facilities scholars in archaeology is relatively to our everyday lives. Tonight's forum, Humans and Fire in the Past, Present and Future Archaeological Perspectives, brings together four perspectives on how fire has been identified and managed by humans in various landscapes. The topics for tonight include the early hominid beginnings of the use of fire, ceremony of burning practices in the Neolithic in Southeast Europe, the Native American use of fire as a landscape management strategy, and the challenges the U.S. forest archaeologists currently address while fighting modern fires. Earth, air, fire, and water are considered ancient elements found to be central to the essence of life in many cultures. As Stephen Pine, a fire specialist from the University of Arizona writes, fire is the odd one out. Earth, water, and air are substances while fire is a reaction. It takes its character from its context. The chemistry of fire is biochemistry. The fire takes apart what photosynthesis creates. Fire evokes many feelings for us, most of which is contextual. It's the circumstances of the fire that makes and brings back memories. Most of us have memories of fire bringing warmth and comfort within a context of social interactions, perhaps revolving around fire, such as food preparation, cooking, or putting s'mores together over the outdoor campfire. In these contexts, fire is benign, helpful, and comforting. On a larger scale, fire is integral in the development of agriculture and food production through clearing, field burning, and returning nutrients to the ground for successive propping. However, fire is difficult to control. Many cultures view it as a force that demands respect, and in many cases fear. This is so true in the current fire hazard conditions we Californians experience with our ever more frequent and intense wildfires. Indeed, they are happening worldwide. Fires can bring fear, sorrow, and destruction. As we have seen not only in the prehistoric times, but historically, fire can wipe out settlements in a short period of time and radically reshape the landscape with respect to plant communities and human colonization. Fire has been linked to the idea of rejuvenation, as we shall see in one of our talks tonight. Indeed, in Greek mythology, the phoenix came back to life after burning. The phoenix rising from the ashes is a sign of perseverance, renewal, and regeneration. Tonight, we will consider the long relationship between people and fire and the relationship that is complex and mutable. Our panelists will discuss the diverse and changing impacts of fire on human populations and how people have manipulated fire for power and for survival. The panel will highlight how our archaeological heritage around the world can help us learn to better confront the new challenges we face as a community threatened by fire today. So our panelists include Dr. Tim Gill, and our affiliate scholar who will discuss early prehistoric control and use of fire and how fire may have played a key role in human evolution. Our second topic tonight will be the second speaker. She's also a topic too, but anyway, is Professor Ruth Trigam, whose research in prehistoric Southeast Europe shows how fires were intentionally set in houses to perhaps mark the end of a household cycle. Dr. Ken Lightfoot will discuss his work on California Native American Indian fire practices in California and what we can learn from them. And our last speaker, Lynn Gasaway, is a fire archeologist for the U.S. Forest Service who will talk about how her team deals with the impacts of fire on archeological and culture resources. By the way, Lynn did her undergrad. She would work here at Berkeley. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Tim. He'll be our first guest speaker tonight. And hopefully we'll have some time for questions from the audience afterwards. I kind of come with my own microphone. So if you guys can hear in the back, I'll maybe... Oh, I got a few thumbs up. I'll just stand out here. Now I've been given the job of talking about the last one and a half million years, and I've been given ten minutes to do it. So by my calculation, that's 2,500 years every second. So if I move along pretty quickly, I hope you can tolerate that. What I'd like to do is talk about a few of the highlights. Some of the questions that people like to ask, like, when was fire discovered? And we'll actually ask whether that's even the right question. And some theories about how fire fed into human evolution. And then some of the neat things that people and free people, if you would, free humans, did with fire. So maybe I'll get going on that. Let's see. Does this work? We'll just start here. So just a few words about human evolution, less than you ever need to know, but hopefully enough for today. So this is one of these charts you see a lot of, and time moves from the left to the right. And you can see the bars represent different types of humans and then free humans. And I just wanted to introduce, okay, the magic device. Here we go. Introduce a couple of our players tonight. You can see the astralopithecines are off to the left. And then you move into our genus Homo as you move over toward the right. And a couple that we'll be talking about are Homo and Neanderthalensis, which is a debatable term, but basically the Neanderthals. And also Homo erectus, which was the first hominid really to move out of Africa and spread around the world. So I just wanted to point that out. Here's Darwin's very, very elegant phrase, descent with modification. And one thing just to bear in mind is that the way we live now with just one type of human on the planet is actually unusual. Until 40,000 years ago, there were multiple types of humans around. And I don't mean it's really much different than what we're used to today because today everyone's 41 species. In those days, not necessarily so. So that's a big difference as we move forward. Here's just a drawing, interestingly, has fire in it, and probably misleadingly so because of where this is supposed to have taken place. But it gives you an idea of Homo erectus and perhaps some of the living conditions that might have been around when Homo erectus was on the planet. Now, my absolute favorite, the Neanderthals, they're worth a few words as well. The classic view of Neanderthals, very primitive, a little scared, always hunched over. Definitely nothing to laugh about. Perhaps a little bit confused by the situation. That's how Neanderthals are. And you even hear the word used in common discourse from time to time when somebody, you read it sometimes in the political articles that someone says in the Neanderthal. Well, in the political context, that's probably an insult to the Neanderthals, but anyway, the view of this has changed somewhat. So nowadays, Neanderthals are part of the family. We learned about 10 years ago actually through the DNA analysis that most of us, not everyone, if you're entirely African descent, if that's where your ancestors came from, you probably don't have any Neanderthal genes. Anyone else probably does, a few percent in there. So there was some interbreeding at some point in the past. Now, the topic everybody likes to ask is, when was fire discovered? And I think it's really the wrong question to ask because most likely, fire discovered humans, not the other way around, if you're going to use the word discovered. What we're really interested in, it was when did humans or pre-humans begin to control fire? When could they make it and use it intentionally and not just be subjected to it? And so let's talk about that. It turns out it's not actually a very simple question to answer. It would be easy to think that at some point in pre-history, this discovery was made and it spread around the world. But we're really talking about a world where there were small groups of mobile hunter-gatherers moving around the landscape. So even when it was discovered at one point on one continent, it's quite likely that the knowledge was lost and had to be rediscovered elsewhere. It would have been a lot easier today. Someone would have discovered fire and posted it on Facebook. Hey, I'm down here in what's going to be Tanzania a million years from now, and I just discovered fire. You know, hashtag burn thumb or something. But it wasn't like that. So one of the reasons that it's difficult to say really clearly when fire was discovered, aside from what I just said, is there's certain problems. So we look for certain things in the archaeological record that might indicate that fire was at a site. When you're digging down in the dirt, what do you look for? And these are some of the things. But they're problems. First of all, fire exists naturally. And finding ashes in an archaeological site doesn't mean that humans created fire there. And you can see lightning strikes, and we see that here in the Sierra as well. Volcanic eruptions when those took place could also start at fires. So finding fire doesn't mean you found human control. And then there's additional layer of problems that there are a number of natural processes that also create what looks like fire in the archaeological record. So one thing just to note before we go any further is just because you find materials that had been subjected to heat, you find them in your site in the unit you're digging, and you also find cultural artifacts doesn't necessarily mean that the people started that fire and could control it. Washing through a whole lot of debate, this is kind of what we end up with. There's a cave in South Africa that could be the oldest confirmed one in about a million years where it really does look as though humans repeatedly made fires in that site. But by the time you get to about 400,000 years ago, I know these numbers are beyond comprehension. But by the time you get to 400,000 years ago and up toward the present, it does appear in a number of sites that there was extensive use of fire which would imply control of fire. So a few notes about that. Interestingly, there are a lot of sites where there is no evidence of fire. So as Homo erectus and later the Neanderthals and some of our ancestors moved into the northern latitudes, you would think you'd want to have some fire or we need fire perhaps to move into those areas, but there are a lot of sites that don't have it. So that's something to think about. And I already talked about this one that control of fire could have been achieved many times in many different places. So that's just a few notes on when was fire discovered. Now one of the big theories having to do with fire and human control of it is what's called the cooking hypothesis. This is an idea that control of fire actually began with Homo erectus. So here we're already getting into some questionable terrain and the use of fire actually created or changed us biologically to the point where we are obligated to use fire. We had to obligated to use fire to cook our food. And that according to the theory gave rise to a lot of evolutionary changes in the jaw and tooth structure also in the digestive system. And it was this better nutrition that really allowed people to do the kinds of things to increase brain size. It takes a lot of energy to support a brain, at least for some of us, maybe not mine, but for a lot of people it takes a lot of energy and it also allows a lot of more mobility as well. Critiques of the cooking hypothesis, as I already mentioned, not entirely clear that Homo erectus, probably Homo erectus could control fire in some places, but was it widespread enough that it would have that big evolutionary change? Hard to say. As I mentioned, there are a lot of sites where there is no evidence of fire and even some Neanderthal sites in cold climates and this was a much colder time overall when the Neanderthals were living in Europe and western Asia than we have today. Not entirely, there were ups and downs, there were fluctuations in the climate, but there were a lot of very cold periods and you would think you would need fire, but strangely we don't always find it. This you can read for yourself. Still some research to do on exactly what the effects of cooking food would be and the digestive system evolution is perhaps more complicated So how many people have been into caves and Professor Conke can't raise their hand? You've been in more than 5,000 places in the county. So what's it like in there when you get away from the opening of the cave? It's pretty dark. There is actually an image in there lit up by I think a cell phone light. I took this picture in a cave in France where the whole river flows into a mountain and we went exploring in there one day. It's pretty dark. So one of the obvious uses of fire in prehistory is to provide illumination. Now what I put these pictures up here because one thing that's very noticeable in a cave is whatever's outside the range of whatever lighting device you have it's still totally dark. So these are modern flood lights here and you can see in the back that where the flood light doesn't hit you can't see anything. And what people use in those days was more rudimentary I would say than the flood lights we have. This is a lamp from Lascaux cave in France and a lot of these were found in that cave and in other locations. So this is turned on its side. If you turn it flat in that little hollowed out area you could put some animal fat perhaps with a wick of juniper and you could get some light, a flickering light actually but some light that would last for a period of time. Other ways of getting into caves would be torches and then hearths which is a word for a fireplace basically. If you build a fire in there obviously you can get some light that way. So just some, I wanted to go over a few interesting things I think that Neanderthals and early modern humans did with fire. First of all this came out a year or two ago a cave in southwest France. This is 300 meters deep inside a cave so if you can imagine more than three football fields inside a cave. Obviously it's totally dark in there. It's probably pretty cold although caves do tend to keep a regular temperature. Cool but regular. And you can see a number of these circular structures were found mostly of stalagmites and there are some hearts inside here that were identified as well. So this was a time period when modern humans had not yet gotten to Europe. So it would have been Neanderthals that created this. And obviously fire was required both to explore the cave and to stay in there for a while. This is pretty obvious but it's worth mentioning. Without fire or other means of light that are types of fire it would be very difficult to come up with some of the great imagery that we see and who could resist but to throw a picture of Chauvet up there with the panel with the horses and we've got some fighting rhinos here and some war rocks on the far side. So some fantastic art if we can call it that a very loaded term but some fantastic imagery made possible by fire. Here's a neat trick. So boxwood I guess is an extremely hard wood so it's very good for making implements out of but it's very hard to shape with a stone tool. You're going to be resharpening your blade quite often. Apparently the Neanderthals though figured out that if they heated it if they charred the boxwood it was much easier to scrape the edges off to shape the top so you can see here that the top has a very rounded edge much easier. These are thought to be digging sticks it's nice to have a rounded edge like you'd have on a screwdriver right the back of a screwdriver is often very rounded so you can put more pressure on it and one of these makes the guy really happy. It might be the only picture of prehistory with somebody happy it's always so miserable you know anyway this guy's happy because he's got that boxwood stick. This is also interesting so a half thing is a word that archaeologists use and other people use to talk about fixing a point on a stick or on a handle of some kind and there are different ways to have for example if you want to make a spear it's good to have a nice sharp spear point that will actually go into an animal and cause some damage it's also nice not to have to do it by hand because if you're hunting large animals like bison and deer and other animals to get up close and personal very dangerous in fact there was a study a few decades ago comparing the injuries that were found on the Neanderthals skeletons with those of rodeo riders today and they came out fairly similar so these were people the Neanderthals who were up close and personal hunting big games so in that situation it's really nice to have your point on the end of a spear you can throw it or at least you can stay a few feet away so the Neanderthals figured out that they could actually extract using fire extract birch tar and use that to glue spear points at the end of shafts kind of amazing actually so I don't think it's that easy to do I mean if we tried to do it people have tried another little trick here in southern Africa now these are modern humans at this time period in southern Africa figured out that if they heated the rocks before they tried to nap the minstone tools that was also very effective and then finally just one more example here maybe the most interesting one in a way because it's not as utilitarian as the other ones I've been talking about this is a site in I think I wrote Czech Republic but I think it's actually Slovakia anyway it's out in that part of the world 26,000 years ago and some kilns were uncovered during the excavations and a lot of I'm not sure I want to call them ceramics but clay pieces that had been exploded through thermal shock by taking a somewhat moist piece of clay and putting it in a really hot fire inside the kiln and exploding it and virtually all the pieces of clay were exploded in this fashion so the question becomes were these people just really bad at working clay now this is long before pottery were they just really bad at it did they maybe take all the good ones away or perhaps was the point of the whole exercise the explosion as opposed to the final product we're so used to think of clay pieces in pottery that we're looking for the final product but it could be that the performance of the enactment of doing it was actually the key thing so this is actually a pretty interesting topic I'll close just with this thought fire creates great potential for social life especially in small groups of hunter-gatherers spread around the landscape and here's an illustration Gilles Tassello drew and you can see a group of people and somebody performing an entire shadow up on the wall it's supposed to be down near the Chauvet Cave but I think it really raises the idea of what fire can be used for it in a social setting and there are a number of things so first of all it extends the time that you can be at if you're a hunter-gatherer and it's all dark out there that's a dangerous time to go wandering around it's a dangerous time to be anywhere except more in defensive position but fire it extends the time that people can be together there is some research that's been done to the effect that the things that are talked about at night are different from what you talk about during the day during the day you might talk about all the things you have to do how the hunting is going where you might find some food sources and at night maybe we've seen this from sitting around campfires campfires are a great time to sit around as someone I know said or as we say in Hawaii you sit around and talk story it's the perfect time for that and you can really mesh a group together by telling stories passing on group history that sort of thing it's also a great venue for music I thought the last thing I would say about fire is maybe there's a link between fire and music because this is a great time to sit around and play the flutes and we do have flutes from pretty deep in prehistory modern humans this particular one is made from the radius of a griffin vulture but others are made from mammoth ivory very difficult process to reenact and we have them from 35,000 years ago so this cave is in southwest Germany south of Stuttgart and there's another cave about a mile away called Geisenklerstow say that ten times real fast and it had also three or four flutes so anyway that's a quick overview of fire and prehistory I hope that was somewhat interesting lots of different uses that people had for fire so thanks thanks Tim I'm feeling so our next speaker is Dr. Ruth Triggum and her topic is burning houses in Neolithic Europe so with these chairs here Ruth if you're starting to go over time if I move you're not going to do this time thing again you didn't do it with Tim you're not going to do it with me you have to kind of cross the moderator around here okay so I think by now many of us are familiar we are all familiar in California with a terrible mess that can be created by burned houses on the landscape I'm going to be talking about a similar terrible mess that was created by burned houses consistently in southeast Europe about 6000 years ago or more slightly more perhaps so these over a thousand year period of getting on for 1500 I'll be you know we can be very flexible with our years this time Tim could be even more flexible but by the time we get into the Neolithic this thousand year period you can see would be so this is the kind of thing that we're talking about with this mass of burned clay rubble caused by burning houses and farmers they're very close you can see how close to the surface this is farmers hate it they can't their plants can't go through the burned rubble which is a complete sort of almost like ceramic layer on the land but archaeologists love it then farmers hate it and archaeologists love it so sometimes we see settlements like the one here which is about a thousand lasted for about a thousand years it's in Bulgaria and you can see these layers of the burned rubble in this one layer on top of another that's pretty unusual relatively unusual in the parts where I was excavating in southeast Europe where there's one house is replaced by another one next to it rather than on top of it but even so the whole landscape of southeast Europe in this time period has been covered by these burn layers of burned rubble up close it looks like this you can see the impressions of the wood frame of the building impressed and frozen by the fire into the clay the wood itself actually burns is burned away and you never find that so this is an area across this huge area of southeast Europe this is Greece all of Macedonia, Serbia Bulgaria, Romania Hungary all the way up into the Ukraine it's an extraordinary phenomenon what we call the burnt house horizon and lasts from about 5000 to 3500 BC you might think that in fact they had suffered back then from the same rash of catastrophic wildfires that we are experiencing in California but interestingly enough this interpretation has never been suggested amongst the rich array of explanations for the burnt house horizon so for many years archaeologists love to excavate these and they would clear off all of the rubble of the walls in order to get to the floors of the houses where they would find a larger a rich array of fragmented ceramics you can see here are the kinds of clay phenomenon and oven and clay balls very very rich inventory of materials that are found on the floor of the houses meanwhile they completely ignored the walls that are all collapsed inwards and lie on top of the floors of the burnt floors and generally through all of that rubble from the walls and superstructure onto dumps of some kind and the farmers would take them off and use them to patch up muddy roads or wherever you needed something a bit more solid on the ground the main interpretation traditionally for these burnt houses has been that they were accidental that was one of the favorite explanations an accidental fire caused by at a village-wide scale the houses being close together they would all burn one on top and then another and so on so that the fire was able to spread another explanation for the accidental fires was that more materials were probably being stored inside the houses like grain or textiles and another explanation for this also was that they had ovens internally in the houses at this time another very favorite explanation was that for these is that they were deliberately started that the fires were deliberately started by raiding parties in local or inter-regional conflicts the houses themselves are very solid structures they're built of what's called wattle and daub that means that there's a wood framework between the wood the wood posts is woven these sort of branches in what's called wattling and underneath the floors themselves there's often a foundation of wood and on top of the floors there's a thick layer of clay which gives the house a nice warm foundation and the walls themselves are covered both on the outside and the inside surfaces by thick layers of clay so this is a house from one of the houses from the Ukraine this one is from Serbia and it's the same kind of exactly the same kind of structure and you can see in this image that the clay for the walls is dug from alongside the houses and then the pit that results from that is filled up with trash and it's a very clever way of dealing with your trash and bury it so that's under normal circumstances that is without burning these kind of houses as you can see from this experimental one which is built in by some archaeologists in France the house would just rot if it's not maintained this whole clay will just rot the whole thing will fall back into the earth and as archaeologists we probably wouldn't find it at all so in a way the burning of the houses is very fortunate for us Mirjana Stevanovic and I see Mirjana here on the left started a project to actually investigate this burned house horizon and to understand or to really test and investigate whether the whether the houses were actually accidental or were they deliberate events deliberately fired houses were they a single event were each house burned as a single event or were they burned as village wide events because this had never actually been tested and again was could we tell whether this was happening at the beginning as part of the construction of the house or as part of the end of its use life history even without any kind of investigation we actually knew quite a lot about the houses we knew for example that they were burned from a low oxidizing fire at about 600 to 800 degrees centigrade that's not exactly low in terms of your cooking it's at like 1200 to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit but it's enough to fire ceramics of cooking pots but the houses were burned from about that sort of low temperature up to what you see here which is a very high high temperature fire in a reducing atmosphere of about 1000 to 1200 degrees centigrade that's getting on from 2000 to 1200 degrees a 2100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher which will turn clay into glass this building clay into a glass like structure what's called vitrified and it's enough to actually melt copper and it will turn something like this piece linen which when I found it many years ago was the earliest piece of linen we had ever found in Europe more than the record has been broken like many records get broken but this was really interesting it was found between two layers two floors between the roof and an upper layer and the actual ground floor of the house and it's survived because it's been turned basically into a glass its fibers have been vitrified so it's really very difficult to replicate these fires and to burn down a clay based structure to look like what we find archaeologically many people have tried and you see a couple of experiments here this one in the Ukraine this one in Serbia and they've nobody has yet succeeded in burning the houses and leave with the same kind of temperatures that we have found in the archaeological sites the highest they've been able to do is up to 700 degrees centigrade remember that the fires that we were investigating have been burned at least to 1000 degrees centigrade so we also knew that the fires were well contained and the burning was carefully guided for the walls to collapse inwards so that around the fires there's actually an open space of unburned soil which is very indicative of carefully controlled fire not of accidental fire so it would need a lot of fuel a lot of time they had no accelerants and a great deal of skilled know-how in order to be able to burn one of these houses down and as far as we can tell during this 1000 to 1500 year period every house in that area of southeast Europe was burned in this way of course there is the problem that if it was unburned we wouldn't find it but we don't see significant gaps in the settlements so just something to remind you that at this period the residents of those houses were masters and mistresses of pirate technology they knew how to control and to manipulate fire they also and to create copper artefacts by melting the copper to these 2000 degrees fire and height and to control an oven in reduced circumstances without oxidizing these very beautiful ceramics that are characteristic of the period in all of the different areas one other thing that we knew was that there were no human remains found within the remains of the houses we found some animal bones circulated animals were found in the fires so I'm just sort of setting up the mystery for you here so what we did then was an archaeological arson investigation and here you can see this is one step of the analysis that she was doing which was not only to map the actual impressions of the wood framework but also to actually measure the temperatures at which the rubble was fired or burned over the different areas of a house so the reason for this is that in any arson investigation you want to identify hot spots you have to make a fire nap which is what she did together actually for example is this one here and the coloured spots the blue, the green and the yellow are measuring areas of vitrification there's really high temperature firing and from this she concluded that there were two hot spots in this particular house and as any arson investigator will tell you if there are two hot spots you should be very suspicious so this was how Mira reconstructed the path or the process of the fire in that house so we got the house here without any fire here the two hot spots are the two centres of origin of the fire directly below what would have been the main roof beam and so the roof beam is encouraged to collapse and then the walls will collapse on top of that and here you can see the whole thing neatly all doing what it's supposed to be doing so what we our results showed fairly unambiguously which is a nice quite a rare phenomenon in archaeology that at least the sites that we excavated and investigated the fires were separate events and they were started and carried out entirely deliberately intentionally so there are various explanations for that can be then or can then be proposed and that's where the ambiguity comes because any not any but some of these explanations could be more plausible than others so one of the least plausible is that every single fire was the result of a single event of aggression we don't think that there were that many aggressive neighbours setting fire to their neighbours houses at that time but it has been proposed a second explanation is weather proofing this was proposed by some of the one of the Ukrainian archaeologists on the basis of the lovely floors that are created when this house was was built and that the idea was that the fire would cement this into a really weather proof floor and the weather proof walls would let the whole house collapsed and burned after the weather proofing made this one this explanation less plausible the what's that you've got down there two minutes I'm almost done what have you got you didn't get anything let me let you talk on see so he knows that I'm almost done anyway because we had to do this whole talk before on Tuesday if you didn't realise so purification and fumigation is a well known explanation for those of you who know about Navajo Hogan burning and it's possible that this might be an explanation that we could adapt to the house burning in south east Europe the Neolithic house burning there's a something to bear in mind we can't actually prove one way or another there is a model another explanation which is probably not at all appropriate for the Neolithic but it certainly is something that we thought of some of the big fires of urban fires that have been in the history of Europe can be thought about and one of these is the a great fire of London in 1666 which may have been to fumigate and purify the whole city it certainly could have been accidental that's true but it also could it did certainly helped to fumigate after the great plague the year before it also resulted in a very nice rebuilding program throughout Europe the same with Nero's fire as well but we don't think I just put that in for fun really our favourite explanation is that this was a kind of funeral pyre for the household and this is one that an idea that it was a ritual performance to mark the end of the household in social memory coinciding with the death of a significant person who is not burned or buried inside the house so these are the kinds of lessons that we've learned from this this whole exercise one is that one of the conditions around which an important condition around what happens is the importance of household organisation as the primary socio-economic unit this again is not proven but it's one of those little cards that we build archaeology from and one card we're hoping that that card is pretty solid but it could all fall down it's true another archaeologist John Chapman has argued for the symbolic burial of fragmented things that we see on the floor of the house as it being as important as the burning of the house itself he thinks that the objects might represent a sort of mortuary set laid out as an idealised representation of the household to express regeneration and continuity continuity and remembering is definitely an important aspect of this house burning that's certainly there and one of the things that we've seen is that the burning of the house acts as a memorial thing on the landscape not just for the following generation but for thousands and thousands of years still something that we see on the landscape as a result of their actions I mean you could ask why burn a house for this purpose and that would be one of them the mess that it leaves is what's important but it's also something that Tim referred to it's also the process the act, the performance of the fire is a very dramatic event that can last in the memory the social memory of the community definitely of the individual for many many years in terms of stories and so on, the emotions and passions are invested in a house and this all will have an effect when the whole thing is burned like a funeral pyre so finally I coined this term domithanasia of the house it's the voluntary killing of a house by the residents or their friends or agents because it's a time for it to go and it's a it's I leave you with the fact that this is just one interpretation it's not the truth it's the interpretation that is our favourite and we see as the most plausible for these very reasons and the fact that the other explanations are not as good but the next guest speaker is not going to do it with anyone else I know Professor Kent Leifert and he's going to discuss his work with the California Native American Tribal and the Empire Practices Contemporary thank you John A.Y. I appreciate everyone coming out tonight I hear there's a great band in the Greek theatre and you guys came over here and we're most appreciative of that so I want to thank Tim and Ruth for outstanding talks and talking about people in fire really at more of a localized scale and at the house the village at the hearth in a cave but what about fire at the landscape scale this fire at the landscape scale this unrestrained fires it's what many of us fear today as John talked about in his introduction you know across the state many of us many of our families have been affected by wildfires and it's caused deaths destruction it's blackened thousands hectares of land so thinking about this fire on the landscape scale what does archaeology tell us about people in fire at this broader scale and what the discipline of archaeology tells us is that people in different times and places across the globe they learn to live with fire at the landscape scale and they used it to actually benefit their lives and they initiated what we call anthropogenic fires and what I mean by this these are fires created by people at this broad scale for plethora of reasons which I'll talk about tonight so tonight what I want to do is focus on California the state that we live and love and talk a little bit about Native Californians and how they used fire and I want to begin by noting as Tim and Ruth have talked about that there's a long history of anthropogenic burning here in the Golden State and we can really begin with some of our models of the peopleing of the Americas to think a little bit about this and the models have changed drastically since I've been in the field of archaeology and I've only been in just a couple years as you can see but initially of course the idea was people came over the big game hunters following the megafauna and people who came over in this way definitely were using fire and they used fire for hunting in this case the bison antiquas to chase them over cliffs or into canyons where they would hunt them and then butcher them and consume and use the goods but there's also people who came down along the coast of the Pacific and this is a relatively new idea that people had boats these were maritime hunter-gatherers and California is at the forefront of this research and this is a question I always asked and some of the students from various classes are here our earliest archaeological sites in California and where do you think they are? Underwater but the ones that we have actually studied and are well dated are the Channel Islands and the earliest sites go back around 13 to 14,000 years ago of course if you talk to native scholars they'll talk about as if they have been here forever but I'm talking about sites that have been well dated radiocarbon dated like the Arlington Springs down here on Central Rose Island you know dating back about this time they found lots of charcoal and the charcoal is associated with a broad scale fires and there's a number of different interpretations one interpretation is it was climate change these were natural fires at the end of the Pleistocene another one which they're debating right now in the literature there was a major comment hit the earth 13,000 years ago and created firestorms across western North America what I think was going on is people were bringing the fires with them these are anthropogenic fires now from this beginning fire has become or became a critical management tool at the landscape scale here in California and there's now been considerable research on this and this research is collaborative and interdisciplinary collaborative because it involves tribal scholars archaeologists, anthropologists ecologists and others it's interdisciplinary because it brings together a number of the different disciplines as well as resource agencies like California State Parks and the National Park Service and in these studies we employ multiple lines of evidence one line is working with the tribes and tribal histories and tribal memories about fire and here you can see Val Lopez and other members of the Amamutian tribal band who we work closely with there's also ethnographic actually ethnohistory work gosh ethnohistory early explorers work and this was done by one of our key members of our research team Dr. Rob Cuthrell and what he did is we went back and looked at some of the Spanish accounts for example the Portola Expedition 1769 they talk about native fires and burning and what Rob did in a really amazing piece of research was the stippled areas are all the areas here around the San Francisco Bay where they actually saw 1769 burning so we have this kind of evidence as well from these early explorers early settler accounts and then there's ethnographic accounts from some of our early ethnographers beginning in 1901 you see Berkeley being the center piece of ethnographic research when the department and museum were founded in 1901 and we learned much about fire from these resources and there's also ecology which we bring in fire scars this is how a lot of the fire histories here in California were produced, Sequoia is up in Sierra Nevada's Coast Redwood down here on the coast looking at fire scars and being able to date those and getting idea of the number of fires and when they happened there's also pollen, charcoal and other kinds of evidence from coring wetlands which we've been involved with and this gives you an idea about changes in the vegetation changes in charcoal accumulation which can be a result of fires and again working out these changes using good radio carbon dating and of course there's archaeology, Mark Kilcombe here down at State Parks with one of our recent Trinity Miller one of our recent graduates here from the anthropology department and through the archaeology and here we're working with Yama Mutson and some of their basically their stewardship corps, some of their native peoples who are working with us excavating here and what these excavations have provided us is with artifacts but also through really detailed analysis we can extract plants and animal remains and it gives us an idea along with other lines of evidence about what's going on with people and what they are actually harvesting and getting a sense of that in terms of their use of anthropogenic burning and for example Rob Cuthrow some of his work we've been noting there's lots of a hazelnut in some of the areas down on the Santa Cruz coast from some of these sites that date back several centuries yet today we find very little hazelnut in some of these areas so there's some really significant changes that have taken place so let's take home points for research there's three points that I'd like to discuss you know why did people burn at the landscape scale many reasons they would clear undergrowth they would remove detritus they'd control insects when there are infestations it would facilitate game hunting which goes back of course thousands of years they even hunted grasshoppers and crickets when they would swarm and then they would actually eat them and then it would encourage plants to produce young straight stems for cordage and baskets and there was fires that were done specifically for this but most importantly fire was initiated to augment the productivity of economic plants and animals in their territories and this brings up the second point is how did they burn at the landscape scale and the idea is that they instigated fire regimes characterized by frequent small low severity surface burns and they would burn small patches in their territories and they would create this patchy mosaic of vegetation stands question is how did they constrain fire and as one of the elders said we would burn early and burn light and they would use landscape features like streams, ridges, rock out crops and also past fires to constrain where they would move fires in terms of this light fire methodology and the strategic use of light fires greatly increased local biodiversity because you'd have these different stages of succession grasslands tubers when you first burn you allow them to stay for a couple years and you begin to get scrub land with berries and then woodlands might come in and so you can envision a territory where they're rotating fires across it and selecting out what kind of food resources, medicines and other kinds of plants and animals that they wanted to attract in their territories so the third point is the outcomes so what's the outcome of this kind of light burning well one it increased the quantity diversity and sustainability of the plants and animals used by people and these are the plants and animals they depended on for food, medicine and various raw materials like baskets making houses etc and the regular burning of fire at this landscape scale in a patchwork mosaic it's argued to reduce fuel loads and create fuel breaks after recent burns and as Kat Anderson one of our great scholars has argued it minimized the risk of catastrophic fires and native Californians have learned to live with fire for many centuries and it's something that we have yet to learn here in Contemporary California so the ultimate goal of our research program which is ongoing is how lessons from the past may be applicable to Contemporary California and here at UC Berkeley we are working closely with the Amma Mutton Tribal Band who are involved in tribal revitalization efforts the tribe is committed to enhancing the health and vigor of indigenous plants and animals in their traditional territory and these are the kinds of resources they want to exploit today for food, medicine and raw materials we're also working with resource agencies such as California State Parks and the National Park Service they have a keen interest in indigenous landscape management practices because these landscape management practices might enhance the diversity productivity and sustainability of native species that they definitely want to bring back on public lands and it can also possibly minimize the risk of major fires in public lands so what we are exploring right now is how indigenous landscape management practices may be integrated with modern range and forest practices to generate new policies aimed at improving the management of open spaces in California there are challenges to this and there are four challenges that I'll mention right now the first is that we are not trying to reconstruct a pre-colonial world sometimes when I talk to people they think we're trying to reconstruct Jurassic Park it's not what we're doing we live in a very very different world than native peoples did centuries ago and it is very different we have an expanding urban wildland or interface building out into our wildlands we've of course had this invasion of foreign plants and animals and these have to be managed as well and these kinds of intrusive plants and animals we're never here when native peoples develop their initial landscape management practices so this is all new and we also have rooms full of lawyers who love Berkeley archeologists who are attempting to go out on a limb here so that's the first one is this whole issue that we're not trying to reconstruct a past the second is this climate change that we have global warming that's taking place and global warming can create a very difficult situation for fires and can make the frequency and the severity of fires increase the third challenge is a recognition that we may not be able to do prescribed burning in all places there are all sorts of issues especially if you're near urban settlements there's liability issues there's regulations including pollution air quality, endangered species and there's health issues with smoke so the idea that you're going to be able to prescribed burn everywhere across California well it's not going to happen but what we do is employ other options as well mechanize or manual methods of fuel reduction and thinning out areas and the fourth challenge is we need to initiate long term maintenance of places you can't do this one time and say it's done you have to repeatedly do it because otherwise everything comes back so it's a long term commitment that you have to be involved with where are we at this time as I wrap up our partners working with UC Berkeley the Amamutzen Tribe the Amamutzen Land Trust California State Parks and others we're experimenting with the opening up of some areas of the landscape on public lands and in some cases we're using prescribed fires or we're using other methods to open up these areas and the boots on our ground are essentially the stewardship core of young members of the tribe students and volunteers and we are exploring how we can revitalize landscapes and facilitate the growth of existing native plants and also bringing and attracting some of the animals and in some cases we're re-introducing species that we know based on the archaeology they're very plentiful there and so we believe that we can't construct open spaces and if these are strategically designed in place working with our partners in the resource agencies like State Parks National Park Service they can address three crucial concerns today and these are the final points I'll make first they can enhance the quantity and diversity of indigenous plants and animals which I think we're all behind and want to see the second development that can take place is it can provide better food security for tribal members because it'll provide places for tribal harvesting of native foods medicines, dance regalia plants for making baskets and this is one of the complaints of many tribes is they don't have access to these various resources and we're working with Jennifer Sarah Wine and Tom Carlson two professors here who work closely with the Karouk and Urock native peoples who have very similar kind of program in terms of food security and there's much that we're learning from them and that's a fellow UC Berkeley project up in the northwest part of the state and then finally we feel that in developing this kind of methodology we can create extensive fuel breaks in critical areas on public lands that can help minimize the risk of major fires and those are really the three outcomes that we want to see so I appreciate greatly your attention thank you very much so I am from Lassen National Forest I'm the forest archeologist so you've heard about how people used fire in the past and how it's shaped our cultures well I'm going to talk about how we as archeologists for the land management agencies are trying to protect the archeological record that's out there during all these wildfires that we're having today so when we have any kind of ignition a lightning strike or a human caused fire and it starts running across the landscape there are a bunch of us that are fire archeologists we are trained as firefighters they call a red card we've gone through all the same training that firefighters do we have various amounts of experience I got my first red card 20 years ago so I've been doing this for a while so when there's a fire it starts getting bigger and the bulldozers start running to try to put the fire out and the firefighters start working along that fire line we fire archeologists we'll turn in our Indiana Jones fedora for a hard hat, a fire shelter and some big heavy fire boots we'll get out there and we're going to try to protect what we can we can't protect everything this is an example of a railroad trestle that was made out of giant sequoia logs so it used to be about six feet tall and this is a series of pictures that over two days so we tried to protect it but an ember got into it so this was day one this was day three all that was left were the impressions of where the logs were so we all know the wood burns really easily but for other things that you don't think of that are affected in the archeological record from fire are obsidian, chert rocks you break a piece it shatters with the different heats and fast cooling you lose a part of it you lose abilities to date it based on its shape you lose colors so you lose where the source was and then sometimes you completely lose that it was even a piece of obsidian so this was just heated at about 14,000 degrees for 30 minutes and it turned into not even obsidian anymore it's a pumice and in California one of the major things that we use on archeological sites for dating those sites is obsidian hydration most of our sites are lithic scatters obsidian lithic scatters and when it's flaked you get this obsidian hydration band which you can measure measure it in microns and then put through a big mathematical formula gives you a date of when it was last flaked so when it's burned you actually can't measure it anymore you lose that ability to date that flake that artifact and so you no longer can date that site other things you wouldn't think would be affected by a fire ground stone so a mono and a metate the surface burns when they're pounding acorns or whatever their protein they're pounding that residue will do a protein residue analysis but if it's burned off we will never know what they processed with those rocks and other things big bedrock mortars so pounding acorns and other substances fire comes through the whole rock flakes off this is one example so this log fell before the fire and then when the fire came through it heated up flaked all this off luckily it was not right on top of the bedrock mortar otherwise we may not have known that bedrock mortar was ever there rock art as it starts to fall off it's gone forever so as an archeologist I have a fire that starts on the Lassa National Forest and we start working with firefighters when a big fire starts we call in these things we call incident management teams between 50 and 70 people and they're sort of in charge of putting the fire out and where people go and what techniques are used to put it out and support all the firefighters so I work with those teams I drink a lot of coffee and talk to anybody who will listen to me about where sites are they set up these things that are fire camps let's see I don't think I want to upgrade sure maybe maybe I have to upgrade I'll upgrade to a bigger camp so these camps, these fire camps really are like many cities they have your camp in area so you have your hotel you have a main street you have a hospital you have a restaurant sometimes you have airports you have everything right there everything that a firefighter could need you have laundry and sometimes they last for quite a long time and they can be quite huge I had one that came into a town the town was normally 800 people when the camp moved in it was population 4,000 so you get a lot of people showing up and they can last a long time so this one fire the rough fire in 2015 on the Sequoia National Forest so it was 150,000 acres which is about half of what the Mendocino complex was this year and the car fire was about 200,000 acres it lasted, I ended up working on it for 80 days it's not just like 8 hour days it's 16 hour days 14 days in a row 2 days off 2 days off to say the least I was a little tired after 80 days so when these things start and the teams are there they hand us maps where the fire is where they plan to do things and we just start marking the maps up we try to figure out what's going to be impacted we take our maps we go out on the fire line work with the firefighters fire shelter so hopefully if the fire is going to get too close to me I might have to use the fire shelter I never have had to use one and I hope never too we take our maps we go out there and we flag sites that's telling the firefighters there's something to pay attention to and we try to talk to them about how to protect that site or how not to damage it with their fire suppression so we get bulldozers coming in these are railroad ties this dozer is in a depression this depression is part of a railroad logging system right outside of Yosemite it is a hoist system so the logs used to be pulled up and down this there's a logging camp right up here so we ask the bulldozers to lift their blade and walk perpendicular and then start putting their blade down once they were outside the archeological site so we reduced the impacts and then we had hand crews firefighters come in and put a fire line in where the dozer would have done so we decreased the impact to the site and protected that site another example so this is another giant sequoia railroad trestle these are 6 foot tall each so a tall thing is about 12 feet tall it's a one of a kind it's in the sequoia national forest the giant sequoia national monument it is the only place in the world that they did large scale sequoia logging so this is one of a kind it's about a tenth a quarter of a mile from that picture I showed earlier with those burned out trestle we protected this by getting 60 firefighters to take fire shelter material and wrap it up we ended up calling it the burrito because when you flew over in a helicopter it looked like a huge burrito on the ground we also had to bake potato on this fire so we also asked them to put foam and water this one this tree to protect this tree because this sign has a little hand on it and it points and it says gas and there was a gas station I'm standing on a road down here it was an old gas station on the other side of the road we put sprinkler systems up so this was my very first fire 20 years ago the firefighters knew the archeologists was coming they were talking about this site and they had already wed it down before I even got there I walked up and they were like hey we protected this site for you and I was like great I don't have to do anything all my presence just makes them do work but in a wildfire when things are going hot and heavy and the winds come up things change and we're working with the firefighters as those things rapidly change came over the fire line that they had put in had to totally change tactics we actually came down what we call a escape route to a safety zone this is a safety zone in the middle of a campground and then they started pulling out the map to say where can we go next where can we start putting in suppression lines and control lines and where can we stop this fire so I'm standing on top of a big garbage can because I'm too short all these firefighters are taller than I am and this truck was taller than I am so I stood up on top so I could look at the map while they're talking and they're like okay we're going to put a dozer line in here and we're going to do this here and hey over here there's a cabin can we get that cabin wrapped okay sure Lynn we'll do that so we start doing that we also can start calling in other archeologists to come and help while they're putting in more dozer lines but sometimes it's not safe for us to be out there so this is the lights of a bulldozer and I don't really want to walk in front of a bulldozer in the middle of the night I really don't want to be squished so they will let them do their work tell them where the sites are where they're planning on going and make them aware of it and tell them whether I flagged them or not and then we'll come in afterwards and sometimes well you don't see people with these big suppression fires you get sometimes hundreds of miles of dozer lines so this is on the Sibranis fire outside of Salinas a couple years ago they put in 150 miles of dozer line it's a lot it's needed to suppress and we can survey that after the fact when it's safe for us to do it because you never know what you're going to find so this is a bedrock mortar they found in the dozer line the site was not known before the dozer line went through so I consider it an archeological sampling method because you can't always see sites you just do a pedestrian survey you can't see through the duff well dozers push duff away quite nicely so you find things that you didn't expect and the firefighters help you find stuff this is the dump from a mill site and the firefighters pulled out all the really nice bottles for us we could date the site really quickly we did ask them not to do that anymore so so after the fire the one nice thing about fire is that you can see a lot afterwards you may have that damage to the sites to the surface but you can see a lot of stuff you can see through the trees now and you never know what you're going to find so this was a place called the walker cabin site and this this rifle little .22 rifle was found after the fire burned through so but when we can see things more so can other people so especially along roadways we do get increased looting after fire sometimes they like to drink their beer while looting and then this example is this little discard pile so what you get is looters that will go out to sites they'll grab handfuls of things they'll come back to the roof of their truck and they'll go start sorting them and they'll go I want to keep that I don't want that I don't want to keep that I don't want that and you end up with these little piles right on the road right next to the site we try to increase patrols or disguise sites sometimes after fires additionally so the Thomas fire in Santa Barbara and all the mudslides that occurred after that fire well you think what happened to the houses all the archeological sites that were there too same thing happened to them they no longer exist where they're under feet of debris and mud and so that happens here too so this is a a mining trench a water system for the gold mining in the 1850's and then this erosion is coming down onto sites afterwards too what's called bear or burn area emergency response this is just throwing weed free hay across the site just decreases runoff limits some erosion can try some other techniques so archeologists we love stratigraphy right if things change stratigraphically we lose context we lose what's happening first or last so this is a rootwad that burned out so the whole root of the tree burned out into the site and we say if that collapses we're going to lose all the stratigraphy that is left on the site so we took some filter fabric some soil from off the site brought it in cleaned it up threw some hay on top and you never would have known there was a rootwad there on the site map so the archeologists know that you did it and you just protected some of the site and other things like these straw waddles to deflect water away from the site so the site is down here so these waddles are just trying to keep the water going directly down into the site but push it off to the side and have most erosion take place outside of the site boundaries silk fencing and other things will do the same thing and then we try to clean up a little bit if we have sites that were bulldozed or had suppression actions take place in them so we might screen and see what artifacts came up in the berm or do shovel tests or anything else for determinations of eligibility under the national register so that's what we do to try to protect and minimize impacts to cultural resources during wildfires and if you want more information firearchaeology.com and the Facebook page thank you you mean you guys want to come up here first are there any questions I'll still get up questions for Professor Gill I've read that the theory that as we were investigating fire fire to domesticate us one way that that might have happened was because we needed to distribute labor collecting firewood and keeping the fire going that increased the sociability of the species keeping the fire going changed us it sounds kind of ties into one of the things I was talking about when I was talking at the end about the social aspects of fire and gathering people together so I would think that could I mean it sounds plausible but I would think perhaps a more minor element of it that just the function that you're describing would bring people together and it would require organization and it's all far back in time you're talking about so if we're talking about home erectus that could be pretty significant planning how to use a large number of people that's pretty significant in the way people talk about cognitive development so I can see that as something that could have been effective another question about the the clay kiln explosions did you say that they were repeated like the site showed multiple explosions going on in that same kiln almost all of the clay appeared to have been exploded so it's possible that pieces that were not exploded were taken elsewhere that's possible but also through experimental archaeology it appeared that it was actually kind of difficult to explode this particular clay but it took some work to do it wouldn't be just something that would happen because you weren't good at working the clay it appeared to be something that was it was hard to actually do maybe they were trying to find out how hot it had to be before it exploded you're over and over again but then you would think you would also think that there would be some pieces that maybe weren't exploded because it wasn't hot enough so it's hard to tell but that's the theory that came out of it just a comment if I may I think all of the presenters did an outstanding job in their respective subjects I was very impressed in particular I liked the last two not to take away from the first two but I retired from the US Forest Service 38 years and then retired from 28 barely knowledgeable about fire management and I think a young lady who talked about archaeology and talked about the history of the use of fire by Indians did a superb job they offered great insights and I think for me with my background this has done a great experience thank you is the Forest Service using controlled burning to protect archaeological sites? yes we do sometimes more in the context of larger prescribed burns that protects the sites that are in those prescribed burns but we are sometimes figuring out which sites that we want to do we also do mechanical, thinning either mastication or anthinium on sites that are used in these fuels how do invasive species affect the efficacy of native fire treatment practices? well the problem of invasive species is that if you do prescribed burning which was used for centuries here in California and certainly worked with many of the indigenous plants the problem with some of these intrusive species some of the grasses scotch foam and other they come right in and they'll basically come in and they'll actually over but they'll crowd out indigenous plants so the issue is and this is something Rob Cutterall has been thinking a lot about it's just how do we manage these spaces these plants that will oftentimes come in quicker than the indigenous and I think one of the ways is sometimes you go out and actually remove some of these plants scotch foam and others and basically eradicate them but this is very, very labor intensive and very, very difficult so we're kind of thinking about those issues and trying to see what can be done economically my own feeling is that I think there's a real role to have tribes involved in the management of public lands but it's not you can't see it, it's not going to happen everywhere I think the solutions that need to be done in terms of our wild lands it needs to be localized you need to bring local people involved in it and you got to really think about these issues because they're tough so the problem with the intrusive and burning can be really, really difficult and we're certainly grappling with that right now great question, thanks just to follow on to that I think the eucalyptus which grows very fast and they're basically backward and it's basically kind of yeah, I mean there's a whole controversy, I don't know all the specifics but there was funding to eradicate a lot of the eucalyptus on the wild land urban interface here in the Bay Area but there was a lot of protest about removing eucalyptus so it can be controversial but yeah there eucalyptus are something I think you have to be really, really careful about because given the nature of eucalyptus they will explode especially in certain kinds of fires so my own feeling is is that I mean as part of the landscape now you're not going to eradicate it but I think we have to be really careful where we have eucalyptus the exhalation too it sends the embassy so it's a tough one I think in the 1990s you see instituted on their like Ron Worf, Sevamore around Dwight Derby you go out there and there was goats they were bringing in goats take care of them so you're next I'm going to the last speaker so given the consequences of climate change in terms of increased high extreme fire conditions how does a decision made by fire archaeologists like yourself about when to apply more light tactics in protecting a site like just wetting it versus more extreme tactics like covering the entire site with fire shovel material it's going to have to be based on what the artifacts are versus what climate change is doing because what the fuel loads are on the site so how much brush how many logs are there and then what is the site made of so the fire shelter material is appropriate on those wooden structures but it's not going to do much on top of a large lithic scatter and so you have to sort of weigh this fire on the landscape with light fuels that aren't big logs really doesn't go deep into the site the penetration of heat subsurface-ly is less than 10 centimeters so if you have a deep site you're only affecting the very top which is already heavily impacted by biotubation and just use on the top surface so I work with things under the context of the National Reservation Act and the National Register and whether it's eligible for the National Register so usually a prescribed burn a light prescribed burn over the site is not going to affect that you still have a lot under that you can learn from that site but if you have heavy logs on top of that site then you get deeper penetration of heat so then we just want to remove the logs and then burn through the site so it is a balancing act of what are the impacts versus what's gaining because if we don't burn and we don't protect the site the fuel load is just going to go increase and increase and when you have a lightning strike and a fire that you didn't plan then you're going to lose the whole site I'd rather lose like 1% of the site than 90% there's actually a whole NPS, Forest Service and a lot of inter-agency there's actually a whole litter of the effects of fire on the archaeological sites so if you're interested Professor you mentioned that the stone circle was about 300 feet from the entrance it was just a stalagmite was that to search for the complete darkness was that the possible that could be by the complete darkness why the distance I don't know why the distance why they chose that spot but it would have been completely dark 300 meters that seems quite a distance that's a long way yeah it's over 3 football fields so in the hypothesis where the stalagmites right there they're inside the cave and that's interesting too that they would use that material off of that but yeah use the materials that are already in a completely dark area let's go with you back there that'll be $5 I was just wondering as far as fire archaeology goes I know there was a fire recently my cabin was in the Donald Fire I was wondering if because there was I know there's a lot of historic cabins up there I was wondering if there were any fire archaeologists there to cope with that fire I know that's very broad but like there were archaeologists on that fire I know a few of them that were and helped to get more archaeologists on that fire I don't know any specifics about what they protected during that fire but there were quite a few sites that were involved and I do remember hearing and I think seeing a video showing some structures that they wrapped during that fire I'm actually trying to compile research regarding the temperatures reached in natural fires by own research do you happen to know the mean and perhaps the extreme of these natural fires that are going through California and if it's related to the fuel the fuel load of the pressure would live so first I'd say I'm not a doctor but the temperature extreme is anywhere from just a few hundred degrees in like a grass meadow just quick flashy fuels and then something like a car fire that radius the quote fire tornado huge fire in rural that is probably upwards of three thousand degrees that would be fair but but mostly when you're getting into where the houses are burning with other chemicals there is quite a large range of literature about the heat and heat sensors and there's some brand new locations that are going to be coming out soon from work happening in the immense mountains in Mexico and I would direct you if you want more literature firearchalgy.com I just wrote my whole brain on that including all of my articles articles I've ever found on it but there's my emails on it too so you can get more stuff yeah Dr. Gill I'm curious what the million year old site is in South Africa that you alluded to a weasner paper quote and also given that the evidence that the Amacal sites is inconsistent for fire is there any discernible pattern geographically or temporally about which sites lack it? Just starting from the last part I heard three things there I don't know of any real distribution there's a lot of chance involved too in whether you find something in a site because even though some of these sites might be in caves some might be in the open air but there's still geologic things happening that could take fire remains out of the site stone cave and so it can change a lot I think there's some variation there but I don't know of a real geographic split but in some areas there was no fire in some areas there was it's more of a patchwork as far as I know the cave in South Africa if I pronounce it right there's been a lot of work there and people going back and reanalyzing it and it does seem and the analysis of whether it is fire gets down to the microstructography where you take a column out of an excavation and kind of glue it together and take it to a lab and they look at it through different kinds of microscopes and so a lot of that work has I think been convincing to people that that was a place where there were lots of repeated fires in an area, in a habitation area and that's why that one is seen as being pretty good if you contrast that to the cave in China that was there was that picture the drawing I had of the one where Rectus Zucudian if I'm pronouncing that right from about a million, one and a half million years ago later researchers came back and determined that what was thought to be ashes by the original excavators actually a fire ashes actually seemed to be silk that had washed in geologically into the cave so it's not easy when you're digging in the ground maybe you've done a lot of this to see exactly what is what so the reanalysis seemed to made that less likely it's not that well accepted I missed a question okay thanks okay I think that wraps it up well I want to thank everybody for coming tonight this is our second talk on the safety it's a traveling road show we'll be in the greets the next Wednesday but we really want you to get out and support off with R R and see what they do in the community so I want to thank everybody for coming